Nassim City

A contribution to BUE's International Competition in Sustainability and Future, 2010, 3rd place.
This project was produced as an entry for the International Student Competition on Sustainability and the Future (wining the Second Prize) sponsored by the British University in Egypt and the Egyptian Government. The brief asked for visionary sustainable development proposals to be developed along a proposed national transportation corridor running north to south along the Saharan Desert, 100 kilometres west of the Nile River. Specifically, the brief asked students to design an intermediate city (which the brief oddly defined as a city with between 20,000 and one million inhabitants). The genesis of the project is the government plan to create an alternative development axis parallel to the Nile River in order to decongest the already overcrowded Nile Valley (the land strips on both sides of the river). According the text in the competition brief, “As an emerging economy, Egypt has been speeding up to emulate the lives and economies of its northern neighbours, and in the process it is depleting the very resources that are needed for sustainable living. Major environmental challenges are being faced by Egypt: Our cities are over congested; our air is one of the most polluted in the world; our infamous Nile is losing its clarity and life, and the Nile Delta is under growing threat of sinking due to climate change. More so than ever, this is the time to take serious action towards ensuring that the future is different for the youth of today. [The competition] calls for the development of new communities outside the narrow Nile Valley; communities representing new visions and new ways of living, and not replicas of the concrete jungles which are eating up the arable land that feeds us” (BUE 2009). In addition, the brief asked not just for a suburban intermediate city but one that could itself be self-sustaining.

Studio designers

Gustavo Briz, Ana Raquel Ferreira Fonseca Completo Ferrão, Helene Littke, Yassine Moustanjidi, Helena Novais