Understanding Cairo: The Logic of a City Out of Control by David Sims

Author:David Sims [Sims, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: I.B.Tauris
Published: 2012-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 5.6. Largely vacant public housing in remote location of al-Shuruq New Town, 2006. (Photograph by David Sims.)

The public housing system is perhaps at its weakest when it comes to the issue of location. The reliance on vacant, cost-free public lands for the construction of subsidized housing in Egypt has caused and continues to cause serious distortions in attempts to match supply geographically with demand. In and around Greater Cairo, forty years of land allocations for public housing as well as for schools, health centers, youth clubs, state enterprises, megaprestige projects, and the armed forces has left precious little accessible state land, and as a result new housing schemes may be located in awkward, remote, or otherwise undesirable locations that are usually far from existing densely populated agglomerations. As will be pointed out in Chapter 8, in Greater Cairo residential location is of crucial importance, especially for the poorer segments of urban populations at which subsidized housing programs are theoretically targeted. Distance creates a serious direct (and rising) transport cost to all members of a family associated with living in remote housing estates. It is no wonder that vacancies in these projects exceed 50 percent of all units recently built, as is discussed below. There is already a serious transport crisis faced by the vast majority of residents in Cairo’s new towns who do not own cars.30 In these estates, government public transport is practically nonexistent and the private microbus system cannot provide convenient service, due to a lack of the necessary critical mass of customers. And heavily subsidized fuel prices, which, until 2008, have kept microbus fares affordable (at least for shorter distances) cannot be expected to continue forever.

Experience has shown that government housing estates that are remote and badly located (in terms of access from transport corridors and of proximity to popular and dense urban areas) tend to remain largely vacant and depressed for years, regardless of the success in distributing units. However, as Cairo’s experiences in Madinat al-Salam and Madinat al-Nahda and also Masakin al-Zilzal in Muqattam show, reasonably-located and large government housing estates will, over time, fill up and mature, with both government and private-sector services eventually migrating to or near the area. In these cases it has been a matter of: (1) good location near a major urban corridor, and (2) an expanding critical mass of population that generates its own dynamic, much as occurs in the vast informal areas of Egyptian towns.

As we will discuss in Chapter 6, the new towns around Cairo have been planned on gigantic scales, and the NUCA enforces high development standards that lead to low urban densities. Furthermore, the mechanistic, wholesale approach to land assignments has resulted in a scattering of public housing estates throughout these vast spaces. Thus there is rarely any ‘critical mass’ of habitation that would attract private transport and services, and the distances between one part of a new town to another can be daunting, to say the least. Perhaps, if these new towns had

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