Sheikh Khalifa City
​2009 - New Cairo, Egypt | Concept

The vision of “A Productive Community” was introduced in the Sheikh Khalifa City project to address the problem of “Affordability” of housing for middle income people in Egypt. Unlike conventional approaches to affordable housing, whereby the construction cost is engineered to a minimum saleable value, the proposed planning framework is premised on Land as the prime asset for both real-estate and community development, with local food production being at the heart of this premise. Each housing cluster/local community is supported by small tracts of arable land, including agricultural fields, fruit orchards and vegetable gardens. The development is organized into a series of Housing Hills interspersed by Agricultural Valleys, and interconnected by spines of commercial boulevards and recreational parkways. Such diverse land use pattern, as well as the close proximity to agricultural fields creates opportunities for live-work lifestyle. In addition to traditional modes of urban crafts in workshops and studios, the proposed scheme is conducive to contemporary information-age modes of work-from-home patterns. Basic house-garden development increments are organized around spines of infrastructure, where lines of fiber optics and IT cables provide information highways, the backbone of information industries.