UN-HABITAT and Cairo 2050 Plan in WUF 2012

The Egyptian Ministry of Housing, specifically, the Authority of Urban Development, usually participates in the Word Urban Forum (WUF). This year the WUF was held in Naples, Italy between 5 and 9 September 2012. The Egyptian officials who are responsible for housing policies and projects were active, as usual, in different activities within the WUF. They held a special session again on the Cairo 2050 Plan, renamed recently as 2052, perhaps for the delay caused by the 25^th of January Revolution.

The project comes within a regional vision across different Arab cities and represents, from the formal perspective, a vision for the future of housing and development of the region, as well as proposing the projects of high priority, considering the factors of competition and the high populations of cities in the major provinces (Cairo, Giza, Qaliubiya, Helwan and 6^th of October City). UN-Habitat is an essential stakeholder of this process, and the agency declared that there is a new version now of the Cairo 2052 plan that takes into consideration human rights.

The Housing and Land Rights Network recently organized a workshop with its constituents and members in Egypt to discuss the Human Rights Dimensions in the Urbanization Policies in Egypt, particularly the Cairo 2052 plan. The participants reported no such development.

The discourse of the officials has not changed, as was expected after revolution. Civil society anticipated a new discourse that would call for protecting the rights of the poor and marginalized communities in Cairo and the accountability of public planners and policy makers. However the same authoritarian and security-obsessed policies have persisted.

Rhetoric about the interests of people was heard in the WUF sessions that Egyptian officials participated in and organized, but that parlance contradicts the reality of forced evictions and displacement in Egypt. Most recently, the very recent events in Ramlat Būlāq is one of the examples on this contradiction.

Currently, HLRN encourages alternative solutions and development models through the community organizing and capacity building, to generate ideas that are suitable to the Egyptian environment, as well as affordable to those people who lack housing and basic goods and services. (See also the article on the Egyptian Housing Day in this issue of Land Times).