There are two projects I was involved in over my time at AS+P: One was a thirty-year long-term strategic plan for the City of Alexandria. The other was for a new urban development 30 kilometers west of central Cairo. This mixed-use development, named Badya City, is part of the 6th of October City in Egypt within its strategic extension area. On an area of approximately 1,260 hectares, a human-centered, resource-efficient city is planned to be built for about 150,000 future inhabitants, offering about 48,000 workplaces. AS+P was asked to simultaneously develop the citywide master plan as well as the architectural design of more than 3,000 units to launch the project. I worked with other planners and designers on the project to respond to the changes the clients requested for the design and worked on drafting a progress report detailing the work that had been done thus far by AS+P planning staff.
I was able to use software I had learned at MIT, including autoCAD, SketchUp, Rhino, and the Adobe product suite to help the firm bring design ideas to life. More importantly, the critical thinking skills I honed within my degree program allowed me to communicate details of complex sub-contractor reports on environmental sustainability measures visually, a skill that was prized by the firm’s project leads. In addition, my ability to write and communicate as a native-English speaker was helpful for both projects centered in Egypt, where English was the shared language for communicating ideas. This meant I had a big hand in writing text for our final report and even reviewed the copy that would appear later in Topos Magazine about the project.
Finally, I was able to learn about the way both strategic urban plans and planned new urban communities differed in terms of necessary input from the firm. With the City of Alexandria as one client and a high-end Egyptian developer as the other, the workflows and processes required in dealing with each was unique and helped me to understand the workflow of the organization systemically.
