Sustainable Green Markets, regenerating the urban historic core to sustain Socio-Cultural heritage and economic activities

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Newton Fund
Newton Fund
Newton Fund
Newton Fund
Newton Fund

£198,225

Feb. 12, 2016

March 7, 2018

This project will contribute to developing understandings about broader conceptions of Egyptian cultural heritage and examine ways that such heritage can contribute to processes of social and economic regeneration, through the careful management of interventions that combine understanding of heritage value, appropriate technological innovation and collaborative processes of engagement with local disempowered communities.

The recent heritage in Egypt tends to be neglected in favour of directing funds and effort to its ancient cultural and built heritage from the Pharaonic era. This creates a situation of lost opportunities and valuable architectural heritage being left to ruin. This project will develop frameworks for sustaining the recent cultural heritage of wholesales market buildings in Egypt. The central location of these markets in Cairo, surrounded by a larger retail areas of different markets, urban dwellers and schools, makes them potentially valuable for cultural activities and to act as venues for museum education outside the museums of Egypt. Currently, however, these large covered market plots are predominantly used by urban squatters that provide their services of cut vegetables, cheap electronic goods, bakery and spices to the surrounding urban dwellers. Extensions on the original shop lines, both horizontally and vertically, creates a situation where it is difficult to manage risks of fire and there is poor sanitation. Moreover, on-going attempts to adapt the physical structure of such markets, or to build within them, have undermined the buildings' architectural integrity and historic significance. Equally, we must be aware that attempts to redevelop these buildings run the risk of gentrification, marginalising their current urban poor users and destroying their physical and cultural heritage value.

To address these issues we have assembled a multidisciplinary team of UK and Egyptian researchers, combining expertise in appropriate technological interventions into historic fabric, understandings of heritage value and collaborative processes of engagement with disempowered and disadvantaged communities. Through taking a specific case study, of the Attabba market, the project will develop and share a vision for extending the contemporary refurbishment of these markets into a wider societal role, acting as a nucleus of culture and economy. Whilst we will develop our vision through knowledge of market refurbishment schemes elsewhere in the world and through a process of co-production with local stakeholders we will explore, for example, the potential to extend the market's current function, as a venue for food retail, into one with shared places to enjoy culinary teaching and meals, and to host incubators of cultural exchanges, in the form of exhibition space, and out of museum educational facilities. On the roof we envisage activities to familiarize communities with urban farming and renewable energy technologies.

The research will principally draw from and contribute to knowledge in the fields of sustainable building technologies, cultural heritage and collaborative community process as well as urban agriculture and food and museology. A specific dimension will be an examination of the transferability of approaches developed in UK and the Europe to the very different cultural, economic and institutional context of Egypt.

Potential Impact:
Pathways to Impact
1. Impact from the process

We chose to underpin the networking workshop with a scoping study to identify key points of tension between urbanisation, changing use of buildings and perceptions of tangible and intangible heritage. This process of this scoping study itself will deliver impact directly to student, staff and communities involved.

Impact on students:
The UK PI, directs the Masters for Sustainable Buildings and Environments, the Egyptian PI directs the Masters programme for 'Revitalisation of Historic Cities and Districts'
Both courses can make use of the building and the methodology of collecting data as live projects that they can use as case study for generating innovative architectural and low carbon building designs. Students of urban planning generally receive standard social science research. We hope that this experience will result in at least some cohorts of students able to produce more innovative academic and practice research which uses a range of methods not normally considered.

Academic impact: The work will significantly strengthen the working relationship between the two main institutions, SAPL, Newcastle and Cairo University, and various governmental organizations in Egypt. This offers us a stronger basis for joint publication and further heritage and historical research in Egypt.

Impact on communities: Rather than being the subjects of research, in this study market traders and user communities and owners are the drivers of it. We seek to ensure they are empowered by both the process of telling their stories but also by informing the structure and questions framing the workshop and through networking with professionals

Impact from the Workshop
Academic impact: The two communities involved in the production of a joint report delineating an action framework will be central to the workshop. We anticipate this will influence the thinking and understanding of academics, practitioners and policy makers, many of whom may have had the opportunity for this level of community engagement before.

We seek to establish new, lasting and productive relationships through the workshop. As a pathway to facilitate this an on-line network of all participants will be established through SAPL, Newcastle to support this. Details of all other UK and Egyptian academics involved will be circulated and they will have full access to the scoping study materials for their own use. We anticipate that the workshop will produce an agenda for research leading to at least one major funding application to AHRC/ ESRC/ and or EPSRC.
We are in discussions about the possibility of publishing two articles in high impact journals namely Cities and buildings and environment.

Creative Commons
Outputs from the scoping study and the workshop papers and proceedings will be available under a Creative Commons 'attribution' licence, allowing others to use and build upon the work as long as they attribute its origins to the original developer.