Cairo

Cairo's urban fabric contains a historic city on the eastern bank of the Nile alongside later metropolitan development. In the older districts, residential lanes, markets and craft streets form a connected structure in which monumental religious buildings remain embedded among ordinary dwellings and commercial activity.

The nineteenth-century creation of a new urban centre helped preserve much of the earlier layout. Later architecture also entered historic neighbourhoods, including European Baroque and Rococo influences and revivals of Mamluk forms. These layers make the city legible through changes in streets and building types as well as through its skyline. Conservation consequently concerns the continuity of an inhabited urban fabric, including its domestic and trading functions.