Rethinking Egypt’s ‘Failed’ Desert Cities: Autocracy, Urban Planning, and Class Politics in Sadat’s New Town Programme

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Sisi regime’s New Administrative Capital is the latest iteration of Egypt’s multidecade-long programme to build desert cities. Judging by the programme’s primary stated rationale, to geographically redistribute the population, the new towns have failed. This article asks why have successive Egyptian regimes nevertheless kept building desert cities? Scholars have analysed how the Mubarak regime used new towns to clientelize elites by distributing land in government-serviced desert cities. Drawing on planning documents and accounts of the social and economic conditions in the early Sadat-era new towns, particularly Tenth of Ramadan City, this article makes an original contribution by illustrating how deeply political, not simply developmental, logics have undergirded Egyptian new town development from its inception in the 1970s. During its first two decades, the spatially secluded industrial cities allowed the regime to flexibly experiment with the right number of incentives to compel the previously marginalized business classes to reinvest in the economy. Moreover, in gridded, legible new towns, the regime could segregate, surveil, and supervise labour in booming private sector industries. The case of the Egyptian new towns helps explain both autocrats’ longstanding penchant for building new cities as well as a resurgence of master-planned urban megaprojects in contemporary autocracies.