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Mena7: Congratulations to Egypt for building a new capital city that is the size of the city of Singapore. The new capital is going to be one of the most beautiful and modern cities in Africa
gypt's building a new capital: Inside the smart city in the desert A new administrative center being built between the Nile and the Suez Canal will be the country's first smart city.
Damian Radcliffe By Damian Radcliffe | January 28, 2020 -- 11:15 GMT (03:15 PST) | Topic: Innovation
Uber is in the Middle East to stay, buys main rival WATCH NOW Egypt is busy building a new as yet unnamed capital, designed to be the country's new administrative hub and home to more than 6.5 million residents.
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The new capital will cover 700 square kilometers, or 270 square miles, making it about the size of Singapore, and will be located 35 kilometers, or 21 miles, east of Cairo.
Plans for the city include a new parliament and presidential palace, Egypt's largest airport, Africa's tallest tower, the Middle East's largest opera house, a $20bn entertainment district, and a giant urban park bigger than Central Park in New York.
A LOOK TO THE FUTURE One key driver behind the initiative is the country's rapid population growth. A new baby is born in Egypt the most populous country in the Middle East every 15 seconds, which translates to about two million new people a year.
Cairo is already a congested, polluted, and overcrowded city that is predicted to double in size by 2050 to 40 million people. By then, the country's wider population is expected to jump to 150 million, up from just over 100 million today. "Forget ISIS, Egypt's population boom is its biggest threat," Newsweek declared in 2017.
Population challenges aside, other potential motives for the move include a desire by President Sisi who came to power when the military took charge in 2011 to break from the past and make his mark in history, as well as efforts to stimulate the economy, which has remained sluggish since the events of the Arab Spring.
MONEY WELL SPENT? Projected costs for the new capital range between $45bn and $58bn. While the initiative has its supporters, others have questioned the expense, given some of the financial challenges such as rapid inflation, unemployment, a downturn in tourism, "shoddy infrastructure" and "modest" job creation that the country has faced in recent years. Although there are positive signs in all these areas, there is still a lot of work to be done.
"For the country to watch the government spend tens of billions on this [city] while also hearing them say we all have to tighten our belts, it sends a contradictory message," Timothy Kaldas, a non-resident fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy in Cairo, told NBC News.
"There is something very wrong with the order of priorities," agreed political analyst Hassan Nafaa in an interview with AP. "Maybe el-Sissi wants to go down in history as the leader who built the new capital. But if Egyptians don't see an improvement in their living conditions and services, he will be remembered as the president who destroyed what is left of the middle class."
PROGRESS Despite these misgivings, development is rapidly moving ahead. The first government ministries are intended to relocate to the new capital in mid-2020, and a flurry of contracts have recently been signed for everything from a new $834m business park to a city-wide digital security system, and Honeywell installing over 6,000 wireless cameras across the city.
Meanwhile, the state-owned operator Telecom Egypt agreed in September 2019 to build a EGP40bn ($2.44bn) telecommunications network within the next six months. Train and plane manufacturer Bombardier has been contracted to build a 21-station monorail in the new city, as well as a new line to connect East Cairo with the new capital.
SEE: How to optimize the smart office (ZDNet special report) | Download the report as a PDF (TechRepublic)
Described by Danny Di Perna, the president of Bombardier Transportation, as "the smart mobility solution for Cairo's urban future", the 54km (33-mile) line can carry 45,000 passengers an hour. The estimated travel time from East Cairo to the new capital is around 60 minutes.
SMART TECHNOLOGY TO THE FORE A website for the project promises that "the new capital is developed with the strategic vision for a smart city integrating its smart infrastructure to provide many services to citizens".
This vision includes: smart monitoring of traffic congestion and accidents, smart utilities to reduce consumption and cost, smart buildings and energy management including a focus on renewable energy and using IoT to save power consumption, as well as "building optical-fiber infrastructure connecting every building using FTTX technology".
Plans for a 90-square-kilometers solar (35-square-miles) farm are also part of the mix.
Alongside this, the government has announced that it intends to make the New Administrative Capital the first cashless city in the country.
The development of e-commerce, which it's hoped will be stimulated by this move, and mobile money are big strategic priorities for the government. At present, there are around 20 million active mobile payment accounts in the country, but the Egyptian Central Bank wants to double this in the next two years.
FINANCIAL AND OTHER CHALLENGES Although plans are progressing, there have been some bumps in the road. Reuters reported last year that the "project is struggling to raise funds and needs to overcome other challenges after investors pulled out".
"We need very extensive financing," it quoted Ahmed Zaki Abdeen a retired general who heads the company building the new city as saying. "And the state doesn't have money to give me." As a result, around 20% of investment to date has come from overseas.
According to Abdeen, China has contributed up to $4.5bn towards the costs and China State Construction Engineering is also training 10,000 Egyptian construction workers.
SEE: Tech in Egypt: Here's what you need to know about Middle East's biggest market
Interestingly, writing in Daily News Egypt last year, Matt Walker of MTN Consulting, has stated that much of China's contribution is in the form of loans, and that "Chinese banks are lending funds only to buy Chinese equipment".
And, of course, building in the desert also brings with it other challenges. One obvious example, which Reuters highlighted, is that "the city will consume an estimated 650,000 cubic meters a day of water from the North African nation's scarce resources".
WILL IT BE A SUCCESS? Cairo's continued expansion is clearly unsustainable. The city faces many problems, including being named the most polluted city in the world. However, whether creating a new capital city is the best solution to this problem is a moot point.
The Economist, for example, described the move as "an elephant in the desert", noting that although the new capital will be an employment hub, "few civil servants can afford to live there".
"On average they earn EGP1,247 ($70) a week, last year the housing ministry listed apartment prices in the city at more than EGP11,000 ($698) per square meter."
Others are concerned about the potential implications for Cairo's historic capital.
"With a new Egypt capital being built, what becomes of Cairo?" asked AP's Hamza Hendawia in an article last year. There are fears, as expressed by Amar Ali Hassan, a socio-political expert, that Cairo Egypt's capital for over a thousand years "could be neglected, become estranged and left to die a slow death."
As a result, Khaled Fahmy, a history professor at the American University in Cairo, is just one critic who has argued that the money needed for the new capital could be better used fixing the existing capital's problems.
Moreover, recent history is littered with examples from Brasilia to Abuja of new administrative capitals that didn't quite deliver on their early promises.
he New Administrative Capital (NAC)[1][2] (Arabic: العاصمة الإدارية الجديدة) is a large-scale project of a new capital city in Egypt that has been under construction since 2015.[3] It was announced by the then Egyptian housing minister Mostafa Madbouly at the Egypt Economic Development Conference on 13 March 2015.[4] The capital city is considered one of the programs and projects for economic development, which is part of a larger initiative called Egypt Vision 2030.[5]
The new capital of Egypt is yet to be given a name. A competition was launched on the new capital's website to choose a new name and logo for the city, noting that a jury of specialists were formed to evaluate the proposals submitted to list and determine the best among all the proposals.[6][7] Though, no official results have yet been announced by the Egyptian Government.
The new city is to be located 45 kilometers (28 miles) east of Cairo and just outside the Second Greater Cairo Ring Road, in a currently largely undeveloped area halfway to the seaport city of Suez. According to the plans, the city will become the new administrative and financial capital of Egypt, housing the main government departments and ministries, as well as foreign embassies. On 700 square kilometres (270 sq mi) total area, it would have a population of 6.5 million people, though it is estimated that the figure could rise to seven million.[8][9]
Officially, a major reason for the undertaking of the project was to relieve congestion in Cairo, which is already one of the world's most crowded cities, with the population of Greater Cairo expected to double in the next few decades.[10][11] Cairo, for comparison, has a population of nearly 20 million.
Contents 1 Plans 1.1 Mosques and Cathedrals 1.1.1 The Nativity of Christ Cathedral 1.1.2 Al-Fattah Al-Aleem Mosque 1.2 Skyscrapers 1.2.1 Iconic Tower 1.2.2 Oblisco Capitale 1.3 Capital Park 1.4 The Octagon 1.5 Capital International Airport 2 Transportation 3 Construction 4 See also 5 References Plans The city is planned to consist of 21 residential districts and 25 "dedicated districts". Its downtown is to have skyscrapers, among which are the Oblisco Capitale, which is designed in the form of a Pharaonic obelisk and will stand at a height of 1,000 meters, becoming the tallest in the world; and the Iconic Tower, which is the tallest in Africa. The city will also have a central park, artificial lakes, about 2,000 educational institutions, a technology and innovation park, 663 hospitals and clinics, 1,250 mosques and churches, a 90,000-seat stadium, 40,000 hotel rooms, a major theme park four times the size of Disneyland, 90 square kilometers of solar energy farms, an electric railway link with Cairo and a new international airport at the site of the Egyptian Air Force's existing Wadi al Jandali Airport.[9][10][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][3]
It will be built as a smart city. It is planned that the transfer of parliament, presidential palaces, government ministries and foreign embassies will be completed between 2020 and 2022, at a cost of USD 45 billion. A full cost and timescale for the overall project has not been disclosed.[18] The first government officials were moved into their new offices in 2019.[19]
Feedback on former experiences of capital relocation was looked at, for instance by meeting with representatives from Nur-Sultan (then Astana), which replaced Almaty as the capital city of Kazakhstan in 1997.[20]
Mosques and Cathedrals In January 2019, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi inaugurated a large-scale cathedral and a mosque.[21]
The Nativity of Christ Cathedral The Nativity of Christ is a mega-cathedral, the largest of its kind in Egypt and the Middle East.[21]
Al-Fattah Al-Aleem Mosque Al-Fattah Al-Aleem is a mega-mosque, the largest of its kind in Egypt.[22]
Skyscrapers Iconic Tower The Iconic Tower is a skyscraper currently under construction, set to be Egypt and Africa's largest skyscraper.[23]
Oblisco Capitale The Oblisco Capitale is a planned and approved skyscraper set to be inaugurated in 2030, it is designed by the Egyptian architectural design firm IDIA in the form of a Pharaonic obelisk, and, once finished, it will be the tallest building in the world at a height of 1,000 metres (3,300 ft), surpassing the world's current tallest tower, Burj Khalifa.[24]
Capital Park The Capital Park (also known as Green River) is an urban park set extend along the entirety of the new capital representing the Nile river, it is expected to be 35 kilometres (22 mi) long, aiming to be double the size of New York's Central Park. The initial phase of the park will be of about the first 10 kilometres (6.2 mi), which is currently under construction.[25][26]
The Octagon The Octagon (State's Strategic Leadership Center) is Egypt's new Ministry of Defense headquarters, the complex is considered the largest of its kind in the Middle East and one of the largest in the world, much like The Pentagon in the United States of America.[27][28]
Capital International Airport The Capital International Airport is the airport for Egypt's new capital, intended to relieve pressure on Cairo International Airport, serving Cairo and the Sphinx International Airport, near the Giza Pyramids, serving Giza.[29][30]
Transportation A train to Cairo is being built. The line will start from Adly Mansour Station at Al Salam City on Cairo Metro Line 3, and will split into two branches at Robeiky. One will run northward, parallel to the Cairo Ring Road, to 10th of Ramadan City, and the other will go south towards the New Administrative Capital. Intermediate cities along the train's route include Obour, Shorouk, and Mostaqbal.[31] In addition, a monorail line currently under construction will connect Giza to the new capital passing through Cairo.[32] In January 2021, Egypt signed a contract with Siemens to construct a high speed rail line that extends from the northern middeteranian city of El Alamein to Ain Sokhna city on the red sea passing through the new capital and Alexandria. The 450 km line is expected to be finished by 2023. Later phases of the 1750 km high speed network will connect the new capital with cities as far as Aswan in the south of Egypt.[33]
Construction Speaking prior to the official announcement, Egypt's investment minister Ashraf Salman had already mentioned the possibility of a new capital being "developed, master-planned and executed by a private sector company", at no cost to the Egyptian treasury.[34] It was revealed that the city will be built by Capital City Partners, a private real estate investment firm led by Emirati businessman Mohamed Alabbar.[8]
When the project was officially announced in March 2015, it was revealed that the Egyptian military had already begun building a road from Cairo to the site of the future capital.[3]
In September 2015, Egypt cancelled the memorandum of understanding (MoU) signed with the UAE's Mohamed Alabbar during the March economic summit, since they did not make any progress with the proposed plans.[35] In the same month Egypt signed a new MoU with China State Construction Engineering Corporation (CSCEC) to "study building and financing" the administrative part of the new capital, which will include ministries, government agencies and the president's office.[36] CSCEC signed agreements with Egyptian authorities in early 2016 and in 2017 and 2018 to develop parts of the project.[37][38][39][40] Egyptian construction company Arab Contractors (in Arabic El-Mokawloon El-Arab) was called for constructing the water supply and sewage lines to the new capital.[41] The company stated that the studies needed were done in August[when?] and it is supposed that the project will take 3 months to supply the city with the main services needed in order to prepare it for the construction work.[citation ne
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