T his paper is about some of the first Town Planning schemes prepared for Cairo by Egyptian planners. This material offers insights into how these professionals, acting at an official level, viewed the Egyptian capital city and envisioned its future. It focuses on the earliest known example of such schemes, going back to the late 1920s, and formulated by the engineer Mahmßd Sabr Mahbßb in his capacity of Director of the Tanzm Department at the Ministry of Public Works. This department had been the central authority in charge of most of Cairos municipal affairs - or rather civic activities to use the contemporary expression : al-aml al-baladiyya (Mahboub, 1934/35 : 289; Taqwm 1928 : 261) -, since the city lacked any form of local representative government or municipal autonomy (Abu-Lughod, 1971 : 146-150). This Cairo town planning scheme deserves attention for at least two reasons. First, it represents the first town plan drafted for the city of Cairo, since that very concept had appeared in Western practice a few decades earlier within the new approach to town building which came to be known as town planning (Sutcliffe 1981; Gaudin 1985). Based on an idea which combined the concept of a healthy, convenient, attractive and economic layout of towns with the principle of government intervention in the interest of the common welfare, such an approach is regarded as having emerged in the early 20th century in close connection with efforts at social reform (Topalov, 1989). As a result of the radical urban transformation brought about by the Industrial Revolution, there emerged a view of urban agglomerations as pathological. The remedy for this pathology was town planning. The scope of urban design was thus extended far beyond its previous concerns with beautification, circulation and sanitation, while encompassing a new scale, that of the entire urban area; there was indeed a shift in the nature of public action itself. Town planning as a public venture aimed at controlling all aspects of town development, from central improvement to suburban expansion, and since these were seen now as interdependent and thus not to be handled separately as previously, co-ordination of initiatives became essential. Such coordination was to be achieved through the elaboration of a complete plan for the city as a whole on the basis of an analysis of its main characteristics and trends of evolution. Typically, Mahbßbs plan for Cairo is described as having being preceded by a comprehensive survey of the city (Mahboub 1934/35 : 288) and it included city improvement projects for its built areas as well as city extension schemes, together with proposals to regulate, and even anticipate, its future suburban growth. Besides its global scope, Mahbßbs master plan, as we would call it today, would serve as a point of orientation for subsequent planning developments in Cairo for several decades and, as such, is of obvious significance as well. The building of a local expertise Before reviewing the main options of the scheme, it may be useful to recall its historical background, i.e. the context that had allowed a local professional to be, at such an early stage - that is the 1920s -, in a position to devise measures for the planning of Cairo, and that made even available such an expertise. As a matter of fact, both situations were at the time quite exceptional, compared to what was going on in neighbouring countries, all of them under colonial rule, without any native professionals trained to modern techniques, and with no opportunities open to them. The only possible parallel was Turkey, where foreign planners, however, seem to have dominated much longer than in Egypt (Holod et al 1984). Two distinct processes, one at the educational level, the other at the political one, each with different time ranges, are worth remarking upon in this respect. The oldest one, deeply rooted in what Robert Tignor has termed Egypts relentless quest for modernity (1984 : 3), has to do with a long-established policy of securing local skills in all fields related to modern science and technology. This state policy can be traced back to the first decades of the 19th century and led first to the TOWN PLANNING SCHEMES FOR CAIRO CONCEIVED BY EGYPTIAN PLANNERS IN THE LIBERAL EXPERIMENT PERIOD Mercedes Volait Extrait de Hans Chr. Korsholm Nielsen and Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen (ed.), Middle Eastern Cities 1900- 1950. Publics Places and Publics Spheres in Transformation, Aarhus University Press, 2001, 44-71