Towards Effective and Sustainable Urban Parks in Alexandria

Urban parks are now viewed as an important part of the urban and neighborhood development rather than just recreation and leisure facilities. They are oriented for multifunctional services. Besides, they play an important role in improving the environment and landscape conditions that result in green spaces which have become an essential part in cities due to their strategic importance for the quality of life. As the world's urban population increases, urban areas encounter new problems such as: uncontrolled use of resources, greenhouse effect, ozone depletion, …… etc. To face these problems of urban areas, sustainable urban parks have become a significant urban planning policy and development approach.The city of Alexandria (Egypt) is rich with its urban parks such as Al Montazah Park, Al Shalalat Park and Antoniadis Park. However, the lack of coordination of physical planning activities within the city, has resulted into an unpleasant quality of the environment and decrease in the number of sustainable urban parks. Moreover, urban population has rapidly increased, thus the city of Alexandria has been enlarged and gradually human relations with nature have been damaged. For these reasons, people in Alexandria have lost the opportunity to come in contact with nature.The paper will discuss the causes of decreasing urban parks and its effects on people's health and the significant need to improve these spaces to develop the city and achieve sustainability. It will also highlight the important role of urban parks and their design strategies. It will analyze an international example which was transformed to provide a high quality of living environment presenting the suggested ways to create sustainable open spaces as an integrated part of a sustainable city. Finally, the paper will focus on developing Al Montazah urban park in Alexandria to achieve sustainability. The aim of the paper is to transform urban parks within the environment of Alexandria to improve and enhance the quality of life in order to reach a sustainable city.