Dena Rashed examines suggestions to improve the quality of life for Cairo's 15 million inhabitants Over-crowded, polluted, chaotic. Choose from these or a host of other possible adjectives to describe Cairo. None of them are flattering. Urban planners, endlessly busy attempting to formulate comprehensive solutions to the capital's myriad problems, tend to prefer the portmanteau term problematic. It is easy to see why. In a city where the streets were designed to accommodate half a million cars more than three million daily cross the capital. Cairo is now home to 20 per cent of Egypt's population. The streets are packed. There is an insatiable demand for housing. Pollution levels have soared. There are 885 feddans of green space in the city, i.e. 1.65 square metres for each Cairene. The internationally recommended standard is 20 square metres per person. To service Cairo's inhabitants the city is now home -- according to figures released by Abdel-Azim Wazir, governor of Cairo -- to seven universities, 3,616 schools and 460 hospitals. There are also 554 historical sites attracting tourists who can stay in any of Cairo's 82 hotels. Not that tourists make up the total of Cairo's floating population. Finishing official paperwork often requires a visit to the capital where ministries have their main offices -- all centrally located of course. The same goes for major banks, financial institutions and embassies. "With a population reaching 15 million, living on only 350km square, and three million visitors per day, the problems have become immense," says Abbas El- Zaafarani, professor at Cairo University's Faculty of Urban Planning. "The situation in the capital has reached breaking point. Decisions have to be taken if it is to be saved." Since the early 1970s the emphasis has been on infrastructural development. Bridges and tunnels have been built and major intersections and streets reorganised in order to facilitate the flow of traffic. According to Wazir, the governorate spent LE9.6 billion between 1997 and 2000. Between 2002 and 2007 it expects to have spent a further LE11 billion on Cairo's infrastructure. It is a huge amount of money. And increasingly experts are coming to believe that it could well be better spent outside the city. "For years now the capital has accounted for 60 per cent of the state expenditure. Now the government has announced that it is allocating 40 per cent to the capital with the surplus going to other cities," says Salah Hegab, head of the Egyptian Planning Society. El-Zaafarani believes that Cairo's monopoly of resources drawn from the public purse, and the consequent neglect of other urban centres, has exacerbated the city's problems. "Large sums of money have been allocated towards partial solutions, he says. "There has to be a comprehensive and long-term plan otherwise it is simply like patching up an old dress. The dress will always look tatty." But how is the city to engineer the necessary makeover? It is a question over which urban planners disagree. El-Zaafarani argues that the capital either increases six fold in size, or else four-fifths of the population are evacuated. "Increasing the size of the capital," he explains, "has already occurred with the building of satellite cities on the outskirts of the capital. The plan in the early 1980s was to build 10 satellite cities to incorporate two million residents from low-income areas of the capital. But the cities only attracted 200, 000." Satellite cities such as Badr and Shorouq were placed on the outskirts of the capital, close to industrial centres such as the Tenth of Ramadan, in an attempt to attract Cairenes to the suburbs. The problem though, argues Hegab, is that they were inadequately planned. "The cities were an attempt to relocate rather than house Cairenes. They were somehow supposed to develop on their own into self-sufficient communities when what happened is that they became dormitory towns." A regularly voiced complaint about the new satellite cities is that they lack adequate transportation links to the capital. "There was," says El-Zaafarani, "a belief that in the absence of adequate transport people would find it difficult to base themselves in the capital and simply reside in the new towns. What actually happened, though, is that people refused to move." Nor were employment opportunities in the satellite cities designed to attract families. "Industrial investment, for example, has grown really fast in the Tenth of Ramadan, while housing has grown very slowly. This is because no job opportunities were created for wives. The city has only attracted men, and not their families," points out El- Zaafarani. The most radical solution to Cairo's problems currently being voiced involves relocating the capital. "A new capital would house the government and its offices and be a centre for political activities. Cairo would be left as the centre of economic, commercial and tourist activity. This will eventually result in lessening the number of visitors to Cairo, and would provide incentives for citizens to relocate to the new, planned city," argues El- Zaafarani. "Al-Minya Al-Gadida -- in Upper Egypt -- is a good example of how this might work." (see box). The scheme may seem extravagant but, as El-Zaafarani points out, it could in the end be more cost effective that continually pumping vast sums into attempts to rehabilitate Cairo. "We have to look at least 50 years ahead of us -- it is going to cost but it is viable." The idea of a new capital was first floated by President Anwar El-Sadat at the end of the 1970s. Sadat City was originally designed as a political capital. It was intended to house political institutions and ministries, and to be linked to Cairo by railway. Yet it never progressed beyond becoming another, largely dysfunctional satellite city. "Moving the capital has precedents, with many countries opting for relocation when faced with increasing population density," says Hamad Abdallah, head of the Academic Centre for Design and former dean of the Faculty of Applied Arts at Helwan University. He suggests, though, that a more viable option is not to move the city as whole but specific ministries, keeping them near the outskirts of the capital so as not to burden employees. "We then simply have to imagine downtown Cairo without the Ministry of Housing, the ministries of higher education, and education and the Ministry of Health in one block." Abdallah suggests moving the education ministries to Mubarak city, the Health Ministry to the Al-Tagammu Al-Khames and the Housing Ministry to Al-Qahira Al- Gadida. Mahmoud Yousri, professor of urban planning and former dean of the Faculty of Urban Planning at Cairo University, agrees that "building a new capital is very costly and will take enormous time. It is not really feasible. Taking out the ministries and the administrative institutions is the easiest option available." "We have to decentralise both services and the local administration outside the capital," says Hegab. Saving what remains of Cairo, and possibly relocating parts of what makes a city the capital, is not just about logistical change. It is about a change in governance as well. "We have to move towards decentralisation," points out Abdallah. "Local government should share the capital's bureaucracy. Only then can we revitalise and bring sanity back to life in Cairo." The capital in numbers: ï Fifteen million people live in the capital constituting more than 20 per cent of Egypt's population. ï Three million people commute in and out of Cairo daily. ï Cairo has 31 neighbourhoods and 68 shanty areas. ï The capital's infrastructure includes 66 bridges, 27 tunnels and two metro lines and one line under construction. ï There are 2.7 million buildings with demolition orders having been issued affecting 1,000 buildings. ï 3,780 public buses transport 4.2 million passengers every day. While life expectancy for the buses is four years, 56 per cent of the public buses have been used for more than 12 years. ï The capital needs eight million cubic metres of water for its residents while only six million cubic metres are available.
