You may have noticed that it’s a good time to be a city planner…
It seems like hardly a month goes by without some fancy new renders being
released of a grand new masterplan in Saudi Arabia, China, or the US.
Everybody seems to want to be having a go, from the Vietnamese government, to Disney.
And now Egypt is getting in on the game with possibly the most ambitious new development yet.
This is its New Administrative Capital,
a city the size of Singapore that’s being built from scratch in the desert.
The massive new metropolis will have monumental architecture reminiscent of the pharaohs,
grand government buildings, a huge new finance hub and housing for some six million people.
And as no glitzy new city would be complete without a showpiece skyscraper,
the NAC is getting this, the Iconic tower, Africa’s largest building.
But is it really this easy? Can anyone just drop a few billion dollars and get a new,
fully functioning city? And why is Egypt so desperate for one that
it’s literally building in the middle of this…
Now, we’re used to covering the world’s most impressive megastructures,
but there’s one country that has more of a pedigree than others.
In recent times and until the Burj Khalifa, the title of world’s tallest building has been
passed around with relative frequency – but the great pyramid of Giza held it for four millennia.
Now, I know what you’re thinking, that’s all ancient history,
but you’d be wrong. Egypt is getting back into the
megaproject game and in a big way with that New Administrative Capital, or NAC.
There are lots of reasons for building an entire new city from scratch. Indonesia is constructing
Nusantara to replace its current capital Jakarta which is quite literally sinking
and South Korea is building a high tech floating city to beat rising sea levels.
The NAC came about because of this
Cairo has been plagued by overcrowding for decades and it’s only getting worse.
Congestion is now so bad the place is literally grinding to a halt.
So in 2015 the government came up with the NAC as a solution.
It’s being built in a 700 square kilometre stretch of desert,
which will one day – incredibly – be home to six million people.
After seven years of construction phase one is nearing completion.
The entire Egyptian government will move into a monumental government district.
There’ll be new buildings for official ministries, the Egyptian parliament
and a sprawling presidential palace, all with references to pharaonic architecture.
10 residential zones will host housing ranging from
apartment buildings to a luxury Parisian style neighbourhood.
There’s nourishment for body and soul with a sports complex including a
90,000 seat stadium, the new Al-Fattah Al-Aleem Mosque,
one of the largest in the world and the middle east’s largest cathedral.
The military, which plays a huge part in Egyptian politics,
is represented here too. Not to be outdone by The Pentagon in Washington DC,
they are having their own polygon themed building created: the Octagon.
But it's not just a showpiece capital for the government. This is all part of Egypt’s
2030 strategy – a long term plan that’s out to transform the country’s economy.
To help with that, the NAC also boasts a financial hub where that very tall new tower is being built.
So how is all this possible in the middle of the desert?
Well the project is getting some help from the China State Construction
Engineering Corporation who is overseeing construction of the central business district.
Twenty skyscrapers are being built here and one of the biggest issues
the engineers faced was stopping them sinking into the soft desert soil.
A raft foundation was first constructed for the Iconic Tower – it’s a huge
reinforced concrete slab which spreads the load of a building over a wide area.
To support the weight of the 393-metre structure, a whopping 18,500 cubic metres
of concrete was poured making it the largest foundation of its type in the middle east.
Not only was the construction big, it was also incredibly fast. The foundation slab
was poured in 38 hours, nearly half the time originally expected, thanks to a
specially designed concrete pumping system which poured at a rate of 785 cubic metres each hour.
That speed was kept up as the building’s superstructure began to take shape. The
whole concrete core shot up in 808 days and the steel framework advanced at a
rate of one floor every three days until all 78 storeys were complete.
The project topped-out in August 2022 and it’s expected to fully complete in early 2023.
So, will it work? The overall cost of the project has never been publicly released but
the price for moving government ministries and the parliament alone was estimated at USD $45BN.
From Putrajaya in Malaysia to Songdo in South Korea,
planned cities are often turned to as a way to drive economic growth,
but if they go wrong, billions of dollars can end up being wasted on nothing.
Forest City in Malaysia is a useful cautionary tale. The $100BN development
was supposed to be a smart eco city, leading the world in new forms of urban development.
Instead, only a tiny fraction of the housing units were sold,
the project has turned into one of the most controversial schemes in Malaysia’s history
and it contributed to the downfall of Prime Minister Najib Razak in 2018.
So is Egypt’s NAC worth the bet? It’s no coincidence that the Chinese state
engineering company is helping to build this.
At a summit in 2016, China and Egypt signed a deal including
the NAC in China’s huge Belt and Road infrastructure project, a move which
could give its central business district the opportunity to become an important hub.
There might be a few more reasons why the Egyptian government wants to move. Remember this?
Cairo’s sprawling, overcrowded streets have long been a centre for popular demonstrations.
One of the things that is happening in the streets of Cairo
is the massive, kind of ubiquitous presence of security… instead of, you know,
hearing the voice of people, talking to people and dealing with people's needs. In this case,
the political administration is moving from Cairo to this new administration, administrative capital
The master plan of the government quarter with its wide open spaces and long boulevards may
be visually impressive but it’s also seem by some as an effective way to prevent protests.
Because the built environment basically is built in a way that the idea of.. controlling the urban
environment is possible because of the more ordered and the more straight, straight lines
you have in your master planning of the city, the more control you would be getting.
Whereas in Cairo you can see in the city how the cities form and shape it, all these labyrinths…
Cairo may be congested and overcrowded, but it does have a vibrant city life.
It remains to be seen whether that can be replicated in a new, custom built centre.
They are unfortunately trying to create a kind of contradictory image of the old Cairo. The
rich social and cultural interactions that happen in the streets, trying to create this
image of a very unsafe society on the other side, whereas this side this is we have this
amazing safe ordered and formal birth environment that is made only for those who can afford it.
While the NAC may be a financial success it appears unlikely to benefit ordinary
Egyptians. The average cost of a house in the NAC is
USD $60,000, that’s 16 times the average household income in Egypt.
That is the main the problem we don't know how
much affordable housing schemes can be found in those luxurious villas,
for instance. It is a good initiative because it will bring investment but who benefit from that.
There’s of course a long way to go before this ambitious plan is complete and it
remains to be seen whether or not it can benefit those who need it the most. But
it’s clear that Egypt’s ability to build big is definitely back.
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