During the last decades, the Egyptian government adopted a plan for building new cities in the desert to relieve capacity on Greater Cairo. The New Administrative Capital (NAC) is the major urban development project situated 45 km east of Cairo and just outside the Second Greater Cairo Ring Road, halfway to the seaport city of Suez. It is intended to be a smart city, meaning that the city will be ‘using digital technology to connect, protect, and enhance the lives of citizens’ (CISCO, 2021). Its target population during the first phase is about 5 million inhabitants (Ministry of Housing, Utility and Urban Communities [MoHUUC], 2021), in addition to 100,000 government employees who will be transferred from Cairo to the new capital (Egypt Independent, 2020). According to government officials, job creation is among the goals of the city in addition to providing quality of life for everyone, adding that all levels of income and culture are welcomed in the smart city (MoHUUC, 2021).

The NAC is intended to overcome the major problems present in Egypt’s older cities (e.g. decaying urban environment, poor governance, informal immigration, infrastructure management, overcrowded transit systems) and be a model of inclusive and sustainable urban development in the Middle East. However, during the process of urbanization, the city will face various challenges, one of which is how it will answer the needs of its diverse residents and achieve a considerable degree of urban equity.

This commentary intends to investigate the extent to which the NAC is inclusive. Urban Inclusiveness is defined as the city’s ability to offer sufficient public services (e.g. public transportation, housing, education, healthcare), ecosystem services (e.g. clean water, clean energy, sanitation) and personal development opportunities (e.g. employment and skills-based training) to all its residents with their diverse backgrounds (Liu et al., 2020).This commentary will examine the NAC’s master plan and accompanying official reports through the criteria of this definition.

Land Policy and Housing Purchase System

Law 33/2014 regarding New Urban Communities (NUCs) stipulates that the national social housing program should provide affordable housing units in “areas identified by the Ministry of Housing in the governorates and in the New Urban Communities” (Sims, 2014), in addition to the provision of affordable land plots for middle-income families in the NUCs. NUCs also aim to attract immigrants from other cities in Egypt and low-income families to prevent the expansion of informal areas. According to the New Urban Communities Authority’s (NUCA) data, as recreated below in Figure (1), previous NUC projects in Egypt did not reach their target populations.

Figure 1

Targeted Population vs. Current Population in New Urban Communities

Source: Tadamun, 2015

When it comes to the NAC, the extent to which housing will be affordable for the majority of Egyptians is still not clear. Land finance presents a major part of revenue for the local government to meet the huge capital need for the construction work. The consequences of this policy is clear in the rapidly rising property prices. The present housing stock in the new capital is still not enough to meet the needs of the expected growing population. Moreover, property prices (a medium of 11,000 EGP /m2) are far from adequate to cover the needs of various social classes expected to play a role in the city’s development (Aqarmap, 2021). The master plan suggests that the government is relying on surrounding cities such as "Badr", located 7km from the NAC, to provide housing for low-income residents. The housing project is expected to accommodate nearly 30000 residential units for low-income groups (Egypt Today, 2020). This can cause clear social segregation between ancillary cities and the NAC, especially since it is not clear how it will be connected to the new capital. One way of measuring the real estate affordability is by measuring price to income ratio.[i] According to CAPMAS, the average annual household in 2019/2020 was EGP69.1 thousand (El-Assasy, 2020), which means that the average price of a unit in NAC (EGP1.1 million)[ii] requires 16 years of the annual average income of the Egyptian household free of interest, demonstrating that housing prices need to be revised to avoid spatial segregation.

Access to Public Services

The NAC will host the first high speed electric railway in Egypt. This railway will connect it with 6th of October City, Burj el Arab and Alexandria. The train will cover 15 stations, with a line length of 534km extending from al-Alamein to Ain Sokhna (Construction Review, 2021). In addition, a monorail project is expected to connect the NAC to Eastern Cairo, with a length of 98km, which would make it the longest monorail system in the world. It has been mentioned that employees that will be transferred to NAC will receive transport passes from the government or the company they are working in (Abdeen, 2019). However, information regarding specific stations along this monorail, as well as how these new transport projects will be integrated into the existing transport networks, is still not clear. There is a risk of fragmented urban development due to the layout of transport infrastructure, which tends to shape the spatial distribution of economic clusters. This will cause rapid development in some areas while other areas will be left behind. However, the extent to which these areas will develop depends on other factors that should be considered, like the seasonality of places like Ain Sokhna and al-Alamein and the affordability of these transit systems.

Employment and Social Integration

Given that the NAC is still under construction, it is hard to assess the availability and quality of jobs it will offer. However, this needs to be a crucial consideration, as the availability of jobs in the NAC will shape the city’s demography, degree of social inclusion and sustainability. The job market in Egypt is in need of policies that increase employability and reduce overall unemployment, accordingly, the NAC should aim to offer direct employment opportunities as well as an environment conducive to job creation for everyone. Inspiration for successful employment and labor policies can be found in the Asia-Pacific region, such as Malaysia and The Republic of Korea. A study by the International Labour Organization (ILO) concluded that successful employment practices presented a mix between flexibility in employment and social security for workers. In addition, social cohesion — extensive dialogue and consensus building among all stakeholders — is crucial to reach a balance between flexibility and security (ILO, 2004).Therefore, in order to achieve urban inclusivity, employment policies should extend beyond the assumption that megaprojects are ‘panacea for employment creation’ (ILO, 2017, p. 14), and should entail skills development, providing a conducive environment for small entrepreneurs and encouraging management practices that offer quality social security.

Resource Management

Being a smart city, the city should adopt sustainable infrastructure with efficient use of resources. The city is developing a clean power plan, communication networks and electrical transmission lines. In addition, a sustainable waste management system is being developed; it includes a refuse-derived fuel facility, which can process municipal solid waste to generate fuel for cement industries. Non-recyclable waste will be disposed of in an engineered landfill with gas monitoring and extraction in full compliance with responsible landfill management (Construction Review, 2021). Billions have been spent to offer these services. It was made clear by government officials that the cost of infrastructure was covered by land revenues (Abdeen, 2019). However it is not clear how costs will work in the long run. It is also not clear how the city will achieve financial sustainability and how affordable it will be if these infrastructure costs will be borne by citizens. Going forward, it is important to consider the potential to achieve balance between financing and funding sources to achieve sustainable investment.

The New Capital promises multiple benefits: top-quality infrastructure and technological advancements, employment opportunities that attract talent and better quality of life for its residents. However, the road to become an inclusive city is filled with obstacles, there is a high risk of social segregation if the present policies are not reconsidered from a social justice lens, particularly housing policies and infrastructure management policies. The present policies are more geared toward revenues and investments, focusing on achieving financial gain through providing luxury administrative, commercial and residential buildings.. But this will not be enough to achieve sustainability goals, and policies should be reconsidered to comprise investments in human capital.

The government should focus on "people-centered" policies to avoid social segregation and achieve sustainability in the NAC. These policies should enable the large umbrella of citizens to have equal access to public services, regardless of their income and background. Secondly, regarding infrastructure, attention should be paid not only to advanced facilities, but also to the affordability and convenience of all users. An affordability plan should be studied to ensure equity between citizens in bill payments. Thirdly, in order to reach a consensus on the concept of inclusive development, the urban management system should adopt a more bottom-up approach. In practice, this means the adoption of public outreach methods to consult with local communities.

Generally, smart cities around the world require intelligent IoT solutions that optimize infrastructure and government to better engage citizens in the management of public services. Different data on energy consumption, traffic density and pattern, pollution level, waste, usage, weather is collected through sensors and is then analyzed and used to correct and predict usage and patterns. This data should be open source (available for everyone) (Kosowatz, 2020). For example, Public Participation GIS is used widely to connect the public with decision-makers in cities across the world. For example, in Singapore, almost 95% of homes have broadband access, and open sourced information enables citizens and the private sector to leverage the data for personal or business reasons, such as simulating smart technology for one’s home or simulating crowd dispersion for venues (Kosowatz, 2020). Such intelligent IoT solutions should be embraced, thus opening doors to new methods of community engagement.

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[i] The house price to income ratio is the ratio of the cost of a typical housing unit of 100 square meters, compared to the country's GDP per capita.

[ii] Author’s calculations based on meter prices, see Aqarmap (2021).

References

International Labour Organization. (2004). Employment strategies papers. Geneva: International Labour Office. https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---ed_emp/--- emp_elm/documents/publication/wcms_114329.pdf
International Labour Organization. (2017). Towards evidence-based active labour market programmes in Egypt: Challenges and way forward (Impact Report Series, Issue 4). https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---ed_emp/documents/publication/wcms_545383.pdf

Kosowatz, J. (2020). Top 10 growing smart cities. https://www.asme.org/topics-resources/content/top-10-growing-smart-cities
Ministry of Housing, Utility and Urban Communities. (2021). The New Administrative Capital. http://www.mhuc.gov.eg/Programs/Index/132.
Sims, David. (2014). Egypt’s desert dreams: Development or disaster. American University in Cairo Press.
Tadamun. (2015). Planning (IN) Justice. http://www.tadamun.co/egypts-new-cities-neither-just-efficient/?lang=en#.YC3ufo8zbIW.
Liu, Z., de Jong, M., Li, F., Brand, N., Hertogh, M., & Dong, L. (2020). Towards developing a new model for inclusive cities in China—the case of Xiong’an new area. Sustainability, 12(15), 6195. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12156195.

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