Lonaard Magazine is a peer-reviewed periodical, publication of Lonaard Group in London Issue 15, Volume 3, May 2013, ISSN: 2045 – 8150 ____________________________________________________________________________ 51    THE DISRUPTED SPACE: SAFETY AND SECURITY IN TRADITIONAL CONTEXTS Dr. Gehan Selim, Dr. Mohamed Gamal Abdelmonem Queen’s University Belfast Abstract One of the core elements of successful planning is the individuals’ experience of their shared open spaces. This paper attributes to the relationship between safety and urban design by means of natural surveillance and security in the city’s shared spaces. It examines how political claims over space reassembled alternative definitions of security in one of Cairo’s oldest quarters, and how ambitious planning schemes were mostly driven by problems of insecurity, chaos and disorder. The main crux to this account is based on original documents, interviews and maps which reveals considerable insights and accounts of how this vision affected the quarter’s spatial quality and the user’s reactions to his new spatial formula. It also reveals conflicting conceptions of safety and security between the planning ambitions and the users experiences, which not only lacked reliable visions for securing the quarter, but also resulted further disruption to their everyday living spaces. Introduction ‘If a city’s streets are safe from barbarism and fear, the city is thereby tolerably safe from barbarism and fear…. It does not take many incidents of violence on a city street or in a city district to make people fear the streets. And as they fear them, they use them less, which make the streets still more unsafe’. (Jacobs 1961:36) Since the turn of the century, global media has been characterized by strikingly broadcasting images of the repression of attacks or urban citizen movements throughout the world. The depictions covered numerous spots linked with security tactics used to dislodge people, protesters or reformers. Stephen Graham in his book Cities Under Siege, drawing on historical examples, developed a recent model of what he calls ‘ the new military urbanism’ that promotes the transfer of models of urban planning and surveillance from the space of the colony to that of