ABSTRACT
Slums are the worst outcome of urbanisation in Egypt. ‘Slum upgrading’ became a necessary strategy for improving living conditions, in order to achieve the Millennium Development Goal on Environmental Sustainability. This paper aims to establish a deeper understanding of how ‘informal areas’ (or ‘slums’ as they are more commonly known) emerged and were activated in the Greater Cairo region. Moreover, it aims to highlight the major strengths and weaknesses of slum upgrade plans, and may provide a useful approach for performance evaluation of these plans. Measuring the performance of slum upgrades is a complex task because of the diverse processes involved. The research in this paper develops a set of parameters for performance evaluation of slum development plans that were either in-site developments or new reallocation plans. This new approach evaluates the quality of the upgrade through a full review. Residents’ questionnaires, aimed at measuring user satisfaction with performance quality aspects, were used across four case studies in the Greater Cairo region.
