A high-minded review of Cairo's Azhar Park, the new green space that is just out of view in this photo of mine. Now I understand what my guide at the Blue Mosque was trying to tell me.

While a park is certainly superior to a garbage dump, my hunch is that the park itself isn't going to be the kind of revitalizing influence that its designers intended it to be. Across a major thoroughfare, atop a hill and surrounded by walls, it isn't connected to the fabric of the neighborhood at all. The history of urban design is littered with the detritus of grandiose but ultimately inhuman monuments to the ego of the designer. It's the people, stupid! (And the connectivity) What's more, it isn't catered to the needs of the residents, who would probably greatly prefer soccer fields to formal gardens. Nor does there seem to be a plan for the type of development spillover that such urban parks are usually designed to generate. My old prof, Alexander Garvin, would raise his elfin eyebrows at the missed opportunity. Vincent Scully would bemoan the inhumanity of it all, and mumble something uplifting about the ancient Greeks. And David Sucher, if he weren't such a mild-mannered fellow, would have a conniption.

Far more beneficial than the park, I think, are the kinds of community building activities being undertaken by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture--training locals to renovate and upgrade their own neighborhood, educating them about the rich architectural and cultural heritage of Islamic Cairo, involving them in the revitalization process. The architectural visitor's center is an overdue idea; hopefully it will be a meeting point for tourists and interested residents alike.

All of which, of course, the Times reporter Nicolai Ouroussoff is saying in the article, but in a fancier way.

UPDATE: [2:10 PM 10/25/04] by praktike: Thoughts on the park from "Hellme," one of the few Egyptian bloggers I've come across:
The first thing that comes to mind is the question of how long it will take the locals to ruin the new Agha Khan Azhar Gardens (eloquently covered in this article). Knowing Egyptians, and knowing the flood of people that decend on the Giza Zoo whenever the weather allows or during public holidays, I have a haunting suspicion that Al Azhar's garden's - a multimillion project that demands as much attention as the Alexandria Bibliotheca - will wither away and die, and become a distant remnant of what Cairo could be, but isn't. I also wonder whether I'm just being obtusely pessimistic without cause.
Cheerio.