Sustainable Behaviour Assessment for Building Highways Inside Existing Neighbourhoods: A Case Study of Heliopolis–Cairo–Egypt

In the last two years, Egyptian government started a huge urban regeneration and road network rehabilitation projects in existing neighbourhoods; a massive establishment of highways, elevated highways and bridges are erected cutting through existing urban fabric, especially in Nasr city and Heliopolis. These projects aim to avoid traffic jams, increase trafic flow, reduce travel time and enhance urban mobility through the existing urban fabric. Establishing highways inside existing urban fabric is an international old phenomena in developed countries who first advocated and established highways a century ago followed with a scientific conscious of their negative impacts and governmental calls and actions for removing highways from cities especially American and Japan cities. On the contrary, Egyptian government started a huge highway erection, creating a new border that expected to highly change the existing continuity in socio-spatial fabric of current residential areas without taken into consideration that once the urban structure has changed, it could change neighbourhood behaviour including functional efficiency, urban mobility behaviour, social interactions and relations, and safety and security in somehow and could cause great impacts on existing neighbourhoods in terms of functionality, sustainability and satisfaction. Most local and international studies focused on the impacts of highways on macro-scale in terms of experts and resident’s satisfaction and perception of the impacts, whilst this research aims to test how far the impacts of such change on changing social and urban behaviour of micro-community residents and accordingly impacts sustainability of existing neighbourhoods, in order to help future research in building design guidelines taking into consideration the future plans for road rehabilitation. The result of the research demonstrates how establishing highways inside existing neighbourhoods of Heliopolis records low services efficiency, unsustainable urban mobility, unsustainable social bonds, and reduced sense of security and safety and accordingly negatively impacts functionality and sustainabilty.