Utopia: The New Administrative Capital of Egypt
“The Utopia mentioned here is an imaginary place, as are the characters who live in and around it, even though the author knows for certain that this place will exist soon.”
Ahmed Khalid Tawfik, Utopia, 2008.
Episodes of class inequity are embroidered into Cairo's thousand-year history. The latest episode, launched in 2015 with the construction of the New Administrative Capital (NAC), is the most egregious. Storied Cairo: at once antique and old, bustling and worn out, culturally rich and drenched in poverty (Figure 1). Its replacement: new, monumental, unapologetically elite. The capital’s displacement from the primordial Nile embankment to a tabula rasa site astride the city’s outer ring road further segregates both the social and spatial worlds of the poor from those of the rich (Figure 2). As a college student, I belonged to and commuted between both worlds, often on the same day. How are these extremes experienced? What forces shape their difference? I seek answers to these questions that haunt and define me.
Figure 1. One of the street vendors under a bridge, Downtown Cairo, June 2024. Photograph by the author.
Figure 2. Child laborers packed on a truck commuting to and from construction sites in the NAC, June 2024. Photograph by the author.
In Ahmed Khalid Tawfik’s bestselling novel Utopia of 2008, the Egyptian novelist predicted with uncanny accuracy the dystopian inequality and segregation that pervades Cairo's future. Tawfik’s protagonists fall into two classes: "Utopians," who inhabit a gated metropolis for the rich, and "the Others," excluded from Utopia to live in bleak poverty. In his world, one can either be a Utopian or the Other, but never both. What Tawfik did not anticipate is the prospect of commuting between these two antithetical worlds (Figure 3).
My home is in Alexandria, one of the ancient capitals of Egypt. My family has always lived in the so called “informal” self-built apartment blocks, where columns incline visibly, and three out of four facades are left rough and unfinished.1 In my neighborhood, people must walk despite the searing heat, and markets sprawl through streets rather than being confined to air-conditioned malls. Before moving to Cairo at the age of fourteen to enroll in a boarding school for outstanding students, I had no idea that any other kind of urban reality existed.
Upon graduation in 2017, I received a scholarship to study at the American University in Cairo (AUC), located in “New Cairo,” a satellite city developed early in the new millennium on a desert site along Cairo’s eastern fringe. AUC unveiled its vast new 260-acre campus in 2008, the same year Utopia hit bookstores. Over seven thousand construction workers had toiled in double shifts to build a complex featuring the largest use of stone in a single project since the Giza Pyramids. Sandstone constitutes eighty percent of the campus’s external walls, moderating room temperatures day and night to ensure the thermal comfort of students and faculty. Twenty-seven closed-system fountains operate continuously to humidify a dry microclimate. Eight thousand trees flourish on treated wastewater (Figure 4). An unjust model of sustainability bolstering spatial and social segregation are selling points, according to Tawfik, of a twenty first-century Egyptian dystopia.
“In Ahmed Khalid Tawfik’s bestselling novel Utopia of 2008, the Egyptian novelist predicted with uncanny accuracy the dystopian inequality and segregation that pervades Cairo’s future.”
Figure 3. Service workers’ transportation with the NAC business district skyscrapers in the background, June 2024. Photograph by the author.
Figure 4. The designed environment ensuring the thermal comfort of student and faculty of AUC, June 2024. Photograph by the author.
Shuttling between social, economic, and environmental extremes shaped my spatial imagination as I pursued an architectural design degree. Unlike students whose parents owned a home in New Cairo's gated compounds and who arrived by car, I commuted weekly to the AUC campus via public and private transit routes (Figure 5). On my first day of class, a bus from downtown Cairo dropped me off at a long stone wall badged with the AUC logo. Churned by the wake of speeding cars, I wheeled an oversized suitcase through one gate after another. A luxurious parking garage and two security checks later, I entered the campus for the first time. For the next five years, I joined classmates in the chill atmosphere of a sleek cafe or in air-conditioned classrooms before returning home in a filthy private microbus, its engine groaning beneath my seat. As its exhaust heated the sheet metal floor and filled my lungs with fumes, I experienced how the privileges of New Cairo extended beyond luxury consumption to include thermal comfort and pulmonary health. Inside that new town Utopia, I read Utopia for the first time. The novel’s meditations on the gates and guards of an urban security apparatus, and Utopians oblivious to their privilege all rang true (Figure 6). As I watched fellow students during my first day on campus feed stray cats with cans of tuna—a luxury in my family's home—I realized that I belonged to Tawfik's “Others." Unlike his novel's subalterns, however, I had gained access to Utopia.
Figure 5. Laborers (mostly living far from the NAC) dragging their tools and daily belongings to work, September 2021. Photograph by the author.
Figure 6. Students walking to one of the AUC gates under one of the designed shaded areas across campus. June 2024, Photograph by the author.
The success of New Cairo as a metropolis of elites—complete with gated residential districts, exclusive business and retail amenities, and its own world-class university—inspired President Abdelfattah El-Sisi to commission a masterplan for an even more ambitious satellite city. In 2015, his minister of housing, Mostafa Madbouly, unveiled a mega-project: the New Administrative Capital (NAC). Planted on a 700-square-kilometer tract of unoccupied land 45 kilometers east of old Cairo, the NAC will be a city of government ministries graced with parks and artificial lakes, modern residential districts and educational institutions, more than a dozen hospitals, more than a thousand mosques and churches, a stadium seating over 90,000 people, and a theme park four times the size of Disneyland (Figure 7). A state-of-the-art "smart city" with a technology and innovation business park, AI-monitored waste and water management, and thousands of cameras overseeing streets and public places, the NAC's vision of excess even transcends that of Tawfik's imaginary Utopia.
I visited NAC in 2021 with a group of AUC students to collect site photos for our design thesis projects. What was meant to be a field trip turned into a car ride: rather than explore the sand-blown landscapes of the nascent satellite city on foot, my carpool colleagues preferred to remain ensconced in air-conditioned comfort. I watched through tinted glass as commuting construction workers waiting for transportation out of the city endured the scorching desert sun. The image stayed with me (Figure 8). Five years later, for graduate research focusing on urban and thermal inequity, I returned for a field visit. This time, I chose to immerse all my senses, experiencing the future capital as the laborers building the city now do and future service workers might. How would a menial worker reach the site without a private car? What would their journey entail in terms of environmental comfort? I intended to uncover the nature of thermal inequity in non-elite experiences of the NAC by joining their commute.
Figure 7. The labor behind the monumental buildings and grandiose of the New Capital, June 2024. Photograph by the author.
Figure 8. The exhaustion of the laborers walking in the NAC searching for a commute, June 2024. Photograph by the author.
The six-hour journey from Alexandria began at 9 AM. During the four-hour bus ride to Ramses Square in downtown Cairo (a route I knew well from my eight years of high school and higher education), feeble air conditioning offered little respite from the blazing heat. Squeezed beside other passengers, I was hot and sweaty despite the constant roar of a compressor fan. Through sealed windows I watched roadside beggars spread fabric canopies above themselves for shade (Figure 9). Alighting bus passengers hoisted whatever they carried overhead or crowded under a scrawny tree, beneath a bridge, or along a tall wall's shadow to escape the sun's punishing rays. Climate change, the absence of shade along highways, and the tons of asphalt poured for new roads all conspire to create a tortuous environment for the poor (Figure 10).
Figure 9. Beggars on the side of highway beneath a cloth seeking shade from the sun, Highway leading to Cairo, June 2024. Photograph by the author.
Figure 10. Newly poured highway beside “the people’s park” where the “crazy” citizens attempted to cross on foot, June 2024. Photograph by the author.
From Ramses Square I boarded a bus to Badr City, a development adjacent to NAC that was supposed to provide affordable housing for NAC employees. Proximity to the New Capital has sparked a wave of gentrification, however, stripping low-income working class families of their promised homes. Upon arrival at the NAC two hours later, the driver instructed me to catch a minibus for the last leg of my trip. There was something very odd about my asking drivers about a ride to the new Cathedral of the Nativity, the Middle East’s largest Coptic Orthodox church. Until that moment I hadn't felt out of place: other women had shared the buses and various vehicles I'd used in the journey. But now, at a transit stop used almost exclusively by male workers, their reactions telegraphed the message that I did not belong. Either my proposed destination, my gender, or my use of nail polish and jewelry were being misread by my fellow "Others" as semaphores of a Utopian identity.
One minibus passenger particularly caught my attention: an elderly man who seemed too weary to notice my gaze (Figure 11). He quietly approached another passenger to beg for a loaf of bread. Observing this exchange, the driver, concerned that the beggar might not have the means to pay his fare, asked the old man why he was headed to the New Capital. "I am going to search for a job," he answered. That job could only have been as day labor in the informal economy, in which workers lack contracts, set wages, or regular hours (much less insurance or pensions). Without state protections or support, laborers participating in this micro-economy serve the needs of the state nonetheless, building the dream of a New Capital on a foundation of exploitation and neglect.
When all seven passengers were aboard, the driver looked into the rear-view mirror and asked me: “Are you sure you want to go to the Cathedral?” Trapped and nervous, I said: “yes.” As the car took off, two sweaty men in the front seat made a stab at conversation. “It is too hot today.” “And it still is June! God only knows what will happen in August.” Approaching the capital on newly laid asphalt, we passed through a heroic gateway shaped like parenthesis keystrokes built of stone (Figure 12). While they conveyed the message that we were entering a different realm, it looked much the same, tinged with yellow desert dust stirred by speeding cars. I began to think of NAC as "The City of Gates." Arriving at the Cathedral's grand gates, I climbed out of the minivan to enter a barren landscape of high-speed roadways and unbuilt housing tracts. Trudging across dirt where sidewalks should have been, I must have seemed lost or deranged: drivers honked as they sped past in trucks, hauling trailers or fuel tanks. The danger and terror I felt as a woman walking alone was overwhelming. I hurried, trying to reach somewhere—anywhere—that I might find shelter from the sand, blowing dust, and searing sun.
Figure 11. The man, the loaf of bread, the microbus from Badr to the NAC, June 2024. Photograph by the author.
Figure 12. The New Administrative Capital entrance gates, June 2024. Photograph by the author.
After minutes that felt like hours I arrived at the cliff-like facade of The Knowledge Hub, the for-profit technical college run by a consortium of European universities where I had agreed to meet a friend for a tour of NAC. Arrival as a pedestrian triggered an array of security checks before my friend could greet me with a joke about my "crazy" idea of walking around the city (Figure 13). She guided me to her car, shielded from the unrelenting heat in an underground parking garage. A patina of desert dust did little to camouflage its luxury. The seats were cool and spacious; the air conditioning kicked in instantly, obliterating the unbearable outdoor climate. A large screen displaying a Google Maps view of the city guided us effortlessly as soft music played through high-tech speakers. Entering this seductive capsule of privileged comfort and safety, I could not resist its counterpoint to the harsh and frightening environments I had endured to get there.
“Without state protections or support, laborers participating in this micro-economy serve the needs of the state nonetheless, building the dream of a New Capital on a foundation of exploitation and neglect.”
Figure 13. The scorching sidewalk leading to the gated “Knowledge Hub,” June 2024. Photograph by the author.
Figure 14. The air-conditioned drive out of the NAC while workers walked under the sun. June 2024. Photograph by the author.
As we drove through the incomplete framework of the future capital, my friend and I perceived the same sights through contradictory perspectives. She marveled at the urban scale, the modernity of high-speed boulevards traversing desolate vistas, the spectacle of architectural monuments. She was annoyed by the erratic maneuvers of working-class minibus drivers and the audacity of men and women attempting to dash across the highway on foot. By contrast, I saw laborers roaming the streets in the absence of public transport. I watched impoverished farmers, some still the age of children, planting ill-fated street trees (Figure 14). I wondered whether they would benefit as adults from the green spaces that they were creating. Would they ever be able to afford the price of the New Capital's entry ticket?
Figure 15. "With sincere labor, hope comes true,” ordered the state. June 2024. Photograph by the author.
At the end of the day, crowded once again on a bus heading home, small but numerous road signs showcased the dissonance between Egypt’s old and new capitals (Figure15). The state's promotional signs proclaimed:
All of us, one hand for Egypt
With sincere labor, hope comes true
The future is Egypt
These repeated Orwellian messages reflected a development unforeseen by Tawfik. As an agent of cultural change, Utopia has devised its own manipulative voice. Unlike the fictional Utopia, which was merely exploitative and detached, the NAC promises national transformation—supposedly inclusive, hopeful, and futuristic, but in reality, built by sweaty bodies for the cool comfort of elites.
Notes
1. Marc M. Angélil and Charlotte Malterre-Barthes (eds), Housing Cairo: The Informal Response (Berlin: Ruby Press, 2016), 250-251.
Citation
Rowan El-Hakem, “Utopia: The New Administrative Capital of Egypt,” PLATFORM, October 21, 2024.
