The new capital of Egypt has no residents. It doesn’t have a local source of water. It just lost a major developer, the Chinese state company that had agreed to build the first phase. You might say the planned city in the desert 45 kilometers east of Cairo doesn’t have a reason to exist. Urban planner David Sims told the Wall Street Journal, “Egypt needs a new capital like a hole in the head.”
What the project has going for it is a president who likes to talk big. Five million inhabitants big. An amusement park “four times the size of Disneyland” big. Seven hundred hospitals and clinics, 1,200 mosques and churches, 40,000 hotel rooms, 2,000 schools — that kind of big. 2 Yes, and fast, too. Standing with the Emir of Dubai beside a model of the new city, in March 2015, Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi declared that construction would proceed immediately. “What are you talking about, ten years?” He turned to his housing minister. “I’m serious. We don’t work that way. Not ten years, not seven years. No way.” [...]
The project gained momentum last fall when two Chinese state companies stepped in to replace Emirati developers who had backed out the year before. Now one of the Chinese deals has fallen through, which means the financial risk falls to the Egyptian government and local contractors. 5 That’s a heavy burden for a country on the brink of economic collapse, propped up by foreign aid from gulf states and stringent loans from the International Monetary Fund. 6 And yet, plans for the new capital are advancing, shrouded in bombast and uncertainty. TV reports show pipe being laid, earth moved, apartment blocks rising on the windswept desert. The housing ministry says more than 17,000 units are nearly finished and sales will start next month. 7 [...]
The unofficial truth is that the government finds it easier to finance blank-slate development and promote real-estate speculation in the desert than to invest in infrastructure that would serve the urban majority. There are no plans to build new metro lines or extend services to the city’s informal neighborhoods, the ashwaiyat where more than half the population lives, in tightly-packed brick buildings separated by dirt alleys. Instead, there are PowerPoint presentations of spacious, green, “modern” neighborhoods from which all of Cairo’s governance problems — and most of its population — have been scrubbed clean. [...]
As Mohamed Elshahed wrote in Places in the midst of that revolution, Egyptians discovered “that their fight for democracy [was] inseparably linked to their ability to assemble in urban space.” 15 But if the people knew this, the authorities knew it too. As protests continued after Mubarak’s ouster, the military surrounded Tahrir with barriers and checkpoints, enormous cinder-block walls that cut off entire streets. The subway station was closed for years. After Sisi came to power, there was a fierce crackdown on public expression throughout the capital. Authorities forbid demonstrations, shut down street theater and outdoor concerts, erased graffiti, raided cafés, and harassed cultural venues such as art galleries and publishing houses — anywhere that people (particularly young people) might congregate.
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