Housing Cairo: The Informal Response
Editors: Marc Angélil and Charlotte Malterre- Barthes in collaboration with Something Fantastic and CLUSTER

Housing Cairo: The Informal Response is a publication that aims to illuminate the architecture of informality and its mechanism, focused on the neighborhood of Ard al-Liwa. It challenges the usual negative perception attached to informal areas. Instead, it tries to attract a stronger engagement of architects and designers in these neighborhoods, with an ultimate aim of calling for governmental awareness to recognize, legalize and integrate these areas as an essential part of the city.

Housing Cairo is not merely about the informal architecture and urbanism in Cairo, it is also about the development of the linguistic expression of the urban informality. Accompanying the expansion of the informal urbanism, the one and only term “informality” cannot be used for everything that wasn’t approved by the authorities. Terminologies and terms describing informal urban expansion should also be developed in a more balanced way. By opening with an “anti-glossary,” Housing Cairo draws attention on the importance of the development of terminologies and terms, and how these terms would contribute to a sustained informal and formal urban expansion in Cairo.