Street Networks between Traditional and New Egyptian Developments, Problems and Learned Lessons

With no doubt, street network design and urban form are assumed to mutually influence each other over time and the link between them is well tested in literature. In Egypt, however, this link is seemingly ambiguous particularly in planning of the new cities. In most of the new-city plans no apparent street pattern relevant to the Egyptian city have been introduced which in turn create unsustainable cities. It is widely agreed that the traditional urban form developed hundreds of years ago may hold some significant guidelines for the future. The current generation of the new city policy invite some urban sustainability guidelines based on the international benchmarks and with some applicable to the traditional form. As a result, an increase demand for defining a sustainable urban form for the new cities is quickly raised. This paper extends the discussions over the sustainability urban form using the analysis of road network. The paper makes a critical comparison between different cases from Greater Cairo Region that range from early developed neighbourhoods to the new planned cases. Route Structure Analysis and Simple Network analysis are the two main themes employed here in building the analytical framework that are then translated into a number of dimensions and quantitative measurements. The research uses a geographic information system (GIS) as an instrument for the analysis.