Four months after an extravagant announcement, the government’s plans to establish a new Egyptian capital city seem to be caught somewhere between controversy and awkward silence.

Four months after an extravagant announcement, the government’s plans to establish a new Egyptian capital city seem to be caught somewhere between controversy and awkward silence.

The influx of conflicting reports about cancellation, technical obstacles, financial problems and decommissioning was stopped after a short-lived media embargo, which was lifted with a statement by General Kamal El-Wiziri, army chief engineer, about commencing the project directly after the inauguration of the Suez Canal expansion. Despite the historically recurring failures of the new city’s scheme in general, and despite the negative critique that swarmed professional circles and social media before the blackout, the government is still publicizing the project with an air of positivity.

 The official presentation of the new city during the Egypt Economic Development Conference this past March featured photoshopped maps of Egypt with a huge green terrain (fig.1) covering what is now the Western Desert, showing “how Egypt in the 22nd century would look,” Housing Minister Mostafa Madbouli said. He further explained that the new city is only a part of a bigger “national strategic plan” that combines on a single map all of the new cities that were built since the late 1970s. The map also depicts other mega projects that are currently underway in Toshka, the Western Desert, and more importantly, in the Suez Canal Zone, forming, with the new capital city, one big integrated network of development spanning across Egypt (fig.2).

The map was accompanied by other architectural visualizations, stock images and videos suggesting daily scenes from the new city with green promenades, Dubaiesque architecture in the background, and young people strolling by in the foreground (fig.3,4).

The world promised by these images and maps is not merely a better or a greener world it’s also a world that is ultra-organized, a world where everything on both the macro- and micro-scale follows a single abstract plan that blatantly encompasses everything.

During the presentation, however, very little was said about the viability of this world. Questions of whether this world is financially feasible, whether it is actually going to be functional, or even liked by those who are going to inhabit it, were not addressed. There were only speculative maps, plans and images, that despite being abstract graphics, were enough to convince the audience of the achievability of this imaginary world, give it a material existence, and make it somehow immediately graspable.

The maps and images had such an idyllic effect that the value of properties located within several dozen kilometres of the proposed city spiked out of proportion just a few minutes after the press release was issued. Discussions about the pros and cons of living in high rise buildings and possibilities of pre-booking suddenly surfaced on talk shows. The average public was plugged into discussing details of life in the new city — a city that is still just an image. The audience’s immediate response collapsed the experience of the image with real space-time.

How did this happen?

The answer lies in the techniques used to produce these visuals. Using a set of techniques verging the fields of photography, 3D graphics and cinematic VFX, architects are capable of producing ultra-real visualizations of buildings, streets, trees, cars, people and skies cut out from their original contexts, and collaged together to form whole environments. These populations of pixels — as in the case of the new Egyptian capital — inspire not only a design, but an entire world.  

Being mere pixels, these collages are inexact, incongruent and unrepresentative of the real world. Nevertheless, they are used to discuss designs, negotiate contracts, buy and sell property, and even constitute legal documents in the real world. By fully depicting the world-to-be to the tiniest detail, these images assume control over the immediate world — hence, they become material in and of themselves.

In this case, the sheer scale of the maps combined with the images’ minute details of everyday life speaks of an authority that has absolute control over this promised world. Such an authority has to remain external to our world — much like a modernist architect, it has to see our world from a distance. It has to see it as an image subject to comprehensive reorganization.

This graphical mode of drawing/designing a new Egypt in a comprehensive fashion finds its root in classical urban theory during the late 19th century, and in Boris Groys’ notion of the artist-ruler, where the Communist Party of Stalinist Russia was transformed into an artist whose material was Russia itself and whose goal was to reshape it in ideal form. This mode of ruling cultivates a positivist attitude that conflates social engineering with spatial planning, and advocates a heroic vision of what the city and society must one day become — largely via the aid of concepts, drawings, maps and images. The object of these visions — the whole of society itself — is inert matter that can only find purpose and meaning through an image, a plan, or a concept laid out by the hands of the avant-garde ruler.

But to be more specific, the practice of thinking through images as substitute realities falls more precisely under what political theorist and historian Timothy Mitchell calls representation. In this context, representation doesn’t refer to the mere making of images or mental references. Instead, Mitchell’s representation is a social practice that establishes an image authority over reality, where the reality of the real world is always a function of an image.

In this sense, adding green to a yellow patch on the map or visualizing imaginary worlds is not simply an act of creating visual references. It is an act of bestowing meaning and existence to a visual depiction. Through representation, the imaginary world visualized in these images becomes even more knowable and discussable than the real world.

Some would ask, so what? isn’t building such a dream world a good thing?

The answer is no.

Egypt’s New Urban Communities Authority (NUCA) lists 27 new cities established by successive governments since 1976. The most ambitious of these was Sadat City, conceived of in 1978 to spearhead the then emerging national urbanization policy. Built half-way between Cairo and Alexandria, the city was planned as an alternative administrative capital and a symbol of Sadat’s effort to “draw a new map of Egypt.” These new cities were similarly planned side-by-side with massive infrastructure projects — and, of course, massive forced evictions where needed — and were supposed to reinvent social, spatial and demographic realities into the shape of a dream world. However, this dream world bleakly fell short of its promises. New cities failed to achieve any substantial economic development, mobilize any positive social change, or even meet a tiny fraction of their planned target populations. In short, unlike the image, the reality of the promised world turned out to be so gloomy that many preferred to stay with their old worlds.

So why would the government repeat the same mistake?

David Sims’ latest book – ‘Egypt’s Desert Dreams: Development or Disaster?’ portrays the Egyptian government as an entity so complex, yet so inefficient, that it prefers to repeat the same pattern of mistakes and encounter expected problems than to try something else and risk new difficulties — hence the frequency of grand planning schemes that never work.

This argument runs the risk of falsely flattening the different administrations of the last half century into one single entity, but it can still be of good use when considering the case of the new capital city. If we can entertain the assumption that, deep inside the imaginary inner-self of the Egyptian government, there is a stable paradigm where these grand schemes still make sense despite all the past failures, we would start to glimpse the metaphysical framework that governs spatial planning in Egypt. 

Of course, such an “inner-self” does not actually exist, but the phrase refers to the ethos that collectively guides the bureaucratic apparatus. Such an ethos can be found in a statement by one NUCA official about the failure of new cities scheme: “We have to complete our plans. We cannot look to see if people come or not. They will come.”