TReCairo [Marwan Fayed & Diana Ibáñez López] have been mapping the dynamics of urban densification in Cairo, a city whose population estimates vary wildly between an ‘official’ 16million and a popularly exaggerated 30million. This extraordinary margin of error reflects a very real margin of unofficial growth; the city attracts hundreds of people daily. Despite an overloaded infrastructure on a range of scales, Cairo continues to densify and expand, improvising an adaptive urbanism of need-driven layering.

‘Peripheral’ actions [socially, legally and spatially] represent a popular creative drive which offers solutions, albeit sometimes wobbly ones, to an otherwise unsustainable growth. TReCairo focuses on the diverse nature of this alternative urbanisation; cumulative, additive, corrosive, competitive, absorptive, mimetic…recording these transient ‘behaviours’ through Dynamic Mapping, image based sequences that integrate time lapses or evolutions into a single (progressive) diagram.