Egypt prepares to start move to new capital, away from the chaos of Cairo
reuters.com
reuters.com
> Control centres will monitor infrastructure and security electronically, roofs will be covered in solar panels, payments will be cashless
Good luck with that - a huge number of places don't even put prices up because everything is negotiable and cash is king. If they only want the kind of Western-style stores with explicit prices in this area, then this could be restated as "we don't want the poor part of our population here".
Cairo (and to larger degree, Giza) have a very intense, unique feel inside the city and I don't think this move will change anything about that.
We both know that's exactly what they want.
There's a theory that the recent minimum wage increase for the government sector was actually because some government workers now have to live there, but they financially can't.
Even if you use a barcode there's no reason why the price can't be entered in directly or modified at the behest of the cashier. In the West we just don't trust our cashiers enough to do that sort of thing so we lock out that power ("Manager assistance needed at isle four!").
What the world needs right now is cashless payments that don't have absurd (>0.1%) transaction fees. I used to work at First Data (largest credit card processor) and you know how much it costs them to execute a credit card transaction? NOTHING. It's literally nothing.
It's not even a factor of, "we have this many servers in this many data centers and here's how much the electricity costs, divided by the total number of transactions in a given day." Why? Because every customer that uses First Data still pays a monthly fee that more than makes up for the cost of all the employees, data centers, software, etc etc.
If all First Data ever collected was that monthly fee they'd still be profitable (assuming all they did was handle credit card transactions).
People need to have cards, the cards need to have money on them - both of these are already assumptions that aren't guaranteed to hold for a lot of people.
Sure, it's possible to overcome all of these things in theory - but at what benefit to the population? Cashless payments are not a goal in and of themselves.
We have a bizarre system where retailers mark everything up an extra 2%, to give their more well-off customers (that pay with decent credit cards) an effective 2% discount and the ability to dispute charges.
I think retailers would love a new system with less transaction fees, but banks definitely would not, and some customers may not either if it means sacrificing their credit card rewards and perks.
The payments are bank-to-bank account and non-recourse so they cannot be pulled back once initiated. There is no credit and fraud component.
India is not an exception and most other countries have similar structure. I think WeChat payments have a similar cost structure though I might be wrong. Most payment systems are very low cost (approaching cost of bandwidth). For comparison, FedWire can transmit payments upto 100 million and above for ~$1.20. Below $100 Million it is $0.90 ;)
UPI Statistics: https://www.npci.org.in/what-we-do/upi/product-statistics
FedWire Cost Table: https://www.frbservices.org/resources/fees/wires-2021.html
Also, there are taxes. Easier to dodge taxes with cash transactions than it is with a piece of plastic.
Haggling works better at small shops with few customers and no lines. It allows the seller to have a huge markup on buyers who have little experience or time, or aren't as price-sensitive. It also allows for a human connection between the seller and a discerning buyer, and has an entertainment value for them both, like a short game.
Honestly, that sounds like ripping people off to me. An important part of social mobility is being able to venture into different businesses. Experience in a subject is an advantage in many dimentions, but having to learn new things while having your suppliers exploit your inexperience sounds like an unjust burden.
The clerk looks astonished and exclaims "In Cairo?!"
- This certainly is a huge scale setup. Very ambitious.
- From a transport point of view, it looks like this is accessible by car only. Lots of highways; large distances, etc.
- It looks like it is obviously designed to keep "undesirables" out. It looks like an easy to defend by design very exclusive large scale resort. As others are pointing out; that probably is no accident.
- I know megalomania when I see it. This is definitely looks like it. But then all the great capitals in the world have some of that in their history. I've been to Rome, Washington, Paris, etc. And I live on what got built on the ruins of the Third Reich (Berlin). Same deal, different eras. So, who are we to blame the Egyptians for a bit of megalomania? The ultimate in megalomania is probably the nearby pyramids. And they remain a popular tourist destination.
- It's a desert. Presumably it gets warm there. Is that even going to stay livable in the next decades? E.g. the Saudi's are planning to move some of their cities to more coastal regions. I guess AC is not going to be optional there. But still, it does not look like a pleasant place to hang out. I guess, they can desalinate water and pump it inland to green up the area a bit and keep it cool. That would be an interesting project in it self and an interesting use of e.g. clean plentiful energy potential the country definitely has.
- This looks like some serious spending is happening. And given the local kleptocracy; one wonders who is getting rich here. And given the warm relationships with e.g. the US also who benefits over there? Following the money often yields interesting results.
Also in the desert solar energy is plenty and cheap, with many sunny days. That energy powers the AC that is needed in that region no matter what.
Similar situation in Cairo. Moving the government to a far off, easily protected location means mass protests are dramatically less effective.
China is also not segregated by cities' expertise but by provincial policy. For example, some cities, like Hangzhou had a very preferential treatment towards tech, by virtue of the provincial investment fund being invested in tech companies compared to the usual state-owned steel mill crap.
Most innovative communities aren't some bleeding-heart melting pot but actually look like cults weary of outsiders.
The other examples strike as somewhat peculiar, and probably not anybody’s idea of the Ideal, innovative city.
Counter-culture later merged together with business into what was called the 'Californian ideology' in the 90s, and while it has this sort of melting pot burning man aesthetic going for it, intellectually it is incredibly homogeneous, extremely distinct from the rest of the US, and politically streamlined.
Counter-cultures almost always are paradoxically 'melting-pots' of insanely like-minded people, the stubbornness is what makes them so effective. Once counter-culture starts to bleed into the mainstream (the actually diverse population) it dissipates.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Equatorial_Guinea_coup_d%...
The 2004 Equatorial Guinea coup d'état attempt, also known as the Wonga Coup, failed to replace President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo with exiled opposition politician Severo Moto. Mercenaries organised by mainly British financiers were arrested in Zimbabwe on 7 March 2004 before they could carry out the plot. Prosecutors alleged that Moto was to be installed as the new president in return for preferential oil rights to corporations affiliated to those involved with the coup. The incident received international media attention after the reported involvement of Sir Mark Thatcher in funding the coup, for which he was convicted and fined in South Africa.
There are a lot of things with HoL but being unelected is not one of them.
Yes. You can get rid of elected representatives.
Yo wont get the "stroppy bastards" who actually hold the executives toes to the fire.
I'm a brit and had to google. Apparently they may move temporarily while refurbing the usual location.
They won't let you on the mainland, even with a valid visa. They don't want you to see what the global oil companies have done (and are doing) to the environment.
I tried to go.
Cairo is very congested and dirty city. Protests are last problem in there.
* 200,000 farmers in the Vendee
* tens of thousands of priests and nuns
* ordinary people, children, and eventually themselves.
The stench of the bodies was so great they moved the guillotines outside the city. One day after beheading a convent of nuns that refused to stop praying, next up was a young boy caught stealing. As he was led up to the guillotine, a shout could be heard from the crowd "Please, no more children!"
But hey, at least they replaced their King with an Emperor.
Seriously though, I find the entire period fascinating (mostly via the Revolutions postcast, and reading Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety). The French Revolution is such a pivotal point in Western history that I believe that precision is important.
I mean, all I know is some proto-marxists overthrew the king, murdered everybody who looked at them funny for 5 years straight, went crazy, got overtaken by Napoleon who was basically the next king again.
That's a few years as a republic, and an extremely bloody and dysfunctional one at that, how was that pivotal? Was it "just" because it was the situation let Napoleon take power? I'll definitely agree that Napoleon was pivotal :-)
But I'm very shallow wrt this topic, I'd love to learn how (besides the bloodshed), the revolution changed matters.
Countries were transformed from feudal holdings under a monarch into nation states.
I sincerely urge you to learn more. It's much more complex than a few fanatics overthrowing a king and then falling apart. Specifically, it's about how the full military power of France was unleashed upon Europe, and crucially, this was a power driven by ideology - people should govern themselves, not be beholden an ancient royalty and church.
Napoleon could probably never had risen as far as he did under the monarchy. And crucially, he took power in part because he was so successful in waging the Republic's wars.
I never understood the revolution as causing the Napoleonic wars, and I had always gotten the idea that Napolean waged his wars for the much more mundane reason of an Emperor wanting to expand his borders, because ego. I never understood that so much of the revolution's ideas persisted into Napoleon's rule and conquest.
Also I've always had a bit of a beef with people celebrating the French Revolution as some glorious victory of "the people" over their evil oppressors, without mentioning the Terror that followed. Maybe that's made me a bit blind to how much of the good parts persisted :-)
I'll dig deeper, thanks!
The revolutionaries were quick to behead Lavoisier, who was a member of the establishment and tax collector for the king. He did his best work under the monarchy.
Not sure you can give revolutionary France credit for that field.
Morsi was certainly there long enough to pass judgment. I'm not old enough to remember the Muslim Brotherhood, but older family members are and they were fairly concerned about their rapid political rise. I didn't share that concern at the beginning, but quickly realized the dangers of it with the theocratic bend of the newly-formed government.
Consider how a number of nascent democracies in Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries are now widely regarded as having had a democratic deficit because of their treatment of Jews or of other ethnic minorities, in spite of the governments being elected by a majority of voters.
And in this case, the percentage that the Copts make up of the Egyptian population (which is infamously disputed, so giving a figure like you did is risky) is completely irrelevant, because any modern democratic state is obliged to respect various freedoms regardless of the amount of the population keen on them.
Actually that's precisely what it means: "demos" = mob + "kratos" = rule; hence "demokratia" = the rule of the mob.
Funny, huh?
The people become "ochlos" crowd when in sub-groups, or perhaps when they start causing irritation "ochlesis". Before that, the demos is just a bunch of people.
Originally demos refers just the people of a particular land, from Homeric "demos" = land, and expanded over time to include particular bunches of people (e.g., of a village or town, or a band of people).
The political sense of the people as free and sovereign citizens (the body politic; Latin "plebs") is a later meaning. Before that, demos used to refer to the mass of subjects contrasted to the "basileus" king.
Of course, both demos and ochlos can refer to a crowd (as can "plethos"). One could say that demos has a common attribute (e.g. place of origin) giving it stronger cohesion, while an ochlos may be ad hoc.
Still, ochlos is mass/multitude of people, with the ability to exercise influence in a democratic assembly. It is that characteristic of democracy as mob rule - alright, occasionally, that generated early critique (but also gave rise to rhetoric and dialogue as more benign means of persuasion).
(Source: LSJ and a bit of Lampe)
From your name I gather you are from, or interested in the study of, the Mediterranean?
Also, most of Kazakhstan's political elite continued to reside in Almaty and just flew back and forth from the new capital for business, so Astana wasn't even an example of a capital built to secure the rulers from the population.
Parisian urban revolts were a regular occurrence[0]; it was an explicit goal to make them more difficult.
The following quote is from the SlateStarCodex review[1] of Seeing Like a State.
"This was a particular problem in Paris, which was famous for a series of urban insurrections in the 19th century (think Les Miserables, but about once every ten years or so). Although these generally failed, they were hard to suppress because locals knew the “terrain” and the streets were narrow enough to barricade. Slums full of poor people gathered together formed tight communities where revolutionary ideas could easily spread. The late 19th-century redesign of Paris had the explicit design of destroying these areas and splitting up poor people somewhere far away from the city center where they couldn’t do any harm."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Pa...
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-lik...
it sure worked really well in 1871, considering the dommage which were done during the Commune
The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_Mutiny_of_1783 is specifically what convinced Congress that the capitol building needed to be moved to an isolated area not in an existing city.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_the_Parliament_Buil...
Indeed, primarily by distancing the rulers from people poor enough to not to have anything to loose.
How much big of a part of Cairo is a gigantic slum? Cairo is not a small city, 20 million at least in the conurbation.
On other hand, having a standing out compact garrison city in the desert will make bombing Sisi out of existence much easier.
Versailles. Versailles was a safe residence for the French king, far from the crowds in Paris.
During the revolution, they actually mandated that he move back to Paris.
Sisi wants to make sure that there's no second Arab Spring some day.
It's so weird that media does not pick up on how this is a repressive move and nothing else. Eg when Kazachstan moved their capital to the frozen, desolate, middle-of-nowhere northeast, there were lots of giggly BBC articles about how that weird President over there moved his capital because a dream had told him to, haha! But few media wrote about how all that was cheap smoke and mirrors for making sure that everybody who lived near the capital was a civil servant, ie dependent, with their livelihoods, on a stable government.
EDIT: I changed my mind, I jumped to conclusions. This capital is only ~30km away, a suburb of Cairo really, which means that likely civil servants will be able to live in Cairo and commute to work (and vice versa some day). I bet protests will still be harder to organize than on the Tahrir square, but not impossibly so (unlike eg Kazachstan, Equatorial Guinea, Myanmar, Brazil etc)
In fact I wonder why they didn't build it 500km further down the Nile (but I'm glad they didn't), that's exactly what I'd expect of an authoritarian government like Sisi's.
Brazil's capital was moved from Rio de Janeiro to Brasília to try to solve the perceived problem that the Brazilian federal government was focused on the needs of the coastal area around Rio, and moving it to a more central location would make it more responsive to the needs of the country as a whole. I don't think avoiding protests was a major part of the decision. It was planned for decades – article 3 of the 1891 constitution [0] said the capital should be moved to central Brazil, but the move wasn't actually implemented until 1960.
Australia is another country with a planned capital – Canberra. In Australia's case, both Sydney and Melbourne wanted to be the capital. The compromise [1] was that the capital would be located in a federal territory to be carved out of New South Wales, more than 100 miles from Sydney, and Melbourne would serve as the temporary capital until then.
[0] https://pt.wikisource.org/wiki/Constitui%C3%A7%C3%A3o_de_189...
[1] https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Senate/Powers_practi...
I really should stop assuming.
Pic I took from the bus, assuming it's the right thing https://imgur.com/bb5KE9Y
It looks surrounded by open ground and looks made with security in mind.
There is nothing substantial to support that theory, capitals are moved because of unfixable infrastructure, reducing overcrowded capital, historic realigning to actual cultural centres or public spending for economical reasons or to have it in a region ethnically aligned with the politically dominant group
Revolutions happen when a lot of people are demanding change not when people are rioting in the capital
I have been saying this for a while, the globalist ruling class all around the world is essentially trying to separate themselves from the rabble … or is it cattle? … around them.
Why was it the provisional capital? Well, the major cities (Istanbul, Izmir) were occupied. Ankara was * Controlled by Ataturk's government * Centrally Located * Decently Large (i.e. not a village)
I understand how Dubai and similar places get to expand so quickly, but this does not make much sense for Egypt.
Looking at what is being built, it starts to look familiar: huge city sectors which are multiplied in layout and construction style, a massive "design part of city once and reuse multiple times" like it so often is happening in China.
https://www.google.com/search?q=china+egypt+new+capital then yields the answer.
8130 vs 2900
Althought it has been a while since the last move.
Brasilia was hundreds of Km from the original capital, this move is 45Km away.
It will probably produce some stratification but also relieve pressure from Cairo.
* relieve pressure for the elites in Cairo
Anyhow, lowering Cairo’s pop by six million should make it more livable traffic and smog wise.
https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/22812/cairo/population
It will take longer than 12 years for this new city to reach 6 million people. So what will happen is the population growth will slow some in Cairo; there will be NO population decline there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_purpose-built_national...
Constantinople lasted over 1100 years.... and Washington seems to be the capital of a reasonably prosperous and stable country?
Both the Canadian and American cases are not a relocation that made it too far from the original place
Not surprisingly the Michelin Guide started handing out stars for D.C. restaurants in 2017: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Michelin_starred_resta..... For decades, it ranked (in the US) only restaurants in SF, NYC, and Chicago.
My general cut of it would be Frederick - Leesburg - (follow US 15 south) - Gainsville - Quantico - La Plata - Waldorf - Bowie - Laurel - back to Frederick, although I'm not high confidence of the cuts on the MD side of the line.
Maryland also did a better job of spreading out its employers. A lot of those Virginia exurbs still commute into DC, or at least Northern Virginia, making traffic a nightmare, at least during rush hour.
Another thing that slightly confuses that map: Virginia has much better arteries into DC. You get into DC from the south on I-395 and I-66, and they take you all the way downtown. Maryland has only surface streets. (It was supposed to have I-95 connecting straight through the city to join up with I-395, and I-595 where New York Avenue is, but that would have destroyed a lot of neighborhoods in exactly the way they were destroyed in building 66 and 395.)
That means that there's a fair bit of Virginia that is technically 45 minutes away from the center of the city, but not during rush hour. The 45 minute line in Maryland is pretty close in, but the 1 hour line turns out to be quite broad, because you can reach it on Maryland's interstates that flow pretty freely (parts of it, even during rush hour).
Of course you really should be taking public transport, except during a pandemic. The driving and parking are both horrible.
An additional factor to consider in the DC area is that the DC central business district is relatively weak compared to other major jobs centers: Arlington, VA (just across the river) has hefty job concentration, as does the Dulles-Tysons corridor; on the MD side, there's an additional jobs concentration on Rockville-Bethesda.
The final factor is of course the Baltimore-Washington divide. As you head northwest in MD, more people start commuting to Baltimore instead of Washington. So instead of there being a relatively clean sprawl/rural divide you can point to as a boundary, there is instead a more or less continuous sprawl that transitions from DC suburbs to Baltimore suburbs, and the mixing zone (particularly the Laurel-Columbia belt) is more accurately a suburb of both rather than one or the other.
DC - Maryland - Virginia
aka "The greater Washington, DC metro area"
Nearly 100% of Michigan is 150 miles or less from an international border that is in navigable waters. Is it a coastal state?
Navigable Waters of the United States has a specific legal definition [1] and it has nothing to do with whether it's salt water or fresh water. So the question of whether a particular state is "coastal" based on proximity to salt water a valid question!
The people of Bangor Maine and Buffalo NY have a hell of a lot more in common with the people of Cincinnati Ohio than they do with the people of Portland Maine and NYC.
On the west coast the "wealthy urban and suburban areas on the coast" vs "literally everywhere else" difference is even more stark. And I'm not talking about just the urban vs rural divide. The people of secondary cities resent being ruled by the interests of the major metropolitan areas as much as the rural folks do.
Cities/MSAs are the drivers of cultural identification in America, much less so than states.
Counties have a variety of shapes and sizes, so that doesn't really tell you proximity to the coast, but a majority of the population lives within 50 miles of the coasts.
[1] Let's say a day's drive is around 400 miles, since if you go north traffic is rough.
If you relocate a government agency HQ to an area that doesn't have any competitive jobs, you're making it more difficult for that agency to attract and retain tallent.
Just by moving the office in the first place you'll hemorrhage experienced personnel who don't want to move their lives across the country.
To proponents - that's a feature not a bug. Less effective regulation (and eventually deregulation) being the goal.
But... that's also much closer to the people they are actually regulating. And if you think Kansas City isn't a "real city" able to attract competent bureaucrats, you are way too deep in the swamp.
If my wife's job got moved to a more affordable place, I'd love to leave.
The increase is probably driven largely by these people, who 20 years ago would have been in Fairfax, Arlington, Montgomery or Howard Counties.
And the area has always done fairly well. An uncle by marriage had planned to move back to Long Island after finishing up at Georgetown Law. Then he read that Arlington County topped the list of US counties ranked by average income for lawyers. He moved across the river and didn't look back. That would have been about 1950.
How much has the federal spend increased in that same time period? A lot.
A fair portion of the upper middle class, mostly "west of the park" (Rock Creek Park) uses the public schools: Eaton, Deal, Wilson is a common progression. And some those who can use the public magnets, Banneker, School Without Walls, Ellington. I am not talking here about the really rich, whom I do not know, but about the prosperous.
Yes, lobbyists, but there have always been lobbyist. Yes, contractors, but the DOD contractors tend to be in Virginia. Again, I don't think that there prosperity of the region as a whole has changed that much, rather the share of the region's prosperous who live in the District.
Does it matter? Coastal cities have been rich for a long time. DC pulling away from the median dates to 2006.
There's plenty super-rich here, but they're not particularly tipping the scales out of 700,000 people. The rise of DC's wealth has largely been a huge influx of young professionals in the past 20 years. Most of whom are probably government-adjacent, but we're talking people making 120k/year, not 10MM. It's the same pattern as a dozen other big US cities over the past 10 years.
DC public schools enrollment is up 10% in the past 5 years, and DC Charter school enrollment is up nearly 30%.
https://dcps.dc.gov/release/dc-public-schools-enrollment-sur.... https://dcpcsb.org/student-enrollment
Sorry I know i'm taking the bait, the lazy stereotypes of DC as a non-city with a few zillionaire lobbyists just irk me.
Not that places have to remain static, but these are neighborhoods with a long and interesting history. DC isn't just a government seat. It's a real city, sandwiched between the Confederate capital and a slaveowning but non-seceding state. That gave rise to a unique culture -- including having one of the nation's most prominent Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
That culture persists and evolved, and it's worthwhile to consider that rather than simply replacing it. Exactly how to do that, though, is an ongoing challenge.
Isn't this just another way of saying D.C. is defined to be a highly urbanized area?
This certainly made it much more expensive as it was the middle of nowhere and there wasn't any infrastructure there.
Looking at https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/22812/cairo/population, that’s a slight slowdown from the 30 years it took them to go from 5 to 10 million or from 10 to 20 million, and looking at https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/EGY/egypt/population-g..., it may slow down further, but they need to build a lot of houses fast to accommodate that.
I, probably naively, took this as more of an efficiency move rather than political.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feart.2020.0000...
They keep growing the city larger and larger. Leave for 20 years and come back, and you don't recognize the scenery anymore.
Actually that's true in the old city as well - there is a huge commercial sector and it's very dynamic and alive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Canberra#20th_centu...
"Control centers will monitor infrastructure and security electronically" Come again?
> Some international financing has been secured for rail links, and a $3 billion Chinese loan has helped fund the business district, built by China State Construction Engineering Corp (CSCEC).
When the east does it → foreign invasion
It's actually a bit of both.
A few of my friends from Myanmar are descendants of Chinese families, they say that whenever they read Chinese online forums, they see this selfish/apathetic approach (only my business/my money/my family/my race matters) again and again. I think a lot of people in China are brainwashed to see both sides and they are now conditioned to take the side of "the west is always blaming us" (which is partly true, but partly false as all things go in life).
I've never encountered similar interpretation when it comes to Moscow, yet Stalin actually did a lot of major changes to the Moscow center (as well as to the centers of other major cities) where the government is located in that "anti-street-rebellion" style of Paris mentioned by the other commenters, and the major part of society alive at the time in the USSR had experienced the Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 where street barricades and tactical "takeover of the central postal office and telephone and telegraph station" were among the key parts of the action.
Considering vast size of Cairo, this new "capital" de facto will become another higher standard city district, which is not bad, I think.
BTW, another Cairo project is new airport and giant museum right by the Great Pyramids of Giza. It also makes a great sense to reroute touristic flow from central Cairo with its popular museums but nothing particular interesting besides.
Sorry I'm tired. Was that funny or offensive for reasons I'm insensitive to?