Abstract
Urban areas in metropolitan cities like Cairo suffer from economic, social, and environmental predicaments. Urban economic sustainability is an approach that reforms the urban performance to gain direct benefits such as minimizing costs and maximizing profits and indirect benefits as better social, environmental, and cultural aspects. This research suggests applying such an approach to enhance Egyptian housing projects. The main research question is how to evaluate the economic sustainability of urban forms?. The study presents a “Sustainable Urban Economy model” (SUE model) linking urban fabric, land use pattern, transportation, and street network design with economic sustainability. Research methods and tools include interviews (Delphi method) with 25 urban planning/design and urban economic experts to refine the model. Results show the most effective components of the urban form on economic sustainability (accessibility and degree of permeability, population density, built, and the impact of sub-indicators on the main components. Moreover, results indicate that the seven most influential indicators are the built-up to total space ratio, mixed-use ratio, built-up ratio, population density, floor area ratio, degree of accessibility, and public transportation. Experts suggested values for the seven indicators to measure how the urban form can achieve high economic, environmental, and social performance in the Egyptian context.
Highlights
By 2050, two-thirds of all humanity, 6.5 billion people, will live in urban settlements [1]
Indicators were reduced from 17 to 7 indicators; the final list included mixed-use ratio, built-up area percentage of total area, degree of accessibility and permeability, population density, built-up ratio, land occupancy, and public transportation network, Round 2: transferring the final indicators to values and relative weights After filtering indicators of the economic sustainability model, a calculation formula for each indicator was presented for approval and to suggest values related to the degree of sustainability, as to formulate sustainable urban economy (SUE) model (Table 3)
Indicator 2: mixed-use ratio There was a broad consensus on the value of this indicator, reaching 82%, while 12% saw to decrease the percent
Summary
By 2050, two-thirds of all humanity, 6.5 billion people, will live in urban settlements [1]. Cairo is the largest metropolitan city in the Arab world, characterized by high pollution, shortage of public services and transportation, poor infrastructure, and the rapid demand for housing. Such uncontrolled demand and feeble regulations resulted in irregular growth, creating slums extending on agricultural land or unsafe zones (cliffs), or resulted in the densification of planned areas, transforming them to unplanned. Both urban patterns caused massive energy consumption, poor waste. According to UN 2013, cities’ sustainability can be conceived by integrating four pillars: social development, economic development, environmental management, and urban governance [2, 3]
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