Image of the city: Prioritising the elements in historic and new urban settlemenets of Cairo, Egypt

Image of the city is a commonly used term that structures people’s perception of the spatial organisation and visual form of cities. In the nineteen-fifties, Lynch developed a model of five objective elements that collectively shape people’s perception to the image of cities, which is still widely acknowledged in recent research. The main concluded elements are paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks. The image of a city is dynamic and ever-changing. The present study investigates the way people prioritise the role of these five elements in shaping the mental images of old and new urban settlement in Cairo, Egypt. After setting the theoretical framework, the study employs a survey that involved 74 participants, to investigate their perception of the elements that characterise the image of ‘Historic Cairo’ and ‘New Cairo’. The outcome of the survey is quantitatively analysed by2descriptive analyses, cross tabulations and analyses of variance, to identify the most influential elements in both contexts, and their relations to the studied sample. Landmarks were most influential upon people’s perception to the image in both contexts. Edges were the least important in ‘Historic Cairo’, while nodes were the least in ‘New Cairo’. This should help local architects, urban designers and city planners to develop the built environment in a way that better responds to people’s priorities. © 2019, Cairo University. All rights reserved.