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Aga Khan Trust Wins Innovation Award
Geneva
The Al Azhar Park, which transformed a 500-year-old derelict dumping ground into a landscape of waterfalls, citrus trees and formal gardens, has created more than 250 permanent jobs for skilled workers.
The Aga Khan Trust for Culture received the Travel + Leisure 2005 Global Vision Award for Innovation. An article on the Al-Azhar Park appeared in the December 2005 issue of the magazine. A citation with the award said: “Our judges were drawn to the extraordinarily multi-faceted approach of this project: Al-Azhar provides leisure and recreational space to a city that has little, acts as an engine of social and economic development for neighbouring residents and is a catalyst for historic preservation. In a city where the amount of green space per resident was roughly the size of a footprint, Al-Azhar is a much-needed green lung for Cairo’s 17 million inhabitants.
The Al-Azhar Park has proven to be one of the most significant urban renewal efforts in recent history. Set in the middle of one of the world’s most congested cities, the newly opened 74-acre Al-Azhar Park in central Cairo is the result of a decade long, $30 million project sponsored by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture. The Al Azhar Park, which transformed a 500-year-old derelict dumping ground into a landscape of waterfalls, citrus trees and formal gardens, has created more than 250 permanent jobs for skilled workers. The Aga Khan Trust has also played an integral role in the economic revitalisation of the neighboring Darb al-Ahmar district, which has an unusual concentration of 12th to 14th century Islamic art and architecture, by drawing attention to this previously neglected area and aiding in restoration projects.
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