Public spaces in Cairo witness a significant transition in their articulations since the state imposed its power over their
development till the empowerment of the elite class over the same. This paper develops and validates an evaluation sheet, with
measurable indicators, used to understand and evaluate the publicness degree of public spaces through discussing two features:
accessibility degree and social diversity degree. Expo Square and Festival Square from metropolitan Cairo are investigated to represent
public-sector development (state power) and private-sector development (elite power) respectively. Through this investigation, the degree
of publicness is discovered via the evaluation sheet to understand how different empowered actors could affect space publicness. The
research concludes that in Cairene context, the private-sector produces public spaces with less degree of publicness according to his
profit-making plans. |
