The edge environment in Cairo: An approach to reading the social pattern language of the Middle Eastern built environment

This paper introduces a new concept that might help in reading both social life and urban process, showing how they are interlocked in a way that clarifies ideologies and their implications for the physical form of the city. This reading is capable of envisioning and analysing the relationship between the cohesive social pattern language of traditional built environment and its physical expression, relying on a new reflective and exploratory concept, the edge environment. This illuminates the relationship between the values hidden beneath the physical edges of spatial morphology in Middle Eastern urban contexts like Cairo, and allows those values to be understood in terms of modern ideologies relating to the human community. The concept of edge environment might help in the design education particularly in conservation and up-grading processes, as an analytical tool and as a design method by careful interventions at edges by fine tuning of the edge environment.