Uploaded on 2016-12-09 by Samaa

I read once in one of Radwa Ashour’s novels; the main character’s son wanted to leave architecture school and study law instead because he thought his country then needed more lawyers than it needed houses. You can see Egypt now and realize it is the same case here. But then I realized people are so misfortunate now that they do need a good, comfortable and healthy built environment that will eventually and by time would affect their rate of happiness. And it is not a matter of welfare but rather a necessity. Hassan Fathy once said and I quote; “As an architect, If I have the power and means to make people comfortable, god will never forgive me if I raised the temperature inside the house to more than 17 degree Celsius on purpose.” The same it is with urban planning or design; an urban planner has taken on his burden to give people the environment that satisfy their needs ergo increase their rate of happiness. Since beginning of time houses just grew up randomly, tribes where formed and different forms of housing and services lined together to shape some sort of an urban form which was perfectly fine considering it with a small group of people. With an increasing growth rate, a random set of houses became a problem and a dysfunctionality rather than an environment that satisfy its residents’ needs. Take for example the case of El-Mohagreen residents in El-Marg District on one hand there is the one floor houses; they have the small corridors between the houses, those corridors create a social bond that can never be achieved in multi-store housing. They have re-used materials for various creations; old doors, windows, ceilings of wooden plates and re-used old building materials. They have stairs that makes the houses slightly elevated from the street level, courts in some cases, windows that are craved in the wall which is one of the methods to decrease direct sunrays and give them more privacy, also windows are set at a higher level for the same purpose of privacy. For shading they have wooden plates above some corridors, and decorations that serve as both shading and decorating materials. They paint their walls with traditional writings and drawings. They have natural vegetation and various traditional means of cooling. After all this effort, the government would call it an UN-SAFE Area and demand its removal. But if you look at it the right way, beside the need of some infrastructure repairs and a little monitoring, this place has what it needs to be called a well-made sustainable built environment, and people managed to build and plan it just fine without any outside aid of any source. The government tried to give people alternative houses but they eventually came back and refused to move out. A place like this has traditional housing, good social relations between people, and what is more important is. people are satisfied with what they have and want to live there. On the other hand, what the government would consider a safe environment is the tall hideous buildings of 7 or more floors, what I usually call the concrete blocks. Many and many tall buildings aligned in grids. Here we have two cases, one in which people grew their own build environment with no other intention than to live in and enjoy, and would be the perfect living environment with little adjustments. The other where plots are divided and distributed among people that changed this environment into a source of income; you buy a land, build a tower, sell its apartments or rent them and there you have a trade, in this second case you have an unbearable mess that is well organized. The increasing growth rates required an urban planner intervention – or at least that is what people thought they needed – a one that sees the situation in a larger scale. But over time the job specifications increased and an urban planner changed from a server to the community to a server of the “greater good” AKA the government. And their appeared the conflict of interests and the ugliness that we see now. How does this all fit in the happiness context? A government can simply control the rate of happiness of its citizens with controlling the built environment and since the built environment no longer lies in the hands of the people living in it, but rather in the hands of traders and well, the greater good in this case will always be money, especially in a third world country.