Designing cities: should we build from scratch or keep history alive?

By Abeer Elshater, Professor of Urban Morphology, Ain Shams University
Hisham Abusaada, Professor of Architecture and Urban Design, Housing and Building National Research Center

Cities are often described as living archives of human memory. Walk through an old neighbourhood in an Islamic city like Fez in Morocco or Cairo in Egypt, and you can see layers of history in its streets and buildings. Traces of the past remain visible in everyday life.

Urban historians sometimes call this a palimpsest – a place where layers of history remain visible, like old writing faintly showing beneath new text.

But in many parts…

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