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Egypt is building a NEW CAPITAL in the Desert
It is in the middle of the desert that the future Egyptian capital is being built, more precisely forty-five kilometers east of Cairo, between Cairo, the current capital of Egypt, and the city of Suez. However, the future capital is inside the Cairo governorate and since the latter is the capital of Egypt, it is said that the future capital will be "a new satellite city of Cairo".
Since the third month of 2018, no name has been given to the construction project for the future capital of Egypt. And to make matters easier, it has been given a temporary name: “NAC”, which is the acronym for “New Administrative Capital”.
However, many other names are ironically given to it in particular by the detractors of the project, such as “Madinat Sissi” in Arabic, or “Sissi-City” in English which means “The city of Sissi”, to underline the pharaonic, personal character. and proactive about the project; or the name “Wedian City” because the project is made up of twelve distinct valleys which will serve as hubs for different sectors; or the commentators who call it “Future City”, a name given to it during its official presentation.
Since independence, many Egyptian rulers have embarked on plans to build a new city in the desert, and all aimed to unclog the Nile Valley, where the country's only Arab lands are located, and it didn’t work - which makes the project of "future new Egyptian capital" a deja vu for the Egyptians.
In 1974, for example, the plan was to develop eighteen new towns, all located in the deserts east or west of the river.
And, between 1977 and 2000, there were twenty-two projects that went well, especially under “Sadat” and “Mubarak”. When Abdel Fattah al-Sisi came to power in 2014, he was very interested in the construction project of the new city and thus quickly launched the project. It was in March 2015, in Sharm el-Sheikh, that he presented the project to the international community.
Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has a threefold interest in this project. First of all, thanks to this new city,
Cairo would be relieved of congestion because the population being large of eighteen million inhabitants in 2015, the government anticipates an increase of forty million inhabitants in 2040. Then, it would make it possible to affirm the solidity and the capacity of investment of Egypt, as well as a certain break with traditional Egypt symbolized by the complex town planning of Cairo.
And finally, it would be an opportunity to bring the power of the Suez Canal closer to that of the politically intractable Sinai Peninsula.
It was with a large infrastructure project that the first work on the project began. Motorways of 390 kilometers were built in March 2018 and before that, in 2016, they began urban works of an area of 17,000 hectares where 25,000 homes will be located, divided into seven hundred buildings and nine hundred and fifty villas. About two hundred thousand people are working on this first phase of the construction of the future new capital and corresponds to a budget of about seventy billion Egyptian pounds.
China is not only financing the project but also participating in the construction of the future new capital by building at least twenty of the towers itself.
Two large Chinese construction companies are particularly involved: the China State Engineering Corporation ’and China Fortune Land Development.
Through promotional guided tours, there are foreign journalists who regularly come to visit the works. In the spring of 2021, while the Covid-19 pandemic caused the site to be delayed, approximately 60% of the site was completed according to government sources, and the announced date of the official inauguration is in December 2021.
The construction of Egypt's future new capital is an idea born from Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, with the thirst to build a more modernized city just like that of other modern capitals that were created in order to replace older ones.
But the biggest source of inspiration is Dubai. The construction of the latter is a masterpiece.
Moreover, in building this city, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi wants a city that is more functional, more modern and less chaotic compared to Cairo. This, according to him, will also give Egypt an image of stability and solidity at the international level because “artificial” cities are a political means of expressing their national greatness.
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Published Sep 18, 2023
