Twenty-lane highways and new roads with widths never seen before in Egypt with bus lanes, monorails and service roads – this was a glimpse of what the country's new administrative capital will look like and one that emerged this week at a conference at the American Chamber of Commerce in Cairo (AmCham). According to Minister of Housing Mostafa Madbouli, the new administrative capital is planned as a sustainable and smart city. Speaking to participants at a real estate conference organised by AmCham, the minister said the infrastructure of the new city was bettered by very few cities elsewhere in the world.
Los Angeles, Singapore and Dubai were the benchmarks the new city would observe. The total area would be 180,000 acres, approximately the same size as Singapore, and the development of it would take place over the coming 50 years.
The minister acknowledged the controversies surrounding the new city, with some questioning the project. “It is a priority,” he said, adding that Egypt was already 15 years late in initiating it.
The new capital, located around 50km east of Cairo, will be in a central location between the logistical and industrial zone of the Suez Canal area and Cairo. Over the years, Cairo's natural growth has been towards the east, the minister explained, because there was no agricultural land there as there was in the Giza area to prevent such growth.
The targeted population for the new city was five million, said Ayman Ismail, chairman of the Administrative Capital for Urban Development (ACUD), the company in charge of developing the project. He pointed to the need to generate jobs and economic activity within the new city in order to attract a large population.
The target is for the city to contribute $10 billion to Egypt's GDP within 10 years. The country's GDP is now around $330 billion, and potential growth areas, according to Ismail, include the cinema industry and medical tourism.
ACUD is a private company with government ownership, explained Ismail. It is owned jointly by the army and the New Urban Communities Authority (NUCA). He said that an initial public offering of the company would be carried out soon, the idea behind the current formation of the company being to give it the freedom to move fast.
He explained that the ACUD could develop the city in various forms. It could sell the land, give it out through usufruct, go into partnerships, or develop it itself. Unlike government entities it could give land directly without going through an auction process or a call for bids. “It [the new capital] will be a cash machine for Egypt for the next 50 years,” the minister said.
The new city is expected to host the seat of government, and the various government ministries are expected to move there. However, the minister said it was not the intention to just move employees to new buildings, but rather to develop e-government.
“We are thinking about how to institutionally develop the ministries, who should be there, and what they will be doing,” the minister said.
The new city will be an opportunity to revive and rehabilitate Cairo and relieve it of the pressures of government buildings in the heart of the city. Madbouli pointed out that one square km of Downtown Cairo is currently home to 11 ministries. Cairo was built for six million people, and it is now carrying 16 million, Ismail said.
The question of financing for the new city is a major issue. Madbouli said the NUCA was taking care of this. (Affiliated with the Ministry of Housing, it oversees all the new urban communities.) He pointed out that the NUCA's investment budget could cover the needed financing for developing the infrastructure of the city before the land was made available to the private sector to develop.
The minister pointed out that NUCA's investment budget had grown over the past three years because of the sale of land in the new cities. Its expected investment budget for 2017-18 is LE50 billion, according to the minister. In the meantime, it is also contributing direct financing to the Ministry of Finance as well as building social housing.
Work is already underway on the ground in the new city, the minister said, with roads, infrastructure and the first residential district under construction. During the first quarter of next year construction will begin on 18 ministries, the parliament building as well as the cabinet building, he added. There are also plans for a presidential complex, Madbouli said.
“By January, the first set of land will be available to the private sector for development,” the minister announced.
He reassured the audience that the movement of people in and out of the city had been analysed and was being accounted for with the monorail, a new train station, an underground metro and other means of transportation.
The new administrative capital as well as the other projects that are currently underway such as the Suez Canal Area Development Project, the development of the North Coast and many of the highways being constructed, were part of a plan developed back in 2012 defining what Egypt should look like in 2052 said Madbouli.
The plan intends to double Egypt's inhabited area from the current 6.5 per cent to 12 per cent of the total land.
