A new vision of Cairo's "City of the Dead". The promotion of a policy of sustainable local development and valorisation of the cultural heritage through integrated relational tourism

City of Dead, the widest and most ancient cemetery of Cairo, hosts, starting from the ninth century, many "inhabitants", starting from the massive immigration from rural areas bordering Cairo, and then as a response to the impressive, massive urbanization that, together with a constantly increasing demographic index, made of Cairo a metropolis with an unsustainable density, producing, beside other effects (traffic, pollution, soil consumption , etc.), a huge number of homeless. In a world in which homologation of cities, disguised under the word development, hides the slavish acquisition of imported development models, it is important to work in order to defend uniqueness and differences and to convey it to governments, either local or national, as a policies’ framework, based on their resources and identity, is the only way to follow for to attain a real and sustainable development. In this trend it is placed this International Action-Research project "Living in the City of Dead"; an Italian-Egyptian bi-lateral project between Polytechnic of Milan and the University Ain Shams in Cairo. The purpose of the project is to overcome the partial and reductive vision about City of Dead as a "plague" of Cairo and make it reconsider as means of extraordinary resource, either cultural or etno-anthropological. Thus the deep aim of the project is about valorising it as cultural heritage to preserve with all its social, architectural and environmental systems, viewing it as an experimental context on which it is possible to test new strategies and development models for Cairo of tomorrow. The project works on several levels, starting from a detailed study of the site, of its problems and potentialities, it proposes the structuring of governance process leading to a new Vision (project) and to the definition of relevant policies for City of Dead: policies in which the inhabitants are considered an active part in the retraining processes. Moreover, on a parallel plan, it is brought forward a field work with the inhabitants, for assisting them to form into a recognizable Association and to develop a circuit of Integrated Relational Tourism within City of Dead. This point is starting from the deep belief that this kind of intervention can generate new informal micro-economies, capable of gradually improving the inhabitants’ socio-economic conditions. Consequently this is a project with a strong trans-disciplinary approach, which weaves the themes of valorisation of local heritage either material or non material, of the policies designed to pursue a sustainable and lasting development through new ways of interactive planning and of tourism as a bottom-up development engine. The paper outlines the project, the working methods and the first achieved results.