The Civil Engineering Contractor June 2019 | Page 15

Egypt’s miniature model of its New
Administrative Capital, part of a
master plan produced by US architect
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, shows a
central business district bristling with
towers and a seven-minute animated
fly-through depicts a pixel-perfect
world of vast, modern conference
halls, an opera house, pristine eight-
lane boulevards, swaths of forested
parkland, waterways and various
clusters with alluring labels such as
‘Smart Village’, ‘Medical City’ and
‘Knowledge City’.
Soon, though, international
investors’ confidence in the viability
of the scheme evaporated. The
developers who were to put up
their own cash, bickered over terms
and then walked away, leaving the
Egyptian government to borrow
billions of dollars from China to
enforce its vision.
Egypt’s New Administrative
Capital is being built from scratch
in the desert 45km east of Cairo.
Covering 700km 2 in total, the city
will house 34 ministries of Egypt’s
legendarily sprawling government
and be a new business, finance and
cultural hub, with residential districts
accommodating seven million people.
It is an extraordinary initiative, but
not a new one. Successive regimes
since the 1970s have been obsessed
by the most salient geographical fact
of Egypt, which is that almost every
soul who lives there does so on
around 4% of its territory, either
in the Delta or along the narrow
strip of the Nile Valley. That’s why
rulers since the pharaohs have
gazed out over the vast, scorched
hinterland and dreamed of escape.
At huge cost, governments have built
dozens of new cities and towns there,
but none have worked in terms of
being economically self-sustaining
alternative population centres.
They were meant to be entirely
new centres of growth, self-funding
and economically independent of
existing urban centres. By 2014,
however, these cities had a combined
population of less than one million.
They failed because they did not
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Rameses II established a new Egyptian capital, Pi-Rameses, in 1249 BCE.
cater for ordinary Egyptians, 28%
of whom live below the poverty
line. These cities fulfilled only central
planners’ notions about what an ideal
Egypt should look like – most often
a version of suburban America. You’d
need a car to get around in them,
whereas only 9% of families in urban
Egypt own any type of vehicle. House
sizes specified by planners were too
big and therefore too expensive for
most people.
In October 2017, China State
Construction Engineering Corp
(CSCEC) signed a USD3-billion
contract to build 20 towers in the
central business district, funded
mostly by Chinese bank loans. Egypt
also borrowed USD1.2-billion from
China to build a 68km electrified
railway from the new city to the
outskirts of Cairo.
The Egyptian government’s
original vision had not been for
loans as government debt is already
high, and climbing. It wanted equity
finance from investors confident
of generating profits with new
enterprises, both for themselves and
the Egyptian state. nn
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