Will
the construction of a new capital in the desert outside Cairo solve the
city’s overcrowding issues or prove to be another failed vision?
It
may be a harsh and congested city, but the noisy jumble that is Cairo
can still offer moments of beauty and pleasure that remind even the most
jaded Cairenes of why they love their capital, and why Egyptians call
it somewhat grandiloquently Om el Donia or “mother of the world”.
Sailing
on a felucca on the broad stretch of Nile in the heart of the city,
savouring stillness in the middle of the madness, is one such moment.
The European-style buildings of central Cairo may be dilapidated and
often obscured by clothes and shoe shops with garish fronts, but they
still exude a faded charm, and the observant will see gold mosaic
trimming, gargoyles, plaster rosettes, art-deco flutes and art-nouveau
wrought-iron flourishes attesting to a time when the architects of the
city were Italian and French.
Although there is the option of a
speedier journey through the tunnel under Azhar street, I usually choose
to drive through the car-choked road between elegant historic mosques
and centuries-old markets, dodging pedestrians and quietly cursing
pick-up trucks that block the traffic to load up.
Like other old
cities, Cairo with its more than 1,000 years of history bears the
imprint of every era and fashion it has lived through. While this makes
for variety and a rich cultural heritage, no one can deny that living in
this metropolis of about 19m people and navigating its streets is often
hellish. The traffic, poor public transport, noise, chaos, lack of
green space and rotting rubbish piled up on pavements can be oppressive.
When rushing to a meeting you are not always in the mood to be charmed
by the bakery worker weaving dangerously through the traffic on a
bicycle while balancing a large board of freshly baked loaves on his
head.
With so many people jostling for space in an overburdened
city, the authorities are eying the desert for a new capital to be built
45km east of Cairo. They have come up with a grandiose vision for a 700
sq km metropolis which was launched in March at an international
investment conference in the glittering presence of presidents and
princes. The architect’s model on display showed a city centre of sleek
skyscrapers more reminiscent of Dubai than Cairo, surrounded by acres of
low-rise housing in tree-lined streets. As Mostapha Madbouli, Egypt’s
housing minister, described the government’s plan, the phrase that
repeatedly tripped off his tongue was that everything would be done “to
the highest standard”.
The new city would feature the “biggest
garden in the world”, 25 residential districts, a new international
airport and an entertainment park “four times the size of Disneyland”.
Yet the plans for what would become the largest purpose-built capital
ever are so ambitious that many observers are skeptical that it will
ever materialize. Cynics even claim that it is all a publicity stunt,
aimed at stoking optimism over the regime of Egypt’s president, Abdel
Fattah al-Sisi, the former army chief who ousted his elected predecessor
in 2013. At best, some say, this will end up as a cluster of compounds
for the wealthy who can afford to live far out of town and travel in
SUVs.
Indeed, despite the political and media fanfare that
accompanied the announcement, almost no details have been released about
how the mega project will be funded, other than that it is a
partnership between the Egyptian government and a Gulf company, Capital
City Partners, a privately owned property vehicle founded by Mohamed
Alabbar, chairman of Emaar Properties of Dubai and the man behind Burj
Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. But to add to the confusion,
Sisi, was recently quoted as saying the capital will place no burdens
on the state budget. The Egyptian government will own 24 per cent of the
project, according to Madbouli, presumably against providing the land.
The
new city is being designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. If it
were ever to be built, it will be 40 years in the making. It would
eventually house 5m people and create 1.7m new jobs. The first phase,
according to the minister, is due to be finished in five to seven years
and will see the relocation of parliament, the presidential palace,
ministries and foreign embassies to the as yet nameless metropolis. It
will cost $45bn.
“Our hope is that [the city] will accommodate
millions of the residents of Greater Cairo over the next 40 years,” said
the minister who warned that the population of the existing capital was
on course to double during that period.
The dream of starting
from scratch in the desert may be enticing, but experts warn that Egypt
has gone down that route before and the results have been severely
disappointing. A series of costly satellite cities built in the desert
over the past 40 years have failed to relieve population pressures on
Cairo or to attract residents in anything near the numbers targeted by
planners. Instead, thousands of apartment blocks stand empty while Cairo
continues to grow and gobble up the countryside on its outskirts. The
new cities have failed to take off because of poor transport links and
the absence of the jobs and social networks that enable the poor to
survive.
The planners behind the proposed new capital insist they
will avoid the mistakes that bedevilled Cairo’s other alternative
cities, but the authorities will not explain why they are building from
scratch rather than reinventing existing cities. To critics, this is all
part of the opacity surrounding the new venture about which there has
been no public consultation.
Most of Cairo’s inhabitants live in
what are called the informal areas, which have been illegally built by
citizens in defiance of laws banning building on agricultural land.
Dense forests of mostly unpainted red-brick apartment blocks, separated
by narrow alleys, above which balconies almost touch, extend for vast
distances in almost every direction around the capital.
The state
has no involvement in the construction process; zoning requirements and
building permits are dispensed with and the only time an official shows
up, it is to receive a bribe to look the other way as new floors are
added or another piece of green land disappears.
Over the years,
the government has extended utilities to the informal areas which are
now home to millions of families - by some estimates 12m to 14m
Cairenes, or up to two-thirds of the capital’s population. While policy
makers and the elite may still think of the informal areas as marginal
and commentators warn repeatedly that they are a “time bomb” that will
explode in the face of society, the reality is that they are where the
biggest chunks of society live. Studies have shown that Egyptians of a
wide range of income levels, barring those in the upper echelons of the
middle class, make their homes in these districts. Tellingly, however,
these huge residential areas do not even figure on many maps of the
city.
David Sims, author of the recently published Egypt’s Desert
Dreams: Development or Disaster?, is an economist and urban planning
expert who has long studied informal districts and the dynamics of
housing in Egypt. He argues that another desert city is not the answer
to Cairo’s woes. “Why didn’t the new towns work in terms of population?
It’s because people can’t afford to live in them. The excess supply of
this desert stuff is so outrageous,” he says. “Wouldn’t you rather think
twice before you do the same thing - but on a grander scale - that you
have been doing impressively unsuccessfully.”
Sims points out
that, unlike the informal areas where bustling streets are lined with a
range of small businesses providing employment, the desert cities have
been built to higher standards and stricter rules about the ratio of
green space to built-up areas. It is also forbidden to open workshops in
residential areas. The dearth of jobs means inhabitants have to travel
to Cairo for work, but transport links are bad and too costly for
low-income families.
Despite the overcrowding and poor living
conditions in Cairo’s informal suburbs - where there are no green
spaces, the streets are too narrow to allow ambulances and fire trucks
to pass through and the citizens who essentially subdivide fields to
build on them leave no land for schools and other public amenities - the
government has found it hard to convince residents to move to the new
cities. As a result, occupancy rates are very low in these satellite
urban areas. Sims notes that, nationally, up to 28 per cent of all
Egyptian housing units are empty and the rate is even higher in the new
cities.
It is not unusual to see in desert developments on the
outskirts of Cairo rows upon rows of housing with exteriors painted and
finished to comply with legislation but gaping holes for windows
signaling that they are not inhabited. In the meantime, new construction
in the informal neighborhoods continues to grow both vertically and
horizontally.
Ironically, while government planners speak of the
billions that will be spent on the new capital, a new ministry for urban
regeneration, recently created specifically to address the problems of
poor and informal areas, has a budget this year of less than $100m.
“All
regimes like to think big and to imagine that they have a clean slate,”
says Khaled Fahmy, historian and professor at The American University
in Cairo. “But the big question is, shouldn’t fixing Cairo be our
national priority? I think the assumed answer [from policy makers] is
that it is unfixable, and that is a political stance.”
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