Azhar Park: In a Decaying Cairo Quarter, a Vision of Green and Renewal

The New York Times > Arts > Art & Design > Architecture Review: "Can thoughtful urban planning heal deep cultural wounds? That is the question raised by the new 74-acre Azhar Park, whose luxurious hilltop gardens are meant to spawn a revival of this city's old decaying Islamic quarter. Conceived 20 years ago by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, a font of revitalization projects in the Muslim world, the project's aims could not be more noble. The park is the largest green space created in Cairo in over a century, reversing a trend in which unchecked development has virtually eradicated the city's once-famous parks. Built over a mountain of debris that had served as the city's garbage dump for centuries, it also replaces one of Cairo's most trenchant symbols of poverty and decay.

But it is the trust's willingness to engage the harsher realities of the park's surroundings that makes this project unusual. The trust is completing a painstaking restoration of a mile-long segment of the 12th-century Ayyubid wall, which forms the park's western edge. Just beyond it, in the old Islamic quarter known as Darb al-Ahmar, it is working to restore a series of mosques built during the 14th and 15th centuries as well as some Ottoman-era houses. Its development network has also opened a community center whose programs range from reproductive health services to training programs for local craftsmen, many of whom worked on the park's construction.

The result is an urban vision that is startling in its scope. And it reaffirms that the Aga Khan Trust has become one of the most important institutional advocates for architecture in the world. Unlike the Hyatt Foundation's more famous Pritzker Prize, which is essentially a beauty contest, the trust's vast network of programs has long acknowledged that architecture, urban planning, preservation and social and political issues are forever entwined. In so doing, it embraces a more enlightened view of Islamic urban culture.

The design is an interpretation of Arabic themes: the arched arcades are a mix of Fatimid and Mamluk period styles that would fit comfortably in one of the more luxurious Las Vegas resorts. At the Bellagio, for example, the van Goghs are also real. (The architects, Rami el-Dahan and Soheir Farid, are known for designing resort towns on the Red Sea.)

Cairo is a particularly cosmopolitan example. Its ancient city is a mix of Coptic churches and Arabic mosques. To the east spreads Ismail Pasha's Europeanized late-19th-century city, whose straight boulevards and English-style gardens - inspired by Haussmann's Paris and now almost all gone - were built to impress foreign dignitaries arriving for the inauguration of the Suez Canal. Nearby are the neo-Classical houses and lush overgrown yards of the Garden City district, an early-20th-century interpretation of Ebenezer Howard's suburban vision for London's outskirts. "