What the skyline tells you about Cairo
Issandr El Amrani
Photo from No Expectations
From Cairobserver, a site about Cairo's urban heritage and one of the best new Egypt-based blogs of 2011:
Take the lift at Cairo Tower to the top and look at the skyline. Besides the TV&Radio building from the 1960s and the ministry of foreign affairs from the 1990s, a couple of bank towers, the rest are hotels, mostly built with Gulf investments during Mubarak’s tenure. What does that tell us about Egypt, about Cairo? There are no condo towers for the wealthy because they opted to go suburban, there are few or no office towers (besides the two Sawiris towers further north) because most businesses that aren’t multi-nationals are too small to rent space in an actual office tower so they rent cheap-rent residential apartments. Big telecommunication companies don’t need office towers in Cairo because they went to the desert and built their own “Smart Village.” And media companies also went to the desert and built “Media City.” The skyline isn’t telling of a very healthy economy. The kinds of investments that typically make a city work have all abandoned the city.
The result of decades of petrodollar and comprador capitalism...
Reader Comments (4)
so true. I suggest to read it together with this opinion article written some months ago by Mohamed Elshahed on Al-Masry Al-Youm - A new beginning for Egyptian tourism - which reflects on the role of tourism in the Egyptian economy and the kind of tourism that Egypt attracts [http://www.almasryalyoum.com/en/node/460340]. But this that one of the possible suggestions and come to my mind just because I have read the article a few days ago. Indeed, one may find a wealth of analyses that substantiate the claims you are doing in this post.
keep on keeping us well informed and on sharing with us your critical insights!
I don't understand how corruption would be worse in Cairo than in the desert outside of Cairo.
Put another way, if corruption prevented companies from building in Egypt, it would prevent any investment, including investment in the desert. I suspect that we have here a case of levels of corruption. The Telecom and Media companies were willing to pay the bribes to national officials but not willing to navigate all the corrupt local officials in addition to that.
True; but still Cairo seems more hospitable to urban living than most North American cities where people commute from office towers to the suburbs or to closed condos, and where hardly a pedestrian can be spotted beyond sunset (if at all).
There's something else about real estate in Cairo that I've never heard anyone in the press talk about ... there has to be truly scary real-estate speculation going on on Cairo.... thousands of empty, unfinished apartment buildings.
In June of last year (2010) my girlfriend and I drove from Cairo airport to Alexandria, and what did we see? Mile, after mile, after mile of half finished, red-brick apartment buildings. (My girlfriend, atheist offspring of Evangelical Christians, was amused at seeing miles of empty buildings, as if the inhabitants had disappeared somehow. "It's like the Rapture has happened, only the Christians got it all wrong and it turns out it's a Muslim rapture!).
Anyway, something is seriously wrong with the economy, and all those empty buildings are going to come back to haunt Egypt.