Sustainable Rural Development_Egypt

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Barmelgy, H. M., "‘Pros’ and ‘Cons’ of Rural Tourism and the Sustainable Development of Rural Communities", Engineering Research Journal , vol. 114, issue 1110-5615, pp. A13-A31, 2007. Abstractsustainable_rural_tourism_barmelgy_h._m_2007.pdf

The notion of linking sustainable tourism to the sustainable development of the Egyptian rural communities although well recognised is not without its doubts. Sustainable tourism could (Fsadni and Selwyn, 1997; Mills, 1993; and Hall, 2000) and should (Butler, 1993; and WTO, 1993) provide means of economic, social and environment regeneration for such communities. However, sustainable tourism is not a panacea and cannot be self-contained, its’ needs must be recognised within the wider context of the community sustainable development framework (Lane, 1994; and Human, 1994). After all it is the challenge of sustainable tourism to ‘build on the positive’ and ‘not to reproduce the negative’. The paper provokes the ability of sustainable tourism to act as the catalyst for promoting sustainable development in rural communities through the ability of introducing a deep ecological sustainable form of tourism defined as ‘sustainable eco-rural tourism’.
The paper aims to investigate and define a practical model for promoting a sustainable form of tourism within the Egyptian rural context defined as ‘sustainable eco-rural tourism’ through adopting the ‘Innovation-Diffusion’ theory (Moseley, 2000) in an attempt to address the questions of, what is meant by ‘sustainable eco-rural tourism’ as an innovative form of tourism, and how can it be locally adopted through a community-led approach to insure maximum host integration in the process ‘diffusion elements and channels’.

Barmelgy, H. M., "Primitive as a Sustainable Way of Life: Sustainability and the Egyptian Rural Communities", PRIMITIVE 2004, International Conference at the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff, Wales, 16 September2004. Abstractsustainabilty_and_egyptian_rural_communities_barmelgy_h._m_2004.pdf

Egypt has witnessed the launch of great development movements as a result of a number of reasons. Their impact generates a rapid restructuring of economic, cultural, social and even political orientations. Changes in values, norms tastes, political structures, production system, and consumption patterns of the Egyptian community are well recognised. On the scale of the urban communities to some extent, they were able to bare such transformation while maintaining their cultural heritage. However, the spatial transformation occurring to the rural areas (Egyptian villages) especially those in direct contact to the central urbanisation regions have results in generating tremendous impacts. Such impacts has leads some of these villages to slack their distinct primitive way of life including there primitive urban form and architecture character to the urbanisation transformation. Such primitive way of life can be asserted to be the most sustainable way for such communities to survive sustain-ably within the context of their surrounding environment. Baring in mind that the rural areas form more than 60% of the inhabited areas in Egypt gives us an indicator to the importance of being able to maintain bio-diversity of these areas and thus preserving its primitive way of life. Accordingly, the paper is first to define the principles and features of the Egyptian rural community primitive way of life then will attempt to record the social, economical and cultural transformation of the rural Egyptian community. The methodology adopted will depend on the literature analysis to define the traditional feature of the primitive way of life than on conducting a field survey to record the contemporary transformation on two case studies one of which is very close to the urbanisation area as the main sources of impacts and the other is far off. An analytical case study based on the results of those two cases is to clarify such impacts. Further more, an analytical correlation study is to be conducted aiming to link such transformation to those of the primitive urban from and architecture character of the rural Egyptian community. Finally the paper is to discus the ability of the sustainability principles to positively contribute in the way of maintaining the bio-diversity of the primitive way of life for such communities.