Back is Front- Inversion of Alexandria

Alexandria, the second biggest city in Egypt, has thrived by harbor. Built on the T-shaped Nile delta, the
edge of the Sahara, Alexandria situates on a land strip caught between the sea and lagoons.  1 Nowadays, she
is an industrialized tourist city threatened by both natural and social problems including marine submersion,
sandstorms, industrial pollutions, population expansion, deterioration of slums, and historical context breaks.
All of these crises have increased social imbalance, which hampers sustainable development of Alexandria.
Imbalance is reflected in all kinds of scales. Most tourist and social resources are distributed along the
coastline, while heavy industries, brownfields, informal accommodation, and desertification farmland
occupy the side of hinterland.
Although the innate gaps caused by history and geography are neither just nor unjust, we can still create a
way that enables institutions to deal with the natural facts to pursue justice. The green system plays the role
of communication, fusion and guidance contributing to the inversion of city development trend lead to a
more justice society.
The Green system integrates natural facts that we can use. It constructs strategies for different types of urban
areas respectively, while they are all designed for the inversion of hinterland. As for regional scale, the
desert buffer belt combined with local precision agriculture defends against the sandstorm and stabilizes the
edge of the delta to guarantee field production. As for urban border areas, the phytoremediation models
around informal accommodation provide safe environment and social opportunities. As for the historical
block, the strategy extracts spatial pattern of the traditional Egypt Garden, which encloses space by trees at
the same time creating height variations to make blend spaces reconciling the requirement of residents and
tourists.