About 30 miles east of downtown Cairo and situated between the Egyptian capital’s middle ring road and the Cairo-Suez and Cairo-El Ain El Sokhna highways, a brand-new city is rising from the sands of the eastern desert. Welcome to New Administrative Capital, a satellite city designed to ease Cairo’s traffic congestion and overcrowding and strengthen and diversify the country’s economic potential by creating new places to live, work, and visit. On completion, New Administrative Capital will have created about two million direct and indirect new jobs for some of its 8 million inhabitants who with their families will enjoy a quality of life that would have been beyond their grandparents’ and even their parents’ wildest dreams.
After six years, phase one of four is complete, with much credit due to Khaled Abbas, chairman and managing director of the Administrative Capital for Urban Development (ACUD) and the man tasked with driving this project forward. Formerly Egypt’s deputy minister of Housing, Utilities, and Urban Communities, Abbas brings invaluable experience to what is one of the New Administrative Capital’s biggest challenges, namely, creating the working and living environments that will guarantee an exceptional quality of life for residents and visitors from across the social and economic spectrum.
“What makes ACUD different from other property developers is that we aren’t in this to make a quick profit,” says Abbas. “New Administrative Capital must be able to offer appropriate housing conditions for its low-income residents as well as the better off. We have a responsibility to create a mixed and dynamic social fabric.”
It is a goal that many such urban mega projects before New Administrative Capital have struggled to achieve, with previous efforts often resulting in somewhat sterile and artificial environments. That won’t be the case with New Administrative Capital, principally because it ticks the three boxes beloved of all successful property developers – location, location, location.
“We don’t have that problem, because New Administrative Capital is so close to the old town.” And in close proximity, of course, to the Red Sea and the Nile, whose waterways give Cairo access to international trade routes.
As construction proceeds international airport and a central business district whose 400-meter-high Iconic Tower is the tallest building in Africa, New Administrative Capital is emerging as a blueprint for the smart city movement. Its residents will be able to use smart cards an
