The question of the city as an issue of identity has been gaining more attention recently with the growing number of development schemes that have come with demolitions of older parts of Cairo.

Last week, in reaction to public fury over the most recent wave of demolitions of another part of the Cairo Cemetery, parts of which date back to the early decades of the seventh century CE, Prime Minister Mustafa Madbouli said that the government would reconsider plans that involve considerable demolitions of historic sites to avoid any future violations of significant architectural heritage.

The demolitions that were executed over the past two months have come to a halt. The recent round of demolitions is part of a longer process that started in late 2019 to establish new roads and faster highways across the city.

According to an urban consultant who has worked with the government on planning the new roads, “the idea was not to demolish but to de-construct, remove and re-construct elsewhere.”

The consultant, who asked for her name to be withheld, said that while the demolitions of the past few years are “truly disturbing,” they are not the first in terms of the long process of the modernisation of Cairo that has been expanding over the centuries.

“During the 20th century, several demolitions were ordered to build roads to connect the older part of the city with the newer parts as the city was expanding eastwards; however, with the knowledge and technology of today we did not need to demolish at all,” she said.

She added that it was a matter of a choice that the government had made between parts of history and plans for development.

“The construction of new highways and new flyovers has been part of the evolution of Cairo, specifically during the past 50 to 60 years, with visibly declining attention to what the city means to its people,” said a researcher who asked for her name to be withheld.

“The fact of the matter is that today, with the wide scope of social media, people have prompt access to what is happening, and they can also react to what they consider to be harmful to their city, either in terms of value or in terms of aesthetics,” she said.

According to the researcher, a look at the history of the construction of the 6 October flyover, now a key element of the urban identity of Cairo, shows that the government in 1969 during the launch of the first segment of the flyover was not exactly attuned to the fact that the way this overpass was constructed violates the privacy of residents of many apartment buildings.

“Back then, like today, the priority as decided by the government was to build wider roads to avoid traffic jams,” she said.

“A couple of decades later with the beginning of the construction of the ring-road in the mid-1980s, several houses were removed to allow for the construction work to be done, again prioritising the construction of faster roads that are designed to reduce traffic jams and to connect the different parts of Greater Cairo,” said another urban researcher.

“It is true that the construction of these roads made it possible for the owners of private cars to drive from the western to the eastern points of the city in a matter of 40 minutes. The question, however, is the price of this and its impact on the city and its people,” he said.

Moreover, there is the question of which residents of the city benefit from such roads. “If we consider the discrepancy between the number of private cars and the number of public transport vehicles that use these roads, we will realise that it is mostly the owners of private cars — ultimately a small minority of the residents of Cairo,” he said.

Compromising urban equality has been a growing concern for the city during the past two to three decades. According to researcher Wael Gamal, “inequality in Cairo is significantly higher than it is in other governorates across the country.”

Speaking at an event hosted by the American University in Cairo (AUC) earlier in the year, he argued that this inequality is a function of several factors, top among them the urban factor — given the fact that some residents live in luxurious gated compounds with no direct contact with the rest of the city, while others live in poorly developed and economically challenged parts of the city with little access for easy integration.

Speaking at the same event, researcher Omar Al-Shenety said that the question was not just about the discrepancies in residential quality but also about the lack of connectivity in a city “where there is very little to share.”

“Take a big city like New York — it is inevitably a city with visible and clear discrepancies. However, there is Central Park, which is the place that connects all the city,” Al-Shenety said. Cairo does not have such a central point, and for the most part the urban divide is so sharp that it is hard to think of a place where the different segments of the population can overlap.

For urban researchers today, as Cairo is moving towards relocating, the state has a bigger role to play in observing its responsibilities towards urban connectivity and architectural heritage preservation.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 7 November, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.