Faced with myriad challenges, Egyptians are promised a new capital
Newspaper Title: the Daily Star
Newspaper Number:
Monday - 20 April 2015
Last month the word was out: Cairo was to be replaced as Egypt’s capital by a vast, hypermodern city situated in the eastern desert at the halfway point to the Suez Canal hub – a military-led mega-development featuring an enlarged, two-channel canal that began last year.
Work on the new capital would start at the end of April, the Housing Minister Moustapha Madbouly told the press. In keeping with President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi’s desire for fast progress, it would be “completed” in just 5-7 years, although it was unclear what exactly would be accomplished in that period. Sisi likewise insisted that the Suez Canal enlargement be finished in one instead of the three years originally scheduled. Hence the joke going around Cairo about a pregnant woman who is stopped at a checkpoint and asked when she expects to deliver. “In six months,” she says. “Make that three!” the officer commands.
The plan for a new administrative center was unveiled in mid-March at the Egypt Economic Development Conference held in the south Sinai resort town of Sharm al-Sheikh. The gathering included over a thousand global finance luminaries, among them the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who advises Sisi as part of an Emirates-funded consultancy program.
Staged by Richard Attias and Associates, which produces the annual Davos Forum and is an affiliate of WPP, the world’s biggest advertising firm, the televised conference provided the general public with a welcome distraction from the usual news from (north) Sinai of a violent Islamist insurgency. WPP’s CEO, Sir Martin Sorrell, a keynote speaker at the conference, remarked on the event’s power to alter perceptions regarding Egypt. “Obviously the brand has changed [since 2011] and there’s a necessity to reposition it,” he said.
Now, however, some are wondering whether the new capital wasn’t part of the show. On April 14 Al-Ahram headlined Sisi’s statement that the project was off. “The priority is for raising our citizens’ standards of living” he said, “the government budget will not be able to bear the costs of building the new capital.” Two days later the issue was further confused by the Madbouly who said that private sector participation would make the project possible.
The project to create a new capital, whose total cost was estimated at $45 billion, came as a surprise to the Egyptian people. Gulf investors and developers were already on board; the Egyptian state donated the 700 square kilometer tract of sand and holds a 24-percent share. The video presentation consisted of a relentless crescendo of the city’s attributes accompanied by an Arab-pop remix of Ravel’s “Bolero.”
These include a financial and administrative center where all government bodies will be relocated, ostensibly to relieve the pressure on central Cairo but also for (unmentioned) security reasons, an airport, residential districts for 5 million people, 1,600 schools, 660 hospitals, 1,950 religious buildings, 40,000 hotel rooms, a central park more than twice the size of New York’s, an amusement park to dwarf Disneyland, scores of icicle-slim skyscrapers (including an Eiffel Tower-esque monolith) and energy farms that will provide a portion of the unknown amount of energy the city will consume at an uncalculated cost.
The new capital provoked a flurry of articles voicing skepticism as to its viability in a generally impoverished, energy and water-challenged country; its political wisdom against the background of an affordable housing crisis of epic and destabilizing proportions; its pragmatism, given the existence of some 20 “satellite cities” already orbiting Cairo that stand largely vacant, unaffordable to the segment of the population who needs them most; and the project’s implicit flaunting of the needs of the existing capital, home to millions of citizens who must rely on its inadequate energy, water, sewage and transport infrastructure, not to mention its substandard schools and hospitals whose lack of basic sanitary conditions has fueled the world’s worst hepatitis C epidemic, currently affecting one in seven Egyptians.
The question of identity was inevitably raised. Could a “purpose built” city reflect Cairo’s reality while answering its future needs? Yes, some said, not least because it resembles Dubai, where millions of Egyptians have lived and worked. The plan was designed by U.S.-based engineering firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM), the people behind New York’s new World Trade Center and the King Abdullah Economic City (KAEC, pronounced “cake”), currently under construction north of Jeddah (at a total cost of some $100 billion).
In partnership with Egypt’s Housing Ministry, the main developer is Capital City Partners, a company formed specifically to handle the project by the Emirati tycoon Mohammed al-Abaar, the man according to the CCP website who “helmed the creation of global icons that inspire humanity.”
Abaar advises the mayor of Dubai and sits on the board of Emaar, the Dubai-based real estate developer that built Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, and whose Egyptian subsidiary has financed several upscale developments. Abaar’s signature project, “Downtown Dubai,” is billed as “the world’s most visited retail and lifestyle destination welcoming over 80 million visitors in 2014.” That would make it around seven times more popular than the pyramids.
“The model of urban modernity, hi-tech facilities and comfortable living in an orderly environment has manifested itself in the Egypt public’s collective imagination,” wrote Amira Howeidy for Ahram Online. “The radical idea [for the new capital] encapsulates how Egypt’s urban history, like that of many nations, is shaped by political and economic developments.” While the new capital draws inspiration from Dubai or rather the consumerist mindset that spawned it, it is in keeping with historical trends.
Cairo developed as an accretion of successive “capitals” built by a series of ruling elites to announce their ascendancy. Downtown Cairo, the heart of the current capital, was the Khedive Ismail’s Haussmann-inspired “Paris on the Nile,” purposefully built to coincide with the opening of the Suez Canal (1869). Its gardens were designed to rival those of the Bois de Boulogne. Instead of a theme park there was an opera house modeled on Milan’s La Scala, inaugurated during the Suez Canal opening ceremonies, a masterfully orchestrated public relations event (not unlike the Sharm al-Sheikh conference) that aimed to elicit Western political and economic support.
Egypt has since looked east for allies. Since 2007, when President Hosni Mubarak decreed that foreigners could own land in Egypt, Gulf investors began acquiring prime Nile-side and coastal properties in addition to tracts of desert on Cairo’s outskirts. The Gulf states, who share an aversion to political Islam with Egypt’s current administration, have become more deeply involved in the economy since the military-led ousting of President Mohammad Morsi. Gulf Cooperation Council investors formed the largest regional contingent (160 delegates versus 55 from the United States) and made the largest commitments at the economic conference. This was particularly true of projects in the energy sector which the state is anxious to privatize, and in real estate development where the Gulf presence is already strong in gated residential communities, resorts and five-star hotels.
Responding to feedback suggesting that some Egyptians are uncomfortable with the new capital’s sociopolitical implications and asked if average Egyptians could afford to live there, SOM’s Dan Ringelstein hedged. “This is only a simple concept, we still have a lot of work to do and this is a critical point.” Questioned as to the feasibility of the 5-7 year deadline, Ringelstein noted that Sisi “was firm” about the short deadline which also had to do with “the nature in which it was all announced.” In other words, hastily. SOM knows Cairo “very well,” Ringelstein said, but when he called it a “really urban, mixed and diverse city” one wondered if he wasn’t confusing it with someplace else.
Poverty is a great leveler. Over 60 percent of what we call Cairo has been built in the last few decades, much of it consisting of low-cost unlicensed red-brick boxes. Yahia Shawket, a former housing expert at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, a non-governmental organization whose work has been suspended following recent laws restricting civil society, says, “We are bracing ourselves for a huge development project [for which] no clear social or economic assessments have been undertaken.”
Many Egyptians nonetheless see the new capital as a fresh start, a chance to renew their nation’s claim to greatness, a note sounded by Moustapha Madbouly at the project’s unveiling. “Egypt has more wonders than any other country in the world, and provides more works that defy description,” he said, vowing to “add to it something that our grandchildren will be able to say enhances Egypt’s characteristics.” Given the choice, Madbouly’s grandchildren would probably prefer different kinds of enhancement, things like potable water and arable land, which is currently vanishing beneath informal housing settlements at unprecedented rates.
The president’s backtracking on the new capital will play well with that segment of the public who thought it was absurd to begin with, but it also suggests that when it comes to serving the common good, his administration has a hard time making up its mind. Yet another mega-development, for a million purportedly low income housing units spearheaded by an Emirates based contractor, was widely touted in the press as a solution to Egypt’s housing crisis, then similarly placed on the back-burner before it began. Whether or not the new capital is ever built, if it was meant to convey the image of an Egypt that thinks big and has a clear vision for the future, it is instead offering evidence to the contrary.
