Beyond the Fields Lived

Strawberry fields forever? Not really. Squeezed between agricultural lands on the west and the east, the horizontal urban development of Ismailia was restricted in previous masterplans.¹ However, most of the urban expansion from the end of the 1980s to the present day took place through illegally subdividing agricultural lands.² Located next to each other, Hay El Salam and El Kelo 2, also called Al Hejaz, are separated by a canal of Lake Timsah. The particularity is that El Kelo 2 is built on what was classed as agricultural land. By studying different satellite images from 1985 to 2022, there is a clear urbanization taking place on these agricultural fields, echoing the development of the sites-and-services in time. As such, I seek to investigate the links between the informal settlements of El Kelo 2 and Hay El Salam, especially due to their direct spatial proximity.

In 2006, an official census estimated the total inhabitants of Ismailia to be about 303,000, including 73,000 people in Hay El Salam.³ The Ministry of Local Development estimated the population living in informal settlements to be 185,000 inhabitants, roughly 59% of Ismailia’s urban population, divided between 7 different locations.⁴ The estimated population of El Kelo 2 was 5,800 inhabitants. Moreover, with 75% of all informal settlements on agricultural lands, El Kelo 2 did not differ from most cases.

After the directories for the Ismailia masterplan were decided in 1976, the work firstly focused on the informal settlement of what is now Hay El Salam.⁵ Initially a success in targeting the low and very-low income group, many of these inhabitants were, through different means, pressured to move away around 1985. One blatant reason was the forbidding of low-cost traditional building techniques by the governor of Ismailia in 1982.⁶

In the 1990s, aware of the urban expansion problems Ismailia was to face, different sites were examined to respond to the housing need of the city, and El Kelo 2 was a potential candidate for the Hay El Salam sites-and-services project to be replicated. Indeed, this is what seemed to happen, and by 2007, officials decided to finance a local network of basic infrastructures. Though well-built in reinforced concrete, the area lacks public services and transgresses on state land and property.⁷

Sources

1. Culpin Planning. Ismailia Development Project. 1986.

2. Madbouly, Mostafa and Ghada Hassan. Participatory Slum Upgrading Documented Experience from Ismailia, Egypt. UNDP. 2011.

3. Ibid.; “Ismailia.” Wikipedia. (Last consulted on 04.12.2022) Link.

4. Ibid.

5. Davidson, Forbes and Geoffrey Payne (eds.). Urban Projects Manual. Second Edition. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. 2000.

6. Madbouly and Hassan. Participatory Slum Upgrading. Op. cit.; Matteucci, Claudio. Long-term Evaluation of an Urban Development Project: The Case of Hai El Salam. 7th N-Aerus Conference. 2006.

7. Madbouly and Hassan. Participatory Slum Upgrading. Op. cit.

Cover Image

Beyond the Fields Lived: El Kelo 2 & Hay El Salam. Timeline, relationships, and influences. Source: Own work.