Fluent Essays

rephrase the annotated textbook text as the format in the attached word document. _2553825338187757_4234182264537219072_n.jpg rephrased_essay.docx Unformatted Attachment Preview It has been difficult to merge together the positive aspects of the “self-built” informality commonly used in Egypt and the government policy that imposes to give them legal sanctions and an enduring development. Specifically, the Egyptian policy about informal housing would prohibit to build new illegal constructions and stop its intrusion on lands devoted to agriculture, rebuild informal dangerous and damaged areas, improve buildings and supply new services that older settlements didn’t have, and produce social housing that could be for families looking for an low-cost place to live. Despite the prohibition policy, the numbers of the informal buildings have been incremented since 2011 and even though the law established demolition, arrests and the suspension of services such as water and electricity, the imposition had the opposite effect. The housing designated as unsafe that would have needed and resettlement only consists of the 2\% of all the informal areas. The national program started in 2009 aimed to fund the redevelopment of these informal buildings, but the already “improved” ones lack basic housing rights. The government have improved some infrastructures over the years, without having established budgets or priorities and without defining the characteristics that an informal area should have to be defined as one. Also, the redevelopment hasn’t been applied over a large scale, giving the rest of the informal buildings a lot of problems and not enough basic services. Even foreign donors and NGOs have focused on specific areas to improve having excellent results but those are not copied anywhere else. The government of Egypt has built social housing for people with low income for a lot of years now and since 1990 those have been focused on the more desertic cities. The main fact of the housing being located on the desert make it difficult for poor families to live there; the housing promotes the formation of ghettos and the system is ok with abuse, that is why a lot of the housing estates are empty. Some analysts over the years have mentioned that the alternatives to informal development should be regulated and guided at the same time that the services are been applied. People thought of programs that would attract people to finally stop the informal building. The program would consist of building neighborhoods in low-cost lands that would be well-located. The idea was that those areas would eliminate the need for people to build their own houses. Even though there had been a few tries, the government never attempted seriously on realizing this strategy; the most successful attempt was during the 1980s, when there was the Hay El Salaam project. The government still considered their own project as the most efficient one in order to shut down the informal buildings. In 2007, the Ibni Beitak scheme was proposed, as another alternative, whose objective was to generate huge neighborhoods in which the inhabitants could build their own apartments with subsidies. The results of the project were disappointing, since the locations were remote and the standards were rigid, so again the project was shut down. Now, the government has no efficient policies regarding the problem of informality and they recently created a Ministry of Informal Areas, where negligence dominates. UN-HABITAT created a housing strategy for the whole country that indicated possible ways to eliminate the problem, such as creating a dense neighborhood near cities and it could have great results competing directly with informal buildings. However, this strategy would require the government to get on board offering more valued land to the project (that is usually used for more luxury purposes that are used nowadays for the economic growth) and they would need to acknowledge the fact that the current policies aren’t actually working and that the government is not able to control the project. The recognition is not likely to happen since the government considered itself as a “supreme regulator”. It is difficult that there would be a shift in policy in the near future and the informal development would to grow more and more since it already produces 65\% of the country housing, which are affordable, while on the well-located parts of the country, more luxurious real-estate are being built, having more investors who are interested in it. Through the Ibni Beitak failure, people learned that, in order to shut down the informality, they need to understand thoroughly how the informal building works, in processes, designs and dynamics. Therefore, some things were learnt through the projects over the years. In order to eliminate it, the informality needs to be understood in order to: make it a part of usual architectural and urban thinking and avoid the margination; make the government understand the positive sides of the informal buildings, since it creates affordable housing at a small cost for the country; make people understand the informal buildings create a sense of community, more jobs and opportunities. Misconceptions and myths and disregard towards informality will be maintained unless there would be an appropriate research. It has been useful, then, to have ETH Zurich and MAS Urban Design analyzing informality and its design and transform it into the book “Housing Cairo” that would be beneficial in order to deeply understand informality. List of References: Angelil, M. and Malterre-Barthes, C. (2016). Housing Cairo – The Informal Response. Ruby Press. ... Purchase answer to see full attachment