Rampart Retreat Tourism - A collaboration with Samir El Kordy

supporting design team: Maijane Saba, Amro Thabit

Destination: Sand, Sea & Sun. That is how the global tourism market promotes the 250km coast along the Gulf of Aqaba, from Taba in the North, to Sharm El Sheikh in the lower tip of Sinai. From a more local perspective, Sinai is defined by a sense of celebration of its reclaimed land, and by spirituality, exoticism, mixed feelings of wars & peace, the lost & the gained, friends & fiends… Only recently, has it been recognized as an opportunity for investment: mass & alternative tourism, business, conference & resolution retreats tourism, Bedouin front & back dichotomies …

Combination packages programmed on the basis of refuge drives, emotional and global branding strategies, advocating the known, and offering tourists an opportunity to personally discovering and confirming it.

The current official response is a multi-layered strategy, aiming at achieving the highest possible profit for the Egyptian economy, while maintaining a coastline that is balanced enough to remain secure. It starts  incorporating tailored approaches, targeting diverse segments and  looking at models that operate quietly in the background. Besides, it has adopted strategies for gradually privatizing state-owned hotels and tourism projects, facilitating investment procedures and regulations. With its neighbors, Israel and Jordan, it's pursuing collaborative strategies to strengthen infrastructure & diversify tourism activities and opportunities.

Through identifying 13 main Tourist Retreat Models along that tourist corridor, from a 5-star ‘containment model'  to an officially unclassified ‘eco-lodge' (Basata) near Nuweiba, the Cairo based architect, Samir El Kordy looks at the impact of social, cultural and economic factors on the emerging tourism settlements, the nature of their facilities, their urban structures and their impact on the local Bedouin population. The string of retreats edging up against the Red Sea Mountains create a low density embryonic peripheral sprawl, an indistinguishably merged series of cellscapes, bleeding together into one amorphous artificial territory, if it wasn’t for individual alternative attempts cutting through the networks of infrastructure, hordes of planned, often gated Rivieras. Meanwhile, the Bedouin Community is transforming its nomadic pastoral and fishing culture, into an urbanized sedentary settlement along the peripheries or gaps between existing, planned & upcoming tourism structures.