An "Informal" Area in Cairo's Upscale Doqqi: A Surrouded Village

To leave you for the weekend, and especially for the Cairo hands, here's an interesting piece on an "informal" area (usually meaning a slum or illegal squatter settlement, but in this case one that long precedes the urbanization of the area): one of a number of "surrounded villages" on the West Bank of the Nile. It's  useful to see these examples (there are others) of onetime villages swallowed up by urbanization but still essentially separate.

David Sims and other students of Cairene urbaniztion have studied these places, but this is a rather thorough post on one I hadn't known about..