VIRTUAL Manchester Livable Cities

Abstract

This research explores walkability in Cairo’s Fifth Settlement through an auto-ethnographic flanerie along an 800-meter route from my home to a neighbourhood gym in Al Andalus 1, New Cairo. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s “right to the city”, Walter Benjamin’s figure of the flaneur, and debates on spatial justice, it frames walking as both a method and a lens for studying the city and examining how master-planned neighborhoods mediate presence, spontaneity, and emotional connection to urban space. The paper asks how walkability is experienced in a car-centric, master-planned enclave, and how its absence produces subtle forms of spatial injustice. Over several months of repeated walks (July to December), I combined field notes and in-situ observations with photo documentation and basic mapping to record the conditions, feelings, and atmospheres along this route. The analysis traces recurring spatial situations: unfinished roads and sand surfaces that have remained “temporary” for over a year, fragmented (or absent) sidewalks, the near-absence of other pedestrians, encounters with stray dogs, and greenery that appears as a visual privilege behind compound gates or as small beautification efforts by individual residents. These observations suggest that the “ordered” and master-planned landscape of the Fifth Settlement produces everyday exclusions and inequalities. Within this environment, walking becomes an uncomfortable, unsafe, or simply implausible everyday practice as pedestrians are quietly pushed out of the streets. The research argues that livability in Cairo’s New neighborhoods cannot be assessed through infrastructural provision alone, but must also account for how everyday walking shapes belonging in the street, who moves safely on foot, and how the “right to the city” is enabled or quietly eroded at the scale of a short daily walk.