The outward growth of cities, and the move to a more spatially expansive mode of living, has now become global in extent. The decline in urban density and the move to an auto-dominated system of urban transit has been most extreme in the U.S. compared to the rest of the world. Urban density in Europe is almost four times as great as the U.S. and in the Middle East nearly eight times as great. The affluent cities of western Europe are much more compact than comparable American cities, and the low income cities of the Middle East such as Cairo are among the most compact in the world. If the growing and developing cities of the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and Asia adopt an American-style love affair with the motor vehicle and dramatically reduce their urban densities as a consequence, global urban carbon emissions will skyrocket. If these cities instead follow a European model and stick with high density living, the results will be much less damaging to the climate. Judging from the volume of motor vehicle traffic in Cairo and Istanbul, Middle Eastern cities may be edging toward the American model just at the point when Americans are re-considering the virtues of low density living and choosing to reside in more compact central cities. Is it possible for the developing cities of the world to short-circuit the suburbanization process the West and stick with high-density living? Will social inventions and innovations that promote continued high density living be adopted by low-income cities experiencing economic improvement? Let’s investigate this possibility for Cairo, Egypt.
Cairo is among the largest, densest, and oldest cities in the world. The city today is at the pinnacle of global compact urban living with the average Cairene managing on less than one seventh of urban land as an average Chicagoan. Most residents of urban Cairo live in some of the densest neighborhoods in the world, giving them less than a fourth of the land area per person enjoyed by the average Parisian who lives much more compactly than most Europeans. Cairo extends in a narrow corridor along the Nile River with desert looming to both the east at west at the the dividing point between upper and lower Egypt. To the north of the city, the Nile’s floodplain begins to fan out as multiple channels form and find their way to the Mediterranean. Without the Nile and its agriculturally rich floodplain, Egypt as we know it today with its great historical treasures would not exist. Of Egypt’s 73 million inhabitants, 95 percent crowd into 4 percent of the country’s land area that makes up the Nile Valley and Delta. With the exception of a few oases and coastal areas, the remainder of the country is uninhabited, hot desert. Since the 1930s, the population of greater Cairo has increased from a million to more than seventeen million residents. Through 1980, the growth of Cairo could be explained mainly by rural to urban migration within Egypt, but since then population growth in metro Cairo driven by high birth rates has become predominantly an internal affair.
A first-time traveller to Cairo can easily be overwhelmed by an array of intense visual and aural stimuli: beautiful mosques, unrelenting traffic, the haunting call to prayer, urban noise, hundreds of unfinished but occupied concrete and masonry multi-storied buildings, the beautiful Nile, crowded sidewalks and markets, pedestrians dodging through traffic, garbage, mysterious women in colorful head scarves, men in traditional dress, kids everywhere, police on every corner with weapons at the ready, the pyramids off in the distance, and covering it all a blanket of air pollution. Our new traveller will soon discover that getting from one point to another in the city poses a serious challenge. Sitting in traffic is an inevitable daily pastime, burning up a half a billion dollars in fuel yearly. The fastest way of getting around is Cairo’s metro, but it provides access to less than a third of the city and accounts for only a bit more than a sixth of individual trips within the city. Half of all trips are taken in private minibuses, shared taxies, and overcrowded municipal buses. Despite an explosion in automobile traffic, most Cairenes can’t afford private cars. Only about 10 percent of Cairo families possess motor vehicles and those account for just 20 percent of urban travel. Taxies are everywhere and supply 29 percent of all trips, but private cars lead the way in Cairo’s traffic congestion because of their numbers and low occupancy rates.
By global standards, Egyptians consume very little energy per person and emit little carbon, but as the country advances economically, both are on the rise. Of 84 global cities, Cairo is fifth up from the bottom of the list for per capita transport-related carbon emission (Atlanta, Georgia is at the top). Notwithstanding the auto-induced air pollution one sees in Cairo, the city still attains high energy efficiency per person and correspondingly low carbon emissions because of both its high density and poverty, much like many other low-income cities worldwide. An emerging love affair with the automobile among Cairo’s elite nonetheless bodes ill for the future. If individual Egyptian incomes continue to advance at their recent pace, then more and more Cairenes will be able to afford cars, and, without new mass transit alternatives, the city’s traffic will become increasingly frozen and air pollution more intense.
Cairo’s compactness today has little to do with urban planning and much to do with how low income housing has been created in the past forty years. For most of Cairo residents, housing supplied legally in the formal housing market is simply unaffordable. The gap in housing supply for almost two-thirds of metropolitan Cairo residents has been filled by an informal market functioning outside of land use law and building codes.
Because cropland along the Nile is privately owned and desert lands to the east and west are in government hands, private lands are favored for housing construction at Cairo's edge for their more secure ownership tenure. The government can kick squatters off desert lands, but it can’t easily evict owners from legally titled private lands. The military and various government agencies control desert parcels convenient to Cairo but are not about to relinquish them for informal housing, pushing development onto privately owned agricultural lands. For government to bring informal housing construction to a halt by draconian means would cause a huge housing supply crisis no one wants. Because informal housing construction is focused mostly on privately owned agricultural parcels, Egypt looses upwards of 400 hectares of prime cropland a year due to Cairo’s expansion, a loss that many say the country can ill-afford given that only about 4 percent of its total land area is arable. In reality the 2,300 hectares lost to development on agricultural lands has been more than offset by the thousands of hectares added annually to cultivation by desert reclamation projects elsewhere in Egypt. To economize on scarce and expensive urban land, informal housing is constructed at very high densities matching those in any of Cairo’s historic, Medieval-era districts, an outcome confirmed in aerial photo comparisons of the two kinds of neighborhoods.
The informal housing development process begins with a farmer subdividing and selling land to individuals or families who wish to construct dwellings. New landowners then put up dwellings for their own use or to generate income from rentals or sale. Frequently, an owner will construct a one or two story concrete and masonry building to start, move in, and add on three or four stories more as soon as money can be saved up. Because of this staged pattern of construction, communities on Cairo’s edge have a perpetually unfinished look about them. Much of the informal housing in existence today was originally paid for with remittances from Egyptians working abroad in the oil-rich Gulf states. For builders to follow the letter of the law for subdivisions and building codes would be much too costly, and the government is not about to follow the drastic step of tearing down existing, much needed housing just because it doesn’t happen to comply with current regulations.
The norm in third-world large-city informal housing is rickety shanty-towns, but Cairo is very much the exception. Families, who put up most of Cairo’s informal housing, act as their own contractors and carefully control quality in constructing simple, but solidly built concrete and masonry structures. A typical building will occupy a footprint of about 100 square meters and rise up to as high as five stories, with one or two apartments per floor. Again, construction usually occurs in stages, with one or two floors to start. Rooms are arranged around a central stair well and air shaft, and include a kitchen, living area, and one or two bedrooms. The provision of potable water, electricity, and sewerage hookups for informal housing is slow to arrive, and often requires substantial payments and bribes to government officials by building owners, but the more than 90 percent of housing in Cairo’s informal areas have all three services. This is not to say that their functioning is very reliable. Plugged sewers, broken water mains, and electricity blackouts occur with some frequency in most areas. Lanes between buildings are narrow with little sunlight penetrating to street level, and public open space is absent. The main access roads in informal areas get created by filling in old irrigation canals, and many of the lanes are old irrigation laterals. While informal neighborhoods suffer from poor air circulation, traffic congestion, and a lack of public facilities such as schools and clinics, they are more than just warehouses for the poor and breeding grounds for crime and revolution. They possess extensive kinship networks, a vibrant street life, active mosques, local markets, employment in stores and small shops, connections to larger Cairo through ubiquitous private minibuses, and a core of middle class families.
The single biggest government effort to provide housing has been the planned creation of eight, spatially expansive, satellite suburban new towns in the desert outside of the built-up Cairo urban area. In laying out these new towns, government planners adopted a western suburban vision of spread out, auto oriented residential subdivisions, shopping malls, and industrial and office parks with the hope of diverting population expansion away from the city, but, contrary to the portrayal of a dream-like suburbia in the many billboards and ads one encounters in and around Cairo, the new towns have been an unmitigated failure. Simply put, new town housing is inaccessible or unaffordable for all but a small minority of Cairo’s residents. To get into Cairo from new towns via minibuses for work takes way too long even if housing were cheap enough. To make the commute with ease requires owning a car, something that, as we already noted, very few Cairenes can afford. Despite a huge public investment in roads, sewers, water, street lightning, public spaces, landscaping, and treatment plants, the new towns count for only about 10 percent (1.8 million) of greater Cairo’s population today on some 1,200 square kilometers. This amount of land is equivalent to about 70 percent of Cairo’s current built-up urban area which houses nearly 15 million people. Vast plots of new town subdivided land remains undeveloped, and numerous new housing units remain unoccupied. The suburban dream so far in Cairo has turned out to be a dismal flop.
The future of housing in Cairo looks to be not in new towns, but in existing, compact, energy efficient, informal neighborhoods, and, given their past success in supplying reasonably decent housing at an affordable cost, this is a good thing. Cairo’s housing future will brighten further if a more democratic and responsive government eventually brings an improvement in basic local services, especially garbage collection, and in transportation, education, and public open space. In the meantime, more inexpensive rooftop gardens would be a plus for bringing green space and nutritious food to Cairo’s informal neighborhoods, a serious opportunity for Schaduf’s rooftop farms and micro-financing NGOs.
Despite its current poverty and political troubles, Egypt’s material and social development improved markedly in the past few decades. The UN’s Human Development Index, which is based on per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP), life expectancy at birth, infant mortality, and schooling, increased in recent reports for Egypt at an annualized rate of 1.5 percent a year, nearly matching the booming Asia/Pacific region. The index goes beyond pure economic growth and accounts for both health and educational attainment. Improvements in the country’s human development suggests that Egypt’s Arab Spring may well have flowed less from material depravation than a growing desire for political freedom and democracy. Social science research on global human development processes tell us this: improved material and physical security along with increased educational attainment bring forth demands for more extensive self-expression, both personal and political. Once attained, self-expression in its turn fosters more effective democratic governance and increases political demands for a variety of social goals, including gender equity, economic justice, racial tolerance, and environmental protection.
The emergence of democracy in Egypt will likely be a messy and protracted affair, but once it gains a foothold we can expect a growing public interest in government actions favorable to compact living and the environment. Less developed countries such as Egypt express greater concern for economic security and less for personal autonomy and individual freedom than the affluent west, but younger generations of Egyptians, who have grown up in a world with less infant mortality, improved health, and greater educational attainment, express post-material values with greater frequency than their older peers according to recent research based on the World Values Survey. Yet Egyptians as a whole continue a powerful commitment to traditional religious values and don’t yet score very highly on aggregate measures of self-expressive values. While tensions run high between Egyptian youth and their more traditional elders around such questions as personal freedoms and gender equity, the two groups seem to be in agreement on protection of the environment, especially in Cairo where environmental degradation is a part of the daily experience. Historically, environmental action has been suppressed by a dictatorial government whose predominant interest is in political control. Unleashing the forces of democracy will no doubt take Egypt in unexpected directions, but a path to environmental improvement that helps retain urban compactness is a distinct possibility. Simple social inventions are available to Cairenes that can bring substantial environmental improvement, support a continued compact form of urban life, and expand much needed employment opportunities. Let’s consider a few of the more important examples.
Cairo already operates two modern underground metro rail lines, but they only serve about thirty percent of the city. If all lines currently on the drawing boards for Cairo were constructed, metro access would be expanded to most of the city’s neighborhoods. A shift from commuting by minibus, taxi, and private automobile to riding the metro would bring substantial reductions in traffic congestion and local air pollution as well as climate-warming carbon emissions. The ease of getting around Cairo would be vastly improved, making it a more convenient and pleasant city to live in. A key economic virtue of metro expansion would be the huge number of construction jobs created, not only for the rail line themselves, but for the commercial and residential construction that will follow near metro stations. An efficient metro could be complimented with investment in a feeder system of dedicated bus lanes and low-emission hybrid buses.
Expanding the metro system is neither an especially innovative nor new idea. The real need for social invention here is in the financing of such a project given that Egypt remains a relatively poor country with limited resources for such a huge investment. Nonetheless, Egyptians could take advantage of two funding sources for transportation and other projects, one internal and the other external. The Egyptian government currently spends a fifth of its budget on energy subsidies, primarily for gasoline, amounting to nearly 100 billion Egyptian pounds a year ($16 billion). By any standard, this is a huge amount of money and constitutes a substantial source of funding for both alternative transportation and clean energy projects. Such subsidies could be slowly reduced over time with the bulk of the reductions coming after transit projects are up and running and can provide inexpensive alternatives for Cairenes to get around. The up front costs of such projects could be borrowed against future government revenues flowing from reduced fuel subsidies along with a slowly rising tax on carbon emissions. Egypt’s ratification of the Kyoto Protocol makes it eligible for the funding of projects that will reduce carbon emissions which an expanded Cairo metro would achieve. The Cairo government already plans to sell certificates of emission reductions (CERs) to European countries for its third metro line currently under construction and terminating near the airport. Future global treaties on greenhouse gas reductions will likely contain subsidies to developing countries for meeting treaty provisions on a much larger scale than Kyoto. A one meter rise in sea level induced by global warming would cause the inundation of as much as 4,500 square kilometers of the Nile delta and displace some 6 million inhabitants, a disastrous possibility for Egypt, rendering the country a deserving recipient of funding for fighting climate change.
Other “low-hanging” projects that yield significant greenhouse house gas and air pollution reductions are already in the works and would benefit from a financing boost. Conversion of taxis and minibuses to compressed natural gas as fuel is currently being promoted and could be moved along with incentives for vehicle conversion and refueling station construction. Even with an improved metro, minibuses and taxis will continue to be an essential piece of Cairo’s transportation pie. A second step bringing further emissions reductions would be the introduction of a system of electric powered taxis and minibuses. Deals could be struck with automakers for job-expanding final assembling of such vehicles in Egypt, and a leasing system established to avoid the need for individual operators to bear the initial purchase cost. A side benefit of electric vehicles would be a substantial reduction in traffic noise. Of course, added clean sources of electric power will be needed for both the metro and electric vehicles. Egypt possesses a substantial potential for wind energy in the Gulf of Suez and projects to develop it are in the planning stage, and, as we know, the Egyptian desert offers some of the highest solar potential in the world. Good solar sites already being developed along the edge of the Nile Valley not far from existing power lines. Again, the key need for all this is creative financing spearheaded by an entrepreneurial Egyptian government. Given its history, such creativity seems unlikely, but with democracy and realization of obvious opportunities for much needed economic expansion, who knows. A free, energized, smart Egyptian population demanding a more responsive government is already being unleashed by the Arab Spring, but patience will be required by those pressing for a different and better future. The democracy learning curve can be lengthy, and powerful political forces wedded to the past will have to be overcome.
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