Name: The real reason Egypt is moving its capital
Uploaded: 2022-06-13T16:58:06.000Z
Duration: 10 min 36 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

For decades it's been home to Egyptian rulers and their palaces.

The Parliament has met in this building for over 150 years.

And this public square in the heart of Cairo has been the site of several revolutions.

But in 2015, the Egyptian government announced the capital would move

Which is quickly shaping up to be the New Administrative Capital of Egypt.

This is where a new presidential palace  will go...

the new Parliament building and a new public square.

Egypt's government, led by president Abdel Fattah El-Sisi

claims this new city will solve  a specific problem:

But the country has a long history of building new cities to decongest Cairo.

So, why is Cairo's population still considered a ticking time bomb?

And what's the real reason behind  this new capital?

There's a population counter outside one of the ministries.

it's red, flashing lights with these colors is almost always like telling people...

an architectural historian who studies urban development in Egypt.

And I find this to be quite a dangerous narrative especially since that's actually not the case.

Egypt's home to more than 100 million people.

And about 20% of them live within the boundaries of Greater Cairo.

The city has one of the highest  population densities

with 153,000 people per square kilometer at its peak.

That's higher than New York, London, and Shanghai.

What we know as Cairo, today, was officially founded on the banks of the Nile

in the 10th century, as the capital of the Arab Fatimid Caliphate.

because the rest of the region  was barren desert.

Over the next several centuries, each ruler built expansions of Cairo

and the British added these suburbs during their decades-long occupation of Egypt.

In the 1950s, when the British left and Egypt became a republic

In the 50s, 60s and 70s, millions of impoverished Egyptians from the countryside

moved to Cairo in search of opportunities and better living conditions.

But the city that was built haphazardly along the river

The city sort of was already kind of shaped and demarcated

and the green areas around it were left agricultural.

and close enough to those amenities that allowed then people to step in.

Since the housing that was available  was completely not sufficient.

So farmers started selling small slices of their agricultural land to the migrants.

A lot of people have to build for themselves with little money.

So together, so entire families would go vertical on a small plot of land.

These were the first informal and technically illegal neighborhoods.

It's informal because it's not, you know, given licenses for construction.

It's built outside of the economy, that is the “official economy".

And I think this is actually the result of the fact that

the economic system really excluded  the majority of the population.

For decades, Egypt's government failed to build affordable housing

or invest in public services and infrastructure to support the explosive growth

And that meant these unplanned and informal neighborhoods

continued to get more and more crowded until it became a crisis.

"Egypt's capital is bursting at the seams."

"Cairo is equipped to handle around 3 million, in fact,

"Many people in Cairo live in makeshift shacks

in the city's center and in much worse conditions in the suburbs."

Today, these informal neighborhoods are home to 60% of Cairo's population.

but many have evolved into middle class neighborhoods.

Collectively, these are the most crowded areas of Cairo.

And Egypt's government, under Sisi, points to them

as the real problem behind Cairo's overcrowding.

I find this to be a very problematic narrative because then we take a question of

let's say, bad design or bad management from a state perspective

and turn the blame on actually the people who are suffering

In fact, the government still considers them illegal, referring to them as slums.

From the point of view of the state, calling an area a slum facilitates its removal.

In 2019, the government announced it would eradicate Cairo's slums by 2030.

Many neighborhoods will be redeveloped as affluent housing

while thousands of residents will be forcibly pushed out of their homes

and into affordable housing outside the city.

But instead of focusing on sufficient affordable housing

they invested billions of dollars in a whole new city elsewhere.

And it's not the first time an Egyptian ruler

has tried to solve the crisis by starting fresh in the desert.

"New apartment blocks are going up  at a greater rate

The concept of a new city as a solution for Cairo's growing population began in the 1950s.

The first attempt was under President Gamal Abdel Nasser

who ordered the construction of a new city called Nasr City.

It was also designed to be a new capital  at the time.

There would be space for government buildings, markets, and a huge new stadium.

The plan didn't involve affordable housing

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The real reason Egypt is moving its capital

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