EGYPT HAS announced plans to build a new capital city in the desert east of Cairo at a cost of $54billion (£37billion).
Speaking at an investors’ conference in the resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh, Mostafa Madbouli, the housing minister, said the new administrative centre – dubbed Capital Cairo – would be built over 270 square miles, roughly the size of Singapore.
Funded by Gulf investors, it would take shape between Cairo and Suez, over a period of five to seven years, and would house government buildings, diplomatic mis- sions and residential units. Planners have even drawn up a new airport, larger than Heathrow.
Egypt’s authorities have long enjoyed an ambivalent relationship with their current capital. Cairo, which translates as the defeater, is among the most heavily populated cities in the world, choked with congestion among its towering minarets and apartment blocks.
Mr Madbouli did not expand on what would happen to the sprawling metropolis.
More than 1,000 businessmen have gathered in Sharm el-Sheikh for a conference that will provide a much needed injection of foreign investment, partially reviving an economy battered after four years of social and political unrest.
The so-called Capital Cairo – referred to as CC by social media users – is one of a series of mega-projects designed to attract that investment and create jobs in a country with a population of 90 million and rising.
If the construction goes ahead, Egypt will follow Brazil, Kazakhstan and Burma in uprooting its seat of government. But whether it will be realised remains to be seen. At least one of Egypt’s Gulffunded projects – a plan to build a million affordable housing units – is already in trouble. It is also not the first time Egypt’s political elite has talked about building a new capital away from Cairo’s Soviet-inspired grey towers.
The announcement also prompted anger from those who say the planned new city was a poor response to decades of urban neglect.
“Our Dubai-intoxicated political, military and economic elites want to turn their back to a history that goes back for thousands of years and to pretend that Egypt is a tabula rasa [blank slate],” wrote Khaled Fahmy, a historian at the American University in Cairo. “They yearn to have a new Egypt, with a new capital, and a new people.”