Pillars of Community Development: A Study of “Al-Asmarat District”

The topic of community development for marginalized communities has evolved significantly in the last eight years worldwide, following the United Nations' (UN) establishment of the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015. Under this umbrella, Egypt has set a development vision and targets to improve the standards of living conditions in the country. One of the targets is to minimize the problem of informal settlements through a series of action plans, such as creating new districts that aim to offer a better quality of life for the people who used to live in the various informal settlement areas. This prompted the state to spend exorbitant sums on these development projects, amounting to six trillion Egyptian pounds according to the prime minister's declarations in the “Decent Life” Initiative Conference 2021. The thesis aims to develop an analytical tool to understand the pillars of community development. The aim was completed by collecting the main pillars of development from the point of view of many organizations, like the UN, and many individuals, like economists, sociologists, and architects. This results in having the five main pillars, which are knowledge, psychological, social, economic, and urban pillars. The tool was implemented in a local case study, which is the Al-Asmarat district, to assess and evaluate the project as a community development project. This was achieved through site visits to collect primary qualitative data from the interviews and through observation, mapping, and photo documentation to come up with a conclusion and action plans for the already existing phases in Al-Asmarat and future recommendations to Al-Asmarat phase four, and the other futuristic community development projects.