Al-Azhar Park

Al-Azhar Park
Garden view of Al-Azhar Park.
Motto	Paradise within the heart of Cairo
Location	Cairo, Egypt
Coordinates	30°02′26″N 31°15′53″E / 30.040523°N 31.264631°E / 30.040523; 31.264631
Area	30 hectares
Created	May 2005

Al-Azhar Park is a public park located in Cairo, Egypt.

Among several honors, this park is listed as one of the world's sixty great public spaces by the Project for Public Spaces (PPS). The park was created by the Historic Cities Support Programme (HCSP) of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC), an entity of the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN). The park, developed at a cost in excess of USD $30 million, was a gift to Cairo from Aga Khan IV: a descendant of the Fatimid Imam-Caliphs who founded the city of Cairo in the year 969.

The park project, a great urbanism initiative, included

In 1984, Agha Khan IV was visiting Cairo on a conference. From his hotel balcony Al-Darassa hill was visible: mounts of rubbish amassed during 500 years. He decided to intervene and offer the city of his ancestors the much-needed gift of an oasis in this urban desert. The sum of 30 million dollars was allocated to the project and put in the qualified hand of a local architecture and urbanism office: Sites International. The site posed several technical challenges; half a millennium of debris was at hand. Works of excavation, grading and replacement with appropriate fill began in 1992. "Over 765,000 m3 was taken out of the Park and 160,000 m3 was used as fill elsewhere on site. A further 605,000 m3 was subjected to geotechnical treatment (sieving, washing, etc.) and mixed with 60,000 m3 of special sand and topsoil to enable the site to be covered with a layer of “good” soil from 0.5 to 2.0 meters deep. A total of 1.5 million cubic meters of rubble and soil were moved, which represents over 80,000 truckloads." While the designers grappled with the technical difficulties at hand posed by the terrain and soil the government introduces an additional unexpected constraint at halfway through the process: three cisterns were to be integrated into the terrain to improve the supply of potable water to the city of Cairo. Works had to be interrupted and the design revised to integrate the new three elements. The new revised layout of the park was then carefully designed according to the landscape of the hill and the new 3 water tanks. It is mainly divided in five sections according to slope inclination, leaving us with: 2 hills (southern and northern), a rolling topography hill to the east, a flat area north and a western steep slope.