General theory of walkability as criteria for regenerating maadi as a walkable neighborhood

Abstract EN

Although Maadi neighborhood managed to keep some of its old magic and is more or less still considered as one of Cairo's most attractive, walkable and prestigious neighborhood, yet it gained some of the characteristics of the current great city of Cairo; where high rise buildings and traffic have recently appeared which led to the decline of the street's social life in most of Maadi's streets and the harmony of its urban design.

Unfortunately the streets that used to formulate the urban design of Maadi and manipulated its historical value, livability and its sociability, lost its intimate scale, and became a more service road, without any kind of public life.

Moreover, walking habits disappeared over the diminishing of walking streets that were replaced with wider roads for cars.

Thus, the paper seeks to study the problems facing walkability in Maadi as a model of one of the most pedestrian and child friendly neighborhood in Cairo, and exploring the merits of the new urban theories methods and approaches followed in the developed countries such as the General Theory of Walkability; that is addressing the different aspects of walkability to enhance the urban harmony in the inner cities.

Accordingly, the paper proposes selecting criteria to demarcate the areas that could be transferred into walkable ones, to be applied on Maadi, as picking the most suitable areas, would act as a catalyst to foster walkability to the rest of the neighborhood, and preserve the urban fabric of Maadi.