In Egypt: Two Megacities Rise out of the Desert

The New York Times reports:

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Cairo has become so crowded, congested and polluted that the Egyptian government has undertaken a construction project that might have given the Pharaohs pause: building two megacities outside Cairo from scratch. By 2020, planners expect the new satellite cities to house at least a quarter of Cairo’s 20 million residents and many of the government agencies that now have headquarters in the city.

Only a country with a seemingly endless supply of open desert land — and an authoritarian government free to ignore public opinion — could contemplate such a gargantuan undertaking. The government already has moved a few thousand of the city’s poorest residents against their will from illegal slums in central Cairo to housing projects on the periphery.

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Enormous subdivisions have sprung up in the dunes outside of Cairo, on an almost incomprehensible scale. Already a million people have moved to 6 October City, due west of Cairo, named for the date of the 1973 war between Egypt and Israel still hailed as a seminal Arab victory. A similar number have moved east of the city, to a settlement unimaginatively dubbed “New Cairo.”

The government’s original plans — which are widely considered more wishful than literal — conceived of 6 October City’s expanding to 3 million by 2020 and New Cairo to 4 million, primarily as havens for working-class Cairenes. So far, however, the overwhelming majority of new residents come from Egypt’s uppermost economic strata.

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The Egyptian government has spent untallied millions of dollars building new roads and power and water lines to the desert areas it designated for future development. It has sold huge parcels of land to developers in opaque deals, and built some low-income housing. But it has relied primarily on private developers to put up the cities’ more expensive villas and condos, as well as the malls and offices.

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Other pioneers include some of the richest Cairenes, who buy villas on golf courses and in gated compounds. They have been joined by some of the poorest, drawn by factory and construction jobs, or to serve the rich. Other poor people are shuttled in against their will by the government to isolated tracts of row houses.

The juxtaposition of rich and poor highlights one of Mr. Abdelhalim’s greatest concerns. ...

Consider Haram City, the first affordable housing development here built by a private company. Phase 1 was just completed this summer, and 25,000 people have moved in. When it is complete in two years, Haram City will house 400,000 people — a single project with the population of Miami.

Although it was designed for lower-income workers, some of Haram City’s first residents are indigent Cairenes who were displaced by a rockslide and moved to this distant development by the government. They complain that they are isolated, and that it costs them nearly as much to take the bus into the city as they can earn in a day’s work.

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Haram City was conceived as an affordable neighborhood for lower-middle-class professionals, but the government has bought hundreds of units and is filling them with some of Cairo’s poorest inhabitants — importing the city’s historic class tensions to the replacement 6 October City.

Piecemeal development has created short-term hiccups as well. The new development lacks a subway, sufficient jobs, schools and medical services. Businesses, however, are relocating to the new city and the government plans to put many of its ministries and service buildings there.

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A few miles farther out in the desert is the extreme side of replacement Cairo: an exclusive golf course community called Allegria, already half built, and the planned luxury development of Westown, flanking the main highway from Cairo to Alexandria. Developers are building a replica of downtown Beirut, which will serve as an urban hub for all the gated communities and other developments proliferating in the desert.

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