Heba Allah Khalil

Residential mobility is a key element in a responsive housing market this is especially crucial countries with limited resources & residential areas like Egypt, studying the residential mobility will solve many of housing concerns. This study seeks to provide a deeper understanding of family life cycle and within residential mobility process and its influencing factors. It theoretically develops and empirically tests the acceptance of that concept, enhancing the rent set-ting mechanism and the subsidy policy to ensure the affordability of middle-income housing in Egypt.
The research models residential mobility, using unique survey data that examines specific life-cycle variables to evaluate the concept of residential mobility in the Egyptian housing market as a whole and find out why residential mobility through rental housing became a myth in the Egyptian housing market after it was scattered for a long time.
The findings suggest that residential mobility through a secured housing process could be a popular tool that helps middle income groups in Egypt in finding affordable and appropriate rental housing and it could be one of the effective solutions in illuminating informal areas.

Urban regeneration has been an accepted strategy for reviving city centers around the globe in Western Developed settings and in developing cities for decades. In Cairo, post January 25th Revolution, the Egyptian government sought an approach to upgrade several sites in downtown classical Cairo, to set new conditions for use of public space, to redistribute the power of authority and re-define the rules for the claim of public space of the city. The Cairo Governorate officially launched many projects within the same period; mainly focusing on refurbishing squares and streets, facades face lifting, controlling vendors’ trespassing and regulating car parking space among other regulations within Downtown area. However, having accepted and acknowledged the governmental intentions of the regeneration projects a question poses itself as to ‘How the community perceives and cherishes those initiatives?’ More important questions are raised regarding the regeneration of Al Alfi Street, the case study that addresses the governmental attempt in down town Cairo in 2015. It brings to light the dynamics enacted between different stakeholders. A research is conducted by adopting participant observations, surveys, questionnaires, and interviews with the local community and different stakeholders to understand their perception and appreciation to the ‘2015’ urban regeneration attempt. The findings of the paper set the urban regeneration principles in a discussion aiming at assessing the stakeholders’ involvement versus their goals and measuring their satisfaction with the outcome of the project, while still posing the question of the meaning of urban regeneration to the local community and to alternative scenarios that could yield more successful outcomes.

The scope of this research is to introduce an approach to assess the city's environmental performance, a few years ago many environmental initiatives appeared to conserve the quality of life like Green city, Smart City, Sustainable City, and Eco City; all of them set their concerns on how to let the city green or sustainable, but another definition appeared to make the city resists its environmental and natural hazards called “Resilient City”.
Many tools appeared to assess the city's environmental performance like Green City Index, Global City Indicator, and CASBEE for City all of them contain a certain list of measurable indicators to make the assessment more accurate and to reach the problem level.
To apply this tool to the case study in “Cairo”, the data collection depends on field measurements of air quality and then linking this data geographically using ArcGIS program. Two selected districts are taken; one of them is characterized by heavy traffic load, and the other has a main path that was regenerated to be a pedestrian path so all the results reflect the effect of traffic load on air. Finally, this approach helps the decision makers to improve their city performance and to set the priorities to solve the problem.

Many researches have highlighted the importance of environmental justice, where healthy environment
is a right to all. Currently, the most vulnerable groups to climate change are low-income urban dwellers, typically residing in urban informalities within cities of the Global South. In Cairo, the awareness about climate change and responsive consumption is minimal and the increase in temperature could have serious effects on residents' health. In 2012, informalities were reported to house two thirds of the population and covered a third of the city's footprint. Thus, this paper highlights the importance of studying environmental performance in informal areas to achieve sustainability and reduce risks. It reviews work related to sustainable urbanization, informal areas, urban heat island and urban climate especially in Cairo. It defines needed parameters and develops an integrated tool to assess comfort in outdoor spaces microclimate. The paper relies on extensive fieldwork, meteorological measurements, socio-environmental surveys, activity mapping and modelling to study both Cairo urban climate and microclimate in one of Cairo's densest informal districts. The paper stresses the possibility of introducing responsive low-tech and low-cost strategies and interventions. This is discussed as an inherent right to marginalized areas and a necessity within a continuous process of urbanization.

Urban climate governance on the subnational and local government levels requires multilevel governance and local autonomy. Within centralised governments, climate action becomes challenging. Moreover, in developing countries, development needs are usually prioritised, while climate action is viewed as an unaffordable luxury. In a centralised, middle-income country like Egypt, climate action is a challenge for all government levels. This research investigates the current state and the prospect of urban climate change governance on the subnational level in Egypt. A twofold methodology is used. First, through desk research, a comprehensive list of urban climate governance enabling factors was extracted. The list was used to assess the practices of 3 international case studies (Delhi, Durban, and Amman) and then refined and used to assess the first subnational level climate change strategy in Egypt. Second, semi-structured interviews were conducted with a few selected experts working on climate change and urban policies in Egypt. Two sets of recommendations were formulated to expedite urban climate change governance in Egypt, especially on the subnational and local levels. While the research focuses on Egypt, the methodology and recommendations could be adopted and adapted by local governments functioning within centralised systems.