Eco and Green cities as new approaches for planning and developing cities in Egypt

The Egyptian cities have faced various challenges over the time, and such challenges had negative impacts on the development efficiency and performance of these cities, producing series of dangerous problems. Therefore, it became necessary to find out effective systems and technologies to address such problems. This paper tries to attract decision maker's attention to apply sustainable development fundamentals and approaches of Green and Eco cities in planning and developing cities in Egypt, not only to deal with the Egyptian cities' structural problems and challenges, but also to help in improving the effective and efficiency of the existing strategy of new communities in Egypt. This paper will introduce the first practice in planning and developing Green and Eco new city in Egypt (located at Eastern Desert, Sohaj governorate, on the corridor of Upper EgyptnRed Sea), including elaboration of its urban structure, land use and its green systems which produce most of its needed infrastructure (specially electricity power network, integrated sewage and solid waste management systems) without making any pressures on the national and local existing infrastructure systems. Finally, the paper will conclude lessons learned from the introduced practice, and present recommendations to improve Egyptian cities and make it more sustainable. (C) 2015 Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V.