Adaptive socio-economic design approach for schooling systems in Egypt’s poorest areas (an applied project)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Educational spaces are one of the most critical operations laid down with the architect, school design is a foundation to build/re-build any community. According to current financial variabilities, political crises, and continuous lack of resources, a gap between human classes is widespread, leading to extremely poor, and recently refugees’ communities. Regarding to education, the problem is that traditional school buildings with fixed structures are not effective nor available to these categories with extremely low resources and barley any infrastructure, therefore, it is essential to adopt new concepts to activate the function and impact of educational spaces in these urgent communities. The study aims to create a school “system” to fulfill the task of providing educational spaces, depending on the elements of adaptability with considering social, low-cost impact according to main definitions. With implementing the child`s psychological- physiological development elements, age category from 6 :13 years “Middle childhood: Early adolescence” inside the design process. In Egypt, there are several areas of extremely poor living conditions, the two highly alarming case studies are first, Upper Egypt`s rural villages having the highest ratio of extreme poverty in Egypt, second, refugee camps that became part and parcel of any standing country, both representing urgent need for children`s education rescue. This paper is concentrating as a beginning on first case study as it has the highest percentage of out- school children. As result, trying to fulfill the task by creating an applied school system (project-based) with the adopted criteria, suitable to selected areas main conditions..