Cairo isn’t the problem.

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In 2017, Egypt’s government announced it would build a new capital city 45 kilometers outside of Cairo, the current capital. It was a shocking announcement since Cairo, a city of more than 10,000,000 people, has been the capital of Egypt for decades.

The government claims that Cairo has become too overcrowded and that moving the capital will give both Cairo’s residents and government workers more space. But this excuse is not new. For decades, Egypt’s rulers have been building brand new cities in the desert. None of them have solved Cairo’s density issue. And based on how construction is going, this new capital won’t be a solution either.

So why does Egypt want a new capital? Well, it has a lot to do with the political revolution in 2011.

Watch this episode of Vox Atlas to understand the real reason behind Egypt’s giant new capital city.

Sources:

Mohamed Elshahed’s extensive expertise on architectural history and urbanism helped us understand why creating new cities and communities doesn’t actually improve livelihoods in Cairo:

Nasr City was once Egypt’s new capital, but things went wrong:
https://cairobserver.com/post/1143911...
Revolutionary Modernism? Architecture and the Politics of Transition in Egypt 1936-1967:
https://www.proquest.com/openview/e19...

For historical maps of Cairo, we mainly relied on these three books:

Understanding Cairo: The Logic of a City Out of Control by David Sims
https://books.google.com/books/about/...
Egypt’s Desert Dreams: Development or Disaster by David Sims
https://books.google.com/books/about/...
Cairo by André Raymond
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.p...

We used this report by LSE cities to compare densities between major cities at 1:52:

https://lsecities.net/wp-content/uplo...

For the map at 5:05, we used an updated informal cities map created by Ahmed Zaazaa, a researcher and urban designer. For the demolitions and displacement locations, we used press clippings from Egypt Today and maps from the Cairo 2050 plan. Not all locations are shown.

https://www.egypttoday.com/Article/Se...
https://cairofrombelow.files.wordpres...

These three links helped us create the diagram at 6:42 that shows the population target gaps in Greater Cairo’s new cities:

The Built Environment Observatory: http://marsadomran.info/en/facts_budg...
City Population: https://www.citypopulation.de/en/egyp...
Egypt census data: https://egypt.opendataforafrica.org/t...

These two pieces helped guide the direction of our video:

The Sinister Side of Sisi’s Urban Development by Maged Mandour
https://carnegieendowment.org/sada/84504
Why is Egypt building a new capital by Mustafa Menshaway
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/20...

And a special thanks to the many others based in Cairo who helped us research for this video. Unfortunately, their names could not be listed due to safety concerns.

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