CAIRO
(CUIP) CREATIVE URBAN
INITIATIVES PLATFORM: CAIRO
CUIP – Cairo is a bilingual Arabic/English online directory and a shared calendar of events for the multiple art, culture, architecture, advocacy, urban development and interdisciplinary organizations/initiatives addressing issues related to the city, the urban environment and public space in Cairo.
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Launched in 2013 as the Cairo Urban Initiatives Platform, CUIP offers an expanding index of organizations and initiatives operating in Cairo, and an overview of events in categories including academia/research, advocacy, architecture, urbanism, crafts, cultural development, film, heritage, literature, music, networking, performing arts, photography, public space, sustainability, technology and visual arts. CUIP aims at documenting and mapping active urban initiatives to foster communication, collaboration, and resource sharing.
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CAIRO DOWNTOWN
PASSAGEWAYS
Cairo Downtown Passageways website explores cultural and entertainment highlights, spaces of memory and heritage sites alongside Downtown’s back alleys. It offers a glimpse into a larger body of information, a database on Downtown passageways and in-between spaces that CLUSTER has mapped over three years:
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including activities, patterns of use, typology and genealogy, materiality and texture, circulation and access, roofing and proportion, in addition to territoriality and tools of demarcation, and other spatial and visual documentation and analysis. The website also features interviews with local community members and stakeholders.
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AMMAN
(CUIP) CREATIVE URBAN
INITIATIVES PLATFORM: AMMAN
CUIP – Amman is a community based, user-generated interactive map / directory / shared calendar of events for art, culture, architecture, advocacy, urban development and interdisciplinary initiatives and organizations based in Amman. Launched by CLUSTER in Cairo in 2013 as the Cairo Urban Initiatives Platform.
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CUIP was extended to Amman through a partnership between CLUSTER, the Center for Spatial Research at Columbia University, and Studio-X Amman.
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AMMAN
STAIRWAYS
Amman Stairways documents tangible and intangible heritage, from historical buildings and streetscape elements, to oral histories and family narratives. In offering the Stairways as a framework for connectivity, integration and dialogue, it challenges the urban experience of Amman’s East and West divide.
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By documenting the relationships that the stairways form as they extend and connect between different conditions across the city, Amman’s Stairways are interrogated as occupiable spaces in and of themselves.
The Amman Stairways Mapping Project was developed by CLUSTER in collaboration with Columbia University’s Center for Spatial Research (CSR) and Studio-X Amman at the Columbia Global Centers | Amman.
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ALEXANDRIA
ALEXANDRIA
MAPPING TOURS
Alexandria contains some of Egypt’s finest examples of architectural and urban heritage. One of the first cities in Egypt to experience modernization, beginning in the early 19th century, Alexandria’s booming economy, cosmopolitan culture and diverse historical layers have all contributed to a robust Downtown.
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Over the past few decades, downtown Alexandria has experienced a gradual decay, similar to other major city centers in Egypt. A process of degentrification resulted from the departure of foreign communities around the middle of the 20th century, followed by local upper classes by the 1970s and 1980s. This process of deterioration was compounded by an entrenched institutional and legal framework for rent control, and a lack of incentive for maintenance and upkeep. This Alexandria guidebook seeks to highlight the city’s rich and living heritage, focusing on three walking tours, of the Manshiya, Greek and Downtown districts. This Alexandria mapping project seeks to highlight the city’s rich and living heritage, focusing on two walking tours, of the Manshiya and Downtown districts.
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PORT SAID
PORT SAID URBAN AND
CULTURAL HERITAGE TOURS
Port Said Urban and Cultural Heritage Tours were curated and designed by CLUSTER in November 2022 at StaBene Cultural Cafe in Port Said. Today, Port Said is presented as a major destination for domestic tourism, capitalizing on its cosmopolitan heritage, and not doing justice to its multi-layered histories.
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Organized around four themes, these proposed itineraries contest the dual-city narrative, and suggest alternative lenses to experience the city’s complex and contested urban space.Each tour navigates Port Said’s urban and cultural landscapes, on foot, and by bicycle and ferry, to follow these themes, engaging buildings and sites, beaches and ports, markets and recipes, and certainly music, rituals and festivals. The tours help unravel the complexity of Port Said, in both national and local urban imaginaries, as well as contribute to critical urban narratives of other cities. The project is supported by the European Union (EU)-EUNIC, in partnership with Port Said ala Ademo in Port Said.
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TUNIS
(CUIP) CREATIVE URBAN
INITIATIVES PLATFORM: TUNIS
Creative Urban Initiatives Platform CUIP – Tunis is a community based, user-generated interactive map / directory / shared calendar of events for art, culture, architecture, advocacy, urban development and interdisciplinary initiatives and organizations based in Tunis.
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CLUSTER launched CUIP Tunis in partnership with Blue Fish, Tunis and with support from the Arab Fund for Art and Culture (AFAC).
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MAPPING URBAN
HERITAGE IN TUNIS
Mapping Urban Heritage in Tunis explores the historical urban landscape of Tunis through a number of lenses: social, economic, cultural and architectural. It attempts to fill a gap between specialized literature on urban history, and seeks to counter stereotypes pertaining to landmarks and tourist attractions.
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Mapping Urban Heritage in Tunis offers alternative readings of the city center based on scholarly research and grounded in everyday urban experience, presented in plain language and clear graphic presentation. The research, curation and design of this map are the result of a year-long collaboration between CLUSTER in Cairo and Atelier SCAR in Tunis, urban research and design initiatives with a shared interest in alternative urban narratives and spatial politics.
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TANGIER
REGIONAL
MAPPING URBAN
INFORMALITY IN TANGIER
Mapping Urban Informality in Tangier is a mapping project that aims at understanding the relationship between formality and informality in the city of Tangier. The project aims at articulating the processes of informal practices within the medina, the modern city center and its outlaying suburbs.
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By following specific objects representing the above themes—the brick, the bottle, the local cheese and the smart phone—the tours unravel underlying urban questions facing the Tangier today, such as heritage preservation and gentrification, food supply-chains and rural-urban economies, waterfront redevelopment and global capital, as well as demolition and upgrading of informal housing.
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(PILOT) PUBLIC INTER-LIBRARY
ONLINE TECHNOLOGY
PILOT is a shared Arabic-English cataloguing platform for small, specialized collections housed at civil society organizations, professional practices or private collections. It adopts a universal cataloguing system (Library of Congress) and follows romanization system based on a simplified version of IJMES.
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PILOT aims at developing a framework to open private libraries to researchers and public users, capitalizing on special and rare collections in various fields in the art, architecture, urbanism, humanities and social sciences.
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(CAUL) CRITICAL ARABIC
URBAN LEXICON
CAUL is part of a wider project of knowledge dissemination developed to interrogate the discursive gap between the MENA region and the centers of knowledge production in the “First World.” CAUL includes a working glossary of terms relevant to the context and urban transformations of the Arabic speaking world.
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CAUL aims to address the interdisciplinary nature of urban studies and the proliferation of borrowed terms from social sciences and humanities, including political science, geography, and cultural studies. CAUL is part of a larger knowledge dissemination and resource sharing platform organized around a network of libraries in civil society organizations (PILOT) in the Arab region.
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(GUPs) GROUNDED
URBAN PRACTICES
GUPs are projects, initiatives or offices who use space as a key agent of change, an approach known as spatial activism, and share three main characteristics: a) being grounded, community-based and bottom-up; b) adopting a critical position vis-a-vis the status quo, government policies and conventional practice;
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and c) experimenting with alternative methods and tools, as well as legal, financial and organizational models.
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