Sustainable Green Markets, regenerating the urban historic core to sustain Socio-Cultural heritage and economic activities

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This project will contribute to developing understandings about broader conceptions of Egyptian cultural heritage and examine ways that such heritage can contribute to processes of social and economic regeneration, through the careful management of interventions that combine understanding of heritage value, appropriate technological innovation and collaborative processes of engagement with local disempowered communities. The recent heritage in Egypt tends to be neglected in favour of directing funds and effort to its ancient cultural and built heritage from the Pharaonic era. This creates a situation of lost opportunities and valuable architectural heritage being left to ruin. This project will develop frameworks for sustaining the recent cultural heritage of wholesales market buildings in Egypt. The central location of these markets in Cairo, surrounded by a larger retail areas of different markets, urban dwellers and schools, makes them potentially valuable for cultural activities and to act as venues for museum education outside the museums of Egypt. Currently, however, these large covered market plots are predominantly used by urban squatters that provide their services of cut vegetables, cheap electronic goods, bakery and spices to the surrounding urban dwellers. Extensions on the original shop lines, both horizontally and vertically, creates a situation where it is difficult to manage risks of fire and there is poor sanitation. Moreover, on-going attempts to adapt the physical structure of such markets, or to build within them, have undermined the buildings' architectural integrity and historic significance. Equally, we must be aware that attempts to redevelop these buildings run the risk of gentrification, marginalising their current urban poor users and destroying their physical and cultural heritage value. To address these issues we have assembled a multidisciplinary team of UK and Egyptian researchers, combining expertise in appropriate technological interventions into historic fabric, understandings of heritage value and collaborative processes of engagement with disempowered and disadvantaged communities. Through taking a specific case study, of the Attabba market, the project will develop and share a vision for extending the contemporary refurbishment of these markets into a wider societal role, acting as a nucleus of culture and economy. Whilst we will develop our vision through knowledge of market refurbishment schemes elsewhere in the world and through a process of co-production with local stakeholders we will explore, for example, the potential to extend the market's current function, as a venue for food retail, into one with shared places to enjoy culinary teaching and meals, and to host incubators of cultural exchanges, in the form of exhibition space, and out of museum educational facilities. On the roof we envisage activities to familiarize communities with urban farming and renewable energy technologies.The research will principally draw from and contribute to knowledge in the fields of sustainable building technologies, cultural heritage and collaborative community process as well as urban agriculture and food and museology. A specific dimension will be an examination of the transferability of approaches developed in UK and the Europe to the very different cultural, economic and institutional context of Egypt.