Figure 2
the Church in the middle of the new capital close to the luxury housing compounds and conference center MASA (source: author 2018).
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Die Stadtentwicklung in den Metropolen der arabischen Welt folgt seit den 2000er Jahren immer stärker neoliberalen Mustern: Ein Stadtneu- und -umbau wird mit Fokus auf Marketingstrategien und Profitmaximierung im Immobiliensektor vollzogen. Den Rahmen für die konzeptionelle Betrachtung der Stadt als ökonomische Ware und Marke bilden hierbei die aut...
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... State authorities began to rearrange and replan the city to prevent mass demonstrations and sit-ins (Abaza, 2014). They aimed to destroy any spaces of street politics and instead instituted heavily surveillance and securitized new "spaces" for politics, such as the New Administrative Capital and a series of new cities (Elmouelhi, 2019). They later termed this as building the "new republic." ...
This chapter discusses the urban struggles of Cairo’s middle-class citizens in recent years by highlighting the systemic processes of socio-spatial disenfranchisement that have taken place since the 2014 political shift. Through investigating several urban interventions, it will exemplify how urban re-planning is employed as an instrument for exclusive city-making and how citizens employ various tactics to negotiate these changes. It examines the urban re-planning projects undertaken by the government that took place in many of Cairo’s middle-class neighborhoods, broadly defined as the old city core, historic, or planned areas centered around the Nile. The practice of re-planning the city that came with the change of the political leadership is not a new urban practice. But this “facelift” post 2014 has left the citizenry in a state of disorientation, angst, and dissatisfaction. Through the installation of new infrastructure and the removal of existing infrastructure, as well as re-planning urban facilities, the city’s middle-class neighborhoods have experienced an authoritative urban planning directive that integrated and disintegrated the city in new forms. Qualitative urban research methods are employed, including ethnographic observations and semi-structured interviews, to analyze citizens’ socio-spatial practices within roads, streets, and several public spaces as key spaces where such urban transformations have occurred.
... This is due to spatial and functional urban overlapping, bearing in mind the urban cluster of the new administrative capital that was added to the urban texture of the capital. (2) Population growth, economic opportunities, and social justice; the capital needs to contain the huge population growth and create favourable conditions for sustainable economic growth that warrant achieving social justice [25]. (3) Random growth of housing and services; the legacies of which the capital has suffered as a result of random growth in the past need to be changed [26]. ...
In the last decade, the urban management of the Egyptian capital adopted a comprehensive vision for its urban development sectors. Sustainability indicator results issued by a number of international institutions showed that the Egyptian capital’s ranking dropped after applying this vision. This proves that the capital has deviated from the path for which the vision was created. This research aims to build a general framework that supports achieving urban sustainability in the Egyptian capital, periodically assessing its urban policy, and assisting urban decision makers in correcting the course of their policies if necessary. This framework can be built by reviewing the legacy of urban development policies of the Egyptian capital and determine the urban issues the capital is still facing. This framework is also built by studying international practices of cities whose development plans were likewise based on setting a framework that enabled them to assess the success rate of the urban strategies adopted in achieving urban sustainability. From this, we can form the elements of a general framework for achieving urban sustainability of the Egyptian capital. This research identifies these elements as a group of issues, indicators, criteria, principles, and pillars. These elements observe the local context of the Egyptian capital. The selected issues are fitting to the Egyptian capital and its observance of its international responsibilities. These issues are determined by identifying a group of indicators and principles adopted by international institutions and authorities in assessing cities’ progress towards achieving urban sustainability. The results of this research demonstrate how cities work on building their developmental plans, with an approach based on the exchange of knowledge pertaining to the results of different practices, as well as the principles and indicators endorsed by international institutions and authorities, ensures the achievement of urban sustainability.
... To alleviate congestion in Cairo, a brand-new city known as the new administrative capital is being built. It is situated 35 km east of Cairo between the regional ring road, the Cairo-Suez (CSZ) road, and Cairo-Ain El-Sokhna road and has a total area of 714 km 2 [3]. The new city introduces a modern concept of residence, which will help strengthen and diversify the nation's economic potential and eliminate overpopulation as is expected to provide accommodations to 18-40 million people by 2050. ...
Efficient handling and planning for the urban regions’ sustainable development require a vast range of up-to-date and thematic information. Besides, obtaining an uncontaminated catalog of seismic activity is desirable to study the earthquake (EQ) clusters spatial allocation, which is a key role in mitigating seismic hazards and alleviating EQ losses by enhancing the assessment of seismic hazards. This paper considers the northeastern part of Egypt where the seismicity catalog is contaminated by quarry blasts (QBs) operated throughout the mapped area. Consequently, it is desirable to discriminate these QBs from the EQs for genuine seismicity and hazard analysis. Accordingly, we provide an efficient machine learning (ML) model for decontaminating the seismicity database so that EQ clusters can be properly delineated by relying on 870 events (EQs and QBs) observed by only one seismic station called “
GLL
”, a member of the Egyptian National Seismic Network (ENSN). The model focuses on magnitudes < 3 that have high uncertainty of being EQs or QBs and take a long time for analysis. The approach examines several linear and non-linear ML models and finally selects the best model with only two features leading to the optimal classification between the EQs and QBs. The optimization process is accomplished throughout two stages. The obtained results prove that the proposed scheme achieves 100% discrimination between the EQs and QBs relying on the extreme gradient boosting (XGB) model.
... Egypt has a long-standing tradition of instrumentalizing urban development and housing projects to garner political support and demonstrate the government's capacity to improve the citizen's livelihoods-which in turn legitimizes the regime. Prominent examples are Downtown Cairo, a prestige project by Khedive Ismail (Abu-Lughod, 2018;Sims & Abu-Lughod, 2010) and the various generations of new towns such as 10th of Ramadan and 6th of October under Sadat, New Cairo, Sherouk, and Badr under Mubarak, the New Administrative Capital and the fourth generation of new towns under El-Sisi's administration (Elmouelhi, 2019;Sims & Abu-Lughod, 2010). While these examples mainly target the middle classes and have been propagated as such, they are linked to the question of informal settlements, the right to decent housing, and social justice, which have been key issues of the 2011 uprisings. ...
... Under the slogan of "Egypt Without Slums," projects were established in several governorates. Although urban planning after the 2011 uprising has become more market-oriented, housing projects for the low-income classes are mostly carried out by the state as private sector investments in affordable housing for lowerincome groups are considered risky for developers seeking high-profit margins (Elmouelhi, 2019;Hendawy & Stollmann, 2020;Shawkat, 2020;Sims & Abu-Lughod, 2010). According to the ISDF's statistics, in 2014, 364 areas across Egypt were identified as unsafe (Maabady, 2015). ...
In Egypt, the relocation of residents of informal areas of housing into “proper” living environments is presented as a major political achievement offering citizens a much-improved quality of life. Therefore, it is not surprising that, following the Arab Uprisings, the current regime is widely publicizing relocation projects as success stories on TV and social media. As a way of garnering legitimization and securing stability, this official representation is reshaping the residents’ urban life and evoking narratives of slum dwellers’ transformation into respected citizens. Tackling a new area of interdisciplinary research between urban studies and media and communication studies, this article investigates the portrayal in mainstream media channels and social media platforms of two relocation projects (Al-Asmarat in Cairo and Al-Max in Alexandria), contrasting them with the residents’ perceptions of their new homes and their efforts to produce counter-imagery. The authors argue that both the state-dominated representation of the Al-Asmarat resettlement as an ideal solution to the crisis of informal settlements, as well as the more bottom-up construction of the Al-Max community as a picturesque fishing community, do not reflect the material experience of the inhabitants—despite it being presented as such in nationwide reporting. The effective centering of the public debate around the mediatized images has thus deflected criticism and enabled urban development projects to be positioned to legitimize the current rule despite the shortcomings of their implementation.
... Understanding the legitimation strategies in the case of the NAC is relevant because, like many other capital city relocations, the development of the NAC has been criticized for lack of citizen participation. Prior assessments (e.g., Elmouelhi, 2019;Loewert & Steiner, 2019;Serag, 2017) revealed a project driven by the highest echelons of government bureaucracy that uses the language and tools of entrepreneurial city marketing to legitimize the NAC. By focusing on the NAC and its legitimation strategies, the article builds on the scholarship of McCann (2013), who calls for more attention: ...
This article examines the legitimation of capital city relocation from a discursive perspective. It specifically focuses on how policymakers in developing countries often use boosters' language to legitimize the relocation of capital city functions. Drawing on critical discourse analysis as a theoretical frame and Egypt as a case, this article examines the ways in which government and property developers have succeeded in weaving the logics of the New Administrative Capital (NAC) into Greater Cairo's broader development discourse. The study highlights policy actors' legitimation strategies, locating them within the broader urban boosterism and south-south policy transfer literature. By emphasizing on policy actors' use of texts and imagery at the local level, the article demonstrates how discourse, as an instrument of power and control, is used by policy entrepreneurs to perpetuate non-participation in Global South urban policy-making.
... The public housing and the private housing sectors were unable to catch up with the population growth in Egypt, especially in GCR. Numerous scholars described the private 'informal' housing sector, famous as 'ashwa'eyat, as a self-help housing provision according to Turner (Sims 2000;Singerman and Amar 2006;Piffero 2009;Elmouelhi 2014;Shawkat 2020). ...
... (Khamis 2016) No one mentioned other public transportation means except for micro-buses. The micro-bus system is a widespread informally organised network, on the local and regional level, connecting districts, villages and cities all over Egypt (Elmouelhi 2014). There is a micro-bus station located in front of the Wadi Ḥouf metro station, connecting commuters to the entire area and beyond (see As a matter of fact, this statement can be easily criticized to be not completely true. ...
Cooperative housing is right in the centre of the proliferating discourse of alternative housing provision, especially in the context of the current housing shortage debates in large cities. Cooperative housing enables access to adequate housing and promises various socio-spatial qualities for its members to control their own built environment in the hope of fulfilling their needs and improving their quality of life. The renewed interest in understanding the complexity of such housing delivery channel requires tracing the evolution history of cooperative housing in different local contexts. It is also essential to question which shared principles and ethics are devoted to this housing model.
The wide-ranging inquiry into the field of cooperative housing and its history mainly takes place in the Global North (LaFond and Tsvetkova 2012; Ring 2015; Becker et al. 2015). However, cooperative housing is also part of the history of housing provision in the Global South, yet it still remains an understudied topic on this side of the world.
Egypt is one of the leading countries in cooperative housing in the Global South. In a case-study-based assessment, this study investigates cooperative housing in the metropolitan city of Cairo, after tracing its historical evolution in Egypt since 1908. The thesis proposes a new analytical framework of socio-spatial assessment defined by the aspects of the built environment and governance. It examines the housing situation in Egypt, frames the status quo of cooperative housing and defines a method to better understand how the different cooperative stakeholders correlate on the socio-spatial and governing levels. Conceptually embedded in the global concept of cooperative housing, the main question posed by this thesis is how the dynamically changing context of the Egyptian Housing Crisis is affecting cooperative housing practices and what is the role of cooperative housing in contemporary Egypt.
Answering this question, the performance of cooperative housing, its impact on the built environment and the relationship with cooperative members and stakeholders are unfolded. The planning and governing processes and their challenges are analysed; firstly, in a juxtaposed case-study-based analysis, then within the Egyptian local housing context, and finally presenting a number of learned lessons for a global debate on cooperative housing.
... The Cairo 2050 plan was intended to be implemented in 2008-2010, but the active engagement of citizens and urbanists since the revolution has led to the project's delay (Reeve, 2011). By 2014, the New Administrative Capital (NAC; see Elmouelhi, 2019) project became known to the public as the new national project for moving the capital to the east-i.e., into the desert (Figure 1). The NAC is the epitome of the current regime's mindset. ...
... In the past couple of years, some research has investigated the reasons behind and the potential effects of the construction of the NAC (Elmouelhi, 2019;Kingsley, 2015) as Cairo's main urban-planning endeavour-and the role of the ruling regime as the main stakeholder. Nonetheless, this article is concerned with the urban transformation of Heliopolis, one of the upper and middle-class neighbourhoods in East Cairo (Figure 2). ...
... When we talk about Cairo, we know that social and spatial segregation are nothing new to the city (Adham, 2005;Caldeira, 1996), but perhaps they are currently assuming new forms. This is especially true when we observe the impacts of moving power to the periphery, as the NAC becomes the centre of official political activity in Cairo (Elmouelhi, 2019). This cannot happen without the purposeful action of fragmenting the sociospatial cohesion and creating rifts along the social, economic, and physical lines. ...
This article builds on theoretical foundations from enclave urbanism, authoritarian planning and neoliberal urbanisation to explore contemporary socio-spatial transformation(s) happening in Cairo, Egypt. Relying on a nationwide road development project, inner-city neighbourhoods in Cairo are turning into urban enclaves, whereby populations are being separated by a multiplicity of transport-related infrastructure projects. As these rapid planning processes are occurring, our article aims to explain why these developments are crucial and unique in the context of the post-Arab Spring cities. We argue that the new road infrastructure is creating a spatially and socially fragmented city and transforming the urban citizenry into a controllable and navigable body. We use an inductive approach to investigate the effects of the new road infrastructure and its hegemonic outcomes on the city. On a conceptual level, we propose that the enclaving of the city is a containment method that has erupted since the mass mobilisations of the Arab Spring. In doing so, we use qualitative analysis to explain empirical evidence showing how the city is being transformed into nodes of enclaves, where communities are getting separated from one another via socio-spatial fault lines.
... A majority of scholars identify state-led neoliberal reforms of housing supply as the cause (i.e., Elmouelhi, 2019;Hassan, 2017), however, the experience of traversing and living in the city provides an alternative story. In a way, media play a role in conditioning the desires of the general public for luxury housing, despite the fact that it doesn't serve their housing needs. ...
... The pervasiveness of realestate advertisement could be interpreted from (1) the government's perspective and its desire to promote its political agenda manifested through its urban planning schemes, but also from (2) a bottom-up cultural perspective, which functions as an indicator of the general public's demands or least desires. The former reflection was shared amongst a number of scholars (Daher, 2013;Denis, 2006;Elmouelhi, 2019;Hassan, 2017;Shawkat & Hendawy, 2016), while the latter postulate remains under-explored. Accordingly, our research addresses the following question: ...
... Additionally, Egypt's neoliberal urban governance is marked by its lack of legal protections for the urban poor and their right to housing. In short, the present planning scheme is market-based and controlled by the government (see Elmouelhi, 2019;Hassan, 2017;Nada, 2014). The real estate sector, one of the largest markers in Egypt, can be considered a product of this neoliberal planning system. ...
A majority of scholars consider Egypt’s urban development a product of the neo-liberal political economy facilitated by the country’s central government. In this article, we want to shift our attention towards the public and its demand for housing. We describe the urban everyday experiences of a population within a country in which a visual culture established via public media creates an urban imagination that does not reflect the lived social, spatial, and economic reality of the majority of the population. Exploration of the general public’s attitudes towards media narratives that focus their advertisement campaigns on high class residential projects launched this investigation. The argument that follows is based on empirical studies within the Greater Cairo Region (GCR). In this setting, a puzzling trend from our collected data guides our central research question: Why aren’t ads for luxury housing—a market segment clearly beyond the reach of most Egyptians—condemned by those who cannot afford it? To tackle this phenomenon, we shed light on how the pre—and post-marital demand for housing among young couples and their families influence the market, and particularly, the market for upscale and luxury housing in Cairo. The research consists of four phases, including (1) field interviews with Uber and Careem drivers, (2) an online survey targeting inhabitants across varying urban and social segments of the GCR, (3) the first author’s personal story, which posits that marriage culture acts as a key driver for real estate narratives, and (4) a visual analysis of a real estate advertisement. To conclude, the article discusses how far a hegemonic visual culture that caters to socio-economic links between class, marriage, and real estate engages the support of a large part of the population, which in turn, co-produces a spatially unjust urban development scheme that works against their own interests.
In recent decades, new administrative capitals (NACs) are being developed in Asia and developing countries due to the overcrowding of capitals and large cities. The self-sufficiency of a planned city is considered important for balanced national development. However, no study has specifically analyzed the degree of self-sufficiency of NACs. Therefore, focusing on the city of Sejong (NAC, South Korea) as an example, this study evaluated self-sufficiency using data regarding household composition and travel characteristics. The results of the three-step analysis are as follows: First, the commuting distance of the NAC was longer than that of traditionally developed cities, with relatively little internal commuter traffic in the NAC. Second, commuting to and from the NAC was primarily to large cities nearby. Third, regarding the characteristics of households living in the NAC, the ratio of second-generation households was higher and that of single-person households was relatively small compared with traditional cities. In addition, a spatial correlation in the form of a longer commuting distance in the second generation and shorter commuting distance in single-person households was confirmed. The findings of this study hold important implications for policymakers and urban planning bodies when developing an NAC.
The central question of this chapter is: How can urban transitions perspectives assist understanding of the integration of urban informality in the urban context? This question is addressed first by introducing the current forces that influence ‘urban informality transitions’, and the recent and current socioeconomic and political transitions that bring urban informality to transitions studies. Then the Egyptian urban fabric as a site for urban transitions studies is considered, followed by the main section of the chapter in which four aspects of sociotechnical transitions that influenced the formulation of urban informality are considered. Thus, the sprawl of urban informality, urban transitions, political economy and social capital, and exclusion transitions are highlighted. In reviewing these aspects, of course, others are to some extent neglected. But these four transitions are selected specifically to draw out contributions of urban informality transitions to understanding informal housing and urban change. It concludes that developing urban sustainable transition and management as a visionary proactive approach is seen as a response to lagging, or misfit approaches for public engagement and strategic urban planning to integrate or at least to eliminate informality within the urban context or to convert urban informality into sustainability transitions.
