The New Capital: An Urbanism Born of Fear of Revolution

By Salama Mansour & Shoukry Samir

Halfway between Cairo and Suez, some 60 kilometres from the centre of Cairo, concrete is being poured across a stretch of land measuring 170,000 feddans—an expanse twice the size of Cairo itself, or roughly equal to the historic heart of Greater Cairo, encompassing Cairo, Giza, and Shubra El Kheima. Egypt’s New Administrative Capital (NAC) covers an area approaching that of Singapore, or four times the size of Washington, D.C.

Image Source: Elmouelhi, H. (2019). New administrative Capital-Cairo: Power, Urban Development and Social Injustice-the Official Egyptian Model of Neoliberalism. Neoliberal Urbanism.

The state and its real estate developers present these figures as proof of achievement, as though the sheer scale of the project were evidence enough of its success. The litany of superlatives is endlessly repeated: Africa’s tallest tower; the world’s third-largest mosque after the Two Holy Mosques; the Middle East’s largest cathedral; the world’s longest artificial river, stretching 35 kilometres; and a central park six times the size of New York’s Central Park.

The city also boasts an airport four times larger than London’s Heathrow, an amusement park seven times the size of Disneyland in California, and a Ministry of Defence headquarters, the Octagon, whose footprint surpasses that of the Pentagon itself. The project includes 40,000 hotel rooms, 2,000 schools, 1.1 million housing units, and 1,250 religious buildings. In its first phase, it is intended to relocate 50,000 government employees, a figure expected eventually to double to 100,000.

The capital is marketed as a global city, designed for international investors with its soaring glass towers. Its former chief executive, Major General Ahmed Zaki Abdeen, put it bluntly: “Anyone who goes shopping in Cyprus, Greece or Dubai should come here too. Dubai is built on those commercial centres, and that is exactly what we are planning in the New Administrative Capital.”

At the same time, the company’s spokesman, Brigadier Khaled El Husseiny, insists that it is a city “worthy of Egyptians,” arguing that Egypt’s existing cities have somehow ceased to be humane. Yet such rhetoric overlooks an obvious truth: the overwhelming majority of Egyptians have no place in this luxurious development. They cannot afford to live there, and, as became apparent after the first World Cup match, many could not even afford to watch football there, once admission required a ticket costing EGP 300.

Everything now revolves around the new capital. Ministries, government offices and embassies are moving there. Monorail lines and stations, together with the high-speed electric railway, have been designed to converge upon it. New highways carve their way through Cairo’s neighbourhoods, communities and cemeteries in order to reach it. Even the World Cup was screened there on what was billed as the world’s largest screen, while the familiar televised call to prayer shifted its setting to Al-Fattah Al-Aleem Mosque. For almost a decade now, the labour of engineers, contractors, construction workers, and transport crews has been concentrated on this single site. Loans, grants, and investment have flowed in the same direction, all in service of the same master plan.

The project’s impact on Egypt’s cities and the people who inhabit them is impossible to deny. It is reshaping the housing market and the property sector, redirecting resources and influencing the way our lives will be organized for decades, perhaps centuries, to come. Yet the ordinary citizen has been granted almost no role in deciding how this vast re-engineering of everyday life should unfold.

The New Capital is remaking our lives under the banner of the New Republic of 30 June. It is the child of that political project, setting it apart from Egypt’s much longer history of new-town development. It represents a form of military urbanism that is fundamentally hostile to people and to spontaneous gathering. Its model of finance moves beyond the familiar language of public-private partnership, relying instead on the transformation of public institutions into a network of sovereign funds and quasi-commercial authorities designed to absorb rapid streams of capital. Urban development thus becomes an instrument through which the state seeks to remake society and reorganize public space in ways that secure its own power, ensure its continuity, and protect the interests of its economic allies.

Militarizing the City

At the inauguration of the Octagon, the state’s Strategic Command Centre, in July 2026, Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi explained why it had been built there:
“Why is the state’s strategic command located here? Because there was a time when the Supreme Constitutional Court was besieged; there was a time when the Cabinet was besieged; there was a time when they threatened the Ministry of Defence[…] The state had to leave the capital so that this could never happen again […] Parliament could no longer remain there, nor the Cabinet, nor the Ministry of Defence. That chapter is over.”
Nowhere is the imprint of the January Revolution more visible than in the state’s plans, and its own explanations, for relocating government institutions to the NAC.

The process began with attempts to remake the spaces most closely associated with the revolution, redesigning them in ways that would erase their political memory while giving the state greater control over who could occupy them. The logic was couched in the language of “preventing danger and combating thuggery,” but it translated into a permanent architecture of security: walls, checkpoints, steel barriers, and coils of barbed wire came to define the city’s streets.

These fortifications only began to recede after the first wave of government relocations from downtown Cairo in 2016, when the Ministry of Interior, the Office of the Public Prosecutor, the State Security Prosecution, and the State Lawsuits Authority moved to New Cairo. Only then did the heavy security presence in the city centre begin to diminish, a transition that paved the way for their eventual transfer to the new capital.

At the time, the former director of the Police Academy justified the move in these terms:
“The security situation is linked to repeated attempts by demonstrators based in downtown Cairo to target these institutions in order to spread chaos throughout the country, particularly after those demonstrations reached deplorable levels of disorder, undermined the authority of the Ministry and other state institutions by laying siege to them, and defaced their walls with insults directed at their personnel and with offensive graffiti.”
Downtown Cairo thus ceased to function as the symbolic seat of state authority. In its place came luxury hotels, many of them still only half occupied. The protection afforded to government institutions in the NAC operates on two levels: materially, by making them physically difficult to reach; and socially, by surrounding them with affluent residential districts whose inhabitants are presumed to share the state’s interests.

The militarization of the capital under El-Sisi differs from earlier forms of militarization in Cairo, both in scale and in the extent to which it has been realized. Fortification has long shaped the city’s history. The Abbasids established al-‘Askar outside Fustat as a separate military encampment for their troops. The Fatimids later founded Cairo itself as a royal enclosure, encircled by walls to protect the seat of government from foreign invasion and from rebellions in neighbouring Fustat. Salah al-Din’s Citadel subsequently served as the fortified residence of the sultan and his soldiers, including the Burji Mamluks who later made it their stronghold.
Yet the logic of militarizing cities changed with the rise of capitalism and the transformation of warfare. The fortified city gradually gave way to an urban form designed not to withstand siege but to facilitate the rapid deployment of troops and the suppression of revolt.

During the French occupation of Algeria, military planners developed counter-insurgency doctrines that relied on demolishing entire neighbourhoods and replacing them with broad avenues. Following the French Revolution and the upheavals that succeeded it, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann famously razed large sections of Paris and rebuilt them with the wide boulevards that still define the city today. In his memoirs, he acknowledged that one of his principal aims was to enable the army to move swiftly in order to crush uprisings.
Later, Khedive Ismail enlisted Haussmann’s expertise in planning the new districts that would become Khedivial Cairo.

In the United States, the urban uprisings of the 1960s saw highways deployed as barriers separating poor neighbourhoods from wealthy ones. In Egypt, too, containing working-class districts has long been an objective of urban planning. Projects such as the Ring Road fragmented popular neighbourhoods and enclosed them within new physical boundaries. The satellite settlements initially planned around the Ring Road were conceived as a way of relocating poorer residents and containing the growth of informal settlements through public housing. Real estate speculation, however, transformed that vision into the affluent suburbs now known as New Cairo.

El-Sisi has succeeded in relocating the machinery of government to a capital where some streets are as wide as 120 metres. These vast thoroughfares, together with the generous distances separating buildings, allow security forces to deploy with remarkable ease in the event of popular protest. The new roads cutting through densely populated districts enable rapid military access, while the removal of trees opens wider fields of vision. The remodelling of working-class neighbourhoods into straight, highly visible streets strengthens surveillance, recalling the logic of the Panopticon, the prison model that French philosopher Michel Foucault used to describe the mechanisms of observation underpinning modern society.

In October 2023, hundreds of teachers staged a sit-in outside the Ministry of Education in the NAC after 14,000 teaching appointments were cancelled because applicants had failed the Military Academy tests. Security forces dispersed the protest the very same day and compelled demonstrators to board buses that carried them away from the site. The episode stood in marked contrast to the sit-ins that once took place around ministries in downtown Cairo, where protesters could manoeuvre through surrounding streets and shift their demonstrations from one government building to another.

In this sense, El-Sisi has achieved what former presidents Mohamed Anwar El-Sadat and Hosni Mubarak sought but never fully realized. Sadat City was originally conceived as an administrative capital, and the Ministry of Housing was relocated there for eight months before returning to Cairo following Sadat’s assassination. Mubarak likewise attempted to move government ministries, but his plans stalled in the face of financial constraints and resistance from civil servants.

The newest dimension of this militarized urbanism lies in its embrace of surveillance technology.

The New Administrative Capital is marketed as a smart city. Ahmed Zaki Abdeen, then chairman of the Administrative Capital for Urban Development (ACUD), declared that every street would be monitored by solar-powered surveillance cameras, making crime virtually impossible. The city also relies on cashless payment systems and sensor-operated traffic lights that eliminate the need for traffic police. A smart city is thus being built in a country that ranks among the slowest in the world for internet speed; a striking embodiment of the convergence between neoliberalism, which advances the interests of technology companies, and authoritarianism, which harnesses those technologies to deepen political control.

Within the urban order of the New Republic, the military dominates the planning, construction, and governance of the city. Administratively, El-Sisi has appointed twenty military men as governors of Egypt’s twenty-seven governorates; for the first time in three decades, Cairo itself is headed by a former general, while retired officers oversee districts and a wide range of state agencies. In the realm of urban development, the Armed Forces Engineering Authority and the Armed Forces Land Projects Agency play central roles in designing cities and implementing major schemes.

At the same time, the military profits from land sales and from the networks of companies and retail chains linked to these developments. After the Sayyida Aisha bus station and market were relocated, for example, every commercial outlet in the new complex came under entities such as Aman and Mostaqbal Misr (Future of Egypt). Even electricity bill collection was assigned to Falcon Group, which the national electricity company described as a “sovereign entity”. What emerges is a process of “clearing the popular economy in favour of a rentier military monopoly”.

Land cleared for the public benefit is expropriated and transferred to military agencies and sovereign institutions, which develop commercial premises for sale or rent. Local traders and workers are stripped of their economic autonomy and recast as wage labourers or consumers within spaces owned and controlled by the state.

El-Sisi has been able to accomplish what Sadat and Mubarak could achieve only in part because he has succeeded in securing the necessary financing. Yet the militarization of the state has itself become one of the principal attractions for that capital. In the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, investors increasingly sought large-scale infrastructure projects as relatively low-risk assets. Within this framework, the military’s role as partner or developer is viewed as a guarantee against investment risk, since it possesses the power to remove whatever obstacles might impede implementation; whether by clearing residents, expropriating land, or bypassing legal complications. In the language of global finance, authoritarian coercion is translated into the reassuring promise of a safer investment.

Financing and Infrastructure Investment

When Ahmad ibn Tulun built the city of al-Qata’i—whose site now lies between Sayyida Zaynab and the Citadel—and erected its great mosque, Egyptians are said to have boycotted both the city and the mosque, believing they had been built with illicit wealth. Historians generally attribute the boycott to the crushing taxes Ibn Tulun imposed to finance his ambitious urban project. Yet in the chronicles, another story emerges. Ibn Tulun, confronted by public anger, rescinded the taxes and explained the scale of his undertaking by claiming that he had discovered a buried treasure during a hunting expedition into the desert.

Today, the same question returns in a different guise. Did El-Sisi and the military really stumble upon a treasure in the desert, as they repeatedly imply when insisting that the NAC “will not cost Egyptians a single pound”? A closer look at the project’s financial architecture, particularly at its mechanisms of extraction and appropriation, reveals that the desert treasure underwriting this vast enterprise is, in fact, public wealth transformed into private capital through state power.

At the Economic Development Conference held in March 2015, the NAC was unveiled with an estimated total cost of $500 billion, of which $45 billion was allocated to the first phase. During the conference, El-Sisi urged Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly to complete the project not in ten years, or even seven, but in less time still. Madbouly, for his part, assured the audience that the capital “would not cost Egyptians a single pound.” As the project unfolded, however, both promises quietly evaporated.

By 2018, Brigadier Khaled El Husseiny, spokesperson for the ACUD, acknowledged that spending on the first phase had already exceeded its original allocation and that there was no longer any upper limit to its cost. Completion of the first phase was repeatedly delayed from that year onward, particularly as investors withdrew amid financial disputes and mounting implementation delays.

Several of the project’s most prominent backers abandoned their commitments, among them Mohamed Alabbar and his Emirati companies, most notably Emaar, as well as Capital City Partners, which had signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) in 2015 to participate in building the capital. China’s Land Fortune and the China State Construction Engineering Corporation (CSCEC) likewise stepped back from direct investment. As foreign financing receded, the ACUD came to rely increasingly on Egypt’s New Urban Communities Authority (NUCA), which in 2018 injected EGP 15 billion in government support and loans, together with the Armed Forces Engineering Authority and domestic developers such as Talaat Moustafa Group, Orascom, and Arab Contractors.

As Gulf financing diminished and Chinese companies retreated from direct investment, the project gradually became one sustained by debt. Among its largest loans was a $3 billion facility provided by a consortium of Chinese banks led by the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), financing the Central Business District and the Iconic Tower in partnership with CSCEC. The Egyptian government also secured a further $1.2 billion loan from the Export-Import Bank of China to finance the electric railway linking the capital to Cairo.

Presidential Decree No. 57 of 2016 established the ACUD as a joint venture between the NUCA, which holds 49 percent of the shares, and two military bodies, the Armed Forces Land Projects Agency and the National Service Projects Organization (NSPO), which together own the remaining 51 percent through their contribution of the land itself as equity.
The military’s ownership of the capital’s land rests upon a 1997 presidential decree transferring all undeveloped, non-agricultural land to the Armed Forces, thereby granting them effective control over an estimated 87 percent of Egypt’s territory. NUCA’s participation reflects its status as one of the earliest—and most successful—examples of transforming a government body into an economic authority operating outside the state budget, financed largely through the auction of public land to domestic and international investors.

These three institutions have been systematically restructured, acquiring the authority to purchase, sell, and develop assets independently of the national budget and under their own separate financial accounts. Until 2006, NUCA sold land according to fixed profit margins. It subsequently shifted to public auctions, generating extraordinary revenues. In 2007 alone, it recorded income of $3.12 billion, 117 times greater than Egypt’s urban property tax revenues at the time and equivalent to roughly 10 percent of the country’s GDP. Those revenues financed major infrastructure projects such as the Ring Road.

When Mostafa Madbouly insists that the new capital “will cost neither citizens nor the state budget anything,” he overlooks a central fact: the land being sold is public land.
It is disposed of through autonomous economic authorities operating beyond the national budget and beyond meaningful democratic oversight. The wealth accumulated by these institutions is itself the product of generations of urban development created through the labour of millions of Egyptians, yet those same Egyptians exercise no authority over how that wealth is managed or where it is invested.

Even if conventional budget revenues—taxes—are not directly financing the capital, the project consumes the country’s opportunity to invest elsewhere. Revenue that might have flowed into the public treasury through the sale of land in New Cairo and other developments has instead been ring-fenced within the accounts of autonomous authorities and redirected towards the desert east of Cairo. Meanwhile, the state budget labours under chronic deficits, covered through public borrowing, higher taxation and rolling electricity cuts borne by ordinary citizens.

While this accumulated public wealth is channelled into a project whose first phase alone is estimated to cost around $50 billion, the annual budget of Cairo Governorate, with responsibility for a city of more than 10 million people, amounts to only EGP 8 billion, or approximately $160 million. To appreciate the scale of this disparity, Rio de Janeiro, with a population of around 6.7 million, operates this year on a municipal budget of roughly 52 billion Brazilian reais, equivalent to $9.1 billion.

Rather than directing investment towards housing and public services that address existing social needs, the new capital offers two-bedroom apartments priced at around $50,000, with average prices approaching EGP 8,000 per square metre. It is a city that is, in practical terms, navigable only by private car, in a country where barely nine percent of households own one.

In a country where electricity shortages have become routine, glass towers are rising that require enormous amounts of energy simply to remain air-conditioned. At the very moment when farmers struggle with shrinking water allocations, the world’s longest artificial river is being constructed across the desert, alongside a park six times larger than New York’s Central Park. These priorities are not the outcome of democratic deliberation; they are determined instead by the logic of investment and the market.

Within the political economy of the New Republic, the military has become the central intermediary, and increasingly the dominant actor, in Egypt’s economy, nowhere more clearly than in the New Capital.

It partners with private developers on major projects, operates through institutions that stand outside the state budget, receives grants and loans, and serves as the principal guarantor of investment through the coercive authority of the state itself. It profits from infrastructure megaprojects—the highways, the monorail, the new capital—and stands to inherit the former ministry buildings in central Cairo, converting them into luxury hotels and commercial developments once government offices have vacated them.

At the same time, the Armed Forces Engineering Authority and the NSPO have evolved into the country’s largest general contractors. They oversee vast construction projects, subcontracting work to private companies while collecting management fees that generate substantial financial flows beyond the reach of the public budget.

Infrastructure finance has itself become one of the principal pillars of the New Republic. In 2018, construction accounted for 7.7 percent of Egypt’s GDP, while real estate contributed a further 11.7 percent. This expansion extends well beyond the New Capital, encompassing 4,000 kilometres of new highways, 22 industrial cities, 25 tourist cities, eight airports, and three seaports.

Nor can this extraordinary infrastructure boom be understood apart from Egypt’s position within the global economy. In 2021, Egypt accounted for only around 0.3 percent of global economic output, importing goods worth roughly $70 billion while exporting little more than $40 billion. As surplus capital from China, Europe and the Gulf has searched for investment opportunities that promise rapid returns with relatively low risk, Egypt’s infrastructure megaprojects have become one of the principal outlets through which those surpluses are absorbed.

What Is to Be Done?

The New Administrative Capital cannot be understood as a rupture with Egypt’s urban history, nor as a beginning detached from it. It is, rather, the latest chapter in a much longer trajectory in which the making of cities has been inseparable from the remaking of political power.

In Egypt, urban development has never been simply a response to population growth or an instrument of administrative efficiency. At its core, it has served as a political technology: a means of redistributing power, consolidating the prevailing order, and reshaping the relationship between state and society. Seen in this light, Cairo is not a single city but a succession of overlapping capitals, each embodying a distinct political moment.

A city is never merely an assemblage of buildings and roads. It provides the framework within which people live: shaping social relations, patterns of work, and the ways they move through everyday life. A project on the scale of the NAC—absorbing immense investment, consuming public resources, and redirecting national priorities—inevitably transforms the lives of millions, even though those most affected have no meaningful role in deciding its course. At the same time, the regime of the 30 June Republic has worked systematically to suppress criticism of the urban transformations it has set in motion. The arrest of the urban researcher Ibrahim Ezz El-Din in 2019, following his criticism of the new capital, the government’s megaprojects, and its policies of forced displacement, remains among the clearest examples.

Nor can the NAC be separated from the parallel process of displacement through which it has been made possible. The construction of new cities has long been justified as a solution to overcrowding and a means of redistributing the population. Yet because these developments are governed by the imperatives of real estate investment rather than social need, they have consistently failed to accommodate Egypt’s actual demographic growth. Between the 1970s and 2006, 21 new towns were established, but together they absorbed only around 500,000 people, while informal housing continued to account for 86 percent of Egypt’s housing stock.

The NAC follows the same pattern. When announced in 2015, it was projected to house seven million people within a decade. By 2025, however, its permanent population stood at only around 25,000. Yet new cities require a surplus labour force to sustain them, and the New Republic has supplied that labour through an unprecedented wave of evictions and relocations, moving residents from neighbourhoods across the heart of Cairo to Al-Asmarat, Badr City, Robeiki, and other areas situated close to new investment zones. Many found themselves severed from their former livelihoods and compelled to seek work in the orbit of these developments. A considerable number eventually chose to return to their old neighbourhoods, or to nearby districts, as tenants, unable to secure stable employment in the places to which they had been relocated.

Here one encounters one of the central contradictions of capitalist urbanization. Even as it constructs new spaces for the accumulation of wealth, it simultaneously produces large populations dispossessed of their homes or separated from their means of livelihood, rendering them more readily absorbed into the labour markets these very projects create.
El-Sisi’s urban project cannot be sustained without multiple forms of coercion and exploitation. For that reason, solidarity with the protests and struggles it has generated is not merely a moral imperative but a political one. These struggles must be understood as inseparable from the wider political economy of the 30 June Republic that has produced them.

Recent years have offered numerous examples of such resistance: protests against new highway schemes, from demonstrations over the Matariya Road project to the growing public anger over the rising number of fatalities on newly constructed roads. In the face of displacement, the residents of Toson in Alexandria continue their struggle despite intimidation, repression, and the arrest of their lawyer. The inhabitants of Ezbet El-Haggana have, for the time being, succeeded in preventing their eviction, while the people of Warraq Island have maintained a years-long campaign in defence of their right to remain on their land.

Equally important is solidarity with the government employees who resisted the transfer of state institutions to the NAC. Their struggle, too, forms part of a broader contest over the shape of the city itself and over who has the authority to determine how public resources are used.

The task, ultimately, is not simply to oppose a single megaproject. It is to reclaim the collective right to decide the fate of public land and public wealth; to subject urban planning and public expenditure to democratic deliberation and social need, rather than leaving both to the imperatives of the market and the calculus of investment.

Arabic Version here