Rethinking Egypt’s ‘Failed’ Desert Cities: Autocracy, Urban Planning, and Class Politics in Sadat’s New Town Programme

ABSTRACT

The Sisi regime’s New Administrative Capital is the latest iteration of Egypt’s multidecade-long programme to build desert cities. Judging by the programme’s primary stated rationale, to geographically redistribute the population, the new towns have failed. This article asks why have successive Egyptian regimes nevertheless kept building desert cities? Scholars have analysed how the Mubarak regime used new towns to clientelize elites by distributing land in government-serviced desert cities. Drawing on planning documents and accounts of the social and economic conditions in the early Sadat-era new towns, particularly Tenth of Ramadan City, this article makes an original contribution by illustrating how deeply political, not simply developmental, logics have undergirded Egyptian new town development from its inception in the 1970s. During its first two decades, the spatially secluded industrial cities allowed the regime to flexibly experiment with the right number of incentives to compel the previously marginalized business classes to reinvest in the economy. Moreover, in gridded, legible new towns, the regime could segregate, surveil, and supervise labour in booming private sector industries. The case of the Egyptian new towns helps explain both autocrats’ longstanding penchant for building new cities as well as a resurgence of master-planned urban megaprojects in contemporary autocracies.

KEYWORDS:

• Urban planning
• autocracy
• Egypt
• labour
• business politics

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank three anonymous peer reviewers for their helpful suggestions. I am also thankful for the thoughtful comments and suggestions offered by Lisa Wedeen, Sean Yom, and Carl Rommel. An earlier version of the manuscript was presented at the University of Chicago Urban Workshop in October 2017.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Patrick Kingsley, ‘A New Cairo: Egypt plans £30bn purpose-built capital in desert,’ The Guardian, 16 March 2015 http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/mar/16/new-cairo-egypt-plans-capital-city-desert.

2. The National News, ‘New Capital to Cut Cairo Overcrowding,’ The National, 14 March 2015 https://www.thenationalnews.com/business/new-capital-to-cut-cairo-overcrowding-1.77647.

3. For example, between 1986 and 2000, the level of government spending in four of the twenty new towns equalled a third of all infrastructure spending in the Greater Cairo Region (Stewart, 1996, p. 467). Moreover, just ten days prior to the 2011 uprising, the housing minister announced that in the upcoming years, a quarter of all public investment would go to new-town development. The level of spending has not abided after 2011. In the 2015-16 period, the total investment in new towns by the New Urban Communities Authority’s (E£33.2bn), was four times the total public investment in education (Sweet, 2019, p. 21).

4. Since the turn of the millennium, more than 40 governments have launched over 150 new cities to be built from scratch in Asia (Tianjin Eco-City in China, Thu Thiem City in Vietnam, and Putrajaya and Iskandar in Malaysia) and in Sub-Saharan Africa (Oyala – Ciudad de la Paz in Equatorial Guinea, Kigali Innovation City in Rwanda; Moser & Côté‐Roy, 2021, p. 1).

5. ‘The biggest obstacle,’ Sims notes, ‘is NUCA (the New Urban Communities Authority) itself and its arbitrary, excessively bureaucratic and secretive modus of operandi’ (Sims, 2015, p. 217).

6. Scott (1998, p. 116), for instance, has argued that megaprojects often turn into ‘miniaturizations’ – model cities, museums, expositions – in which ‘control is maximized but impact on the external world is minimized.’

7. Tenth of Ramadan city was immediately followed by Sadat City, Sixth of October City, and six additional towns, all of which were strategically located at least 60 km from any existing urban settlement.

8. Papers such as Al-Ṭalīʿa (The Vanguard) and Al-Ahlī (The People) were closed down (Beinin, 2001).

9. Beinin and Lockman suggest that workers’ movements strongly influenced industrial policy in the past. The famous Misr company’s decision to locate its primary textile mill in the Nile Delta and to rely on untrained workers was a ‘direct response to the history of working class organization and collective action in Cairo and Alexandria, where the textile mills would normally have been located on the basis of economic considerations other than the need to control the labor force’ (Lockman & Beinin, 1988, p. 453).

10. 10th of Ramadan is the Muslim calendar equivalent to Sixth of October, the day of the attack on Israel by Egyptian and Syrian forces during the Yum Kippur war.

11. In the initial master plan, SWECO was concerned that inhabitants of 10^th of Ramadan may commute to Cairo for work. Inversely, commuting from Cairo became widespread.

12. Moreover, this allowed private sector companies to take advantage of cheap and unorganized labour power. According to a study among workers made in Tenth of Ramadan by a German research team in 1997, only around a third of respondents had employment contracts, and 40 per cent only had verbal agreements with their employers. Workers mentioned sometimes working 24-hour shifts and almost two-thirds lacked health insurance, while 37 per cent had other jobs on the side like farming. Moreover, as Kienle notes, it was common practice to ask workers to sign a letter of resignation at the same time as they signed employment contracts. Undated resignation letters could then be dated by the employers ‘in case of unwelcome salary demands and attempts to unionize’ (Kienle, 2001, p. 78).

13. One could question here why bureaucrats would spend so much effort and resources on surveillance given the limited number of inhabitants occupying the city. However, it must be noted that when designing and enforcing the policy of segregation and surveillance, the policymakers and bureaucratic did not possess the knowledge that the towns would fail to attract populations but focused solely on preventing and deterring urban practices deemed unwanted. Therefore, the fact that they conduced such policy nevertheless sheds light on the politics logics undergirding new town development.

14. In addition, in 2001, the Ministry of Housing also reduced the transfer fee on investor land instituted earlier to prevent speculation. Meanwhile, the time limit for building a house on newly acquired land was extended from three to five years.

15. Of course, excessive speculation often inflates economic bubbles that burst, but this has not occurred in the Egyptian new towns. One reason might be that in times of economic uncertainty, as Sims (2015, p. 151) notes, investing in bricks and mortar is generally seen as a safe investment.

16. In a period of fifteen years in the 1990s and 2000s, 1.200 km² were allocated to property development. This can be compared to the 480 km² that constituted the entire greater Cairo region before this expansion. In this fifteen-year period, the urban area grew by 8 per cent per year (Denis, 2011).

17. As Timothy Mitchell points out, these families had flourished after 1974 when the government allowed prominent private entrepreneurs to resurface following years of import constraint and state monopolies Many of these actors had been active in entirely unrelated industries, like construction or import/export, but quickly adapted to the ample business opportunities in the new towns. For example, one of the main enterprises profiting from cheap land sales, the Bahgat Group, originally manufactured television sets (Mitchell, 2002, p. 283). Some of these developers had even been contractors involved in building public housing in the early new towns, after which they began to operate as private contractors developing luxury real estate while benefitting from cheap credit by public banks (Denis, 2006, p. 57).