> 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.
Hey now... Just because a payment is cashless doesn't mean you can't haggle the price down. I've been in plenty of shops where you bring the item to the counter and the cashier enters the price directly into the register. No bar code necessary!
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).
In India, UPI payments approaching 100 million a day, are free for sender and receiver. The RBI (Indian Fed) has a subsidiary which operates the switch.
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 ;)
On WeChat, there is a WeChat Wallet, similar to AliPay, you can store cash in it, so there is no need to go through bank for payment since the buyer and seller all have a wallet from the same company.
A majority of credit card fees goes to the issuing bank. Like a huge percentage of it. Visa and credit card processors take a much smaller percentage relative to the banks.
Yes - the banks then hand a substantial portion of these fees back to the customer via credit card rewards.
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.
There's still more to this than just having payment infrastructure.
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.
Cell networks are only semi-reliable here, a significant portion of people don't use smart phones (or really care about their phones), and that also needs to be linked to some electronic "value store".
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.
You don't need a smartphone to enable cellphone financial transactions, check out Kenya's Safaricom Mpesa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa which is SIM card based, doesn't use any data, has the option of using USSD or Mobile App. It's already available in Egypt.
I don't think it's about price entry, it's much much more tangible to someone when your 'flashing' cash while haggling than showing them your phone or credit card
> 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".
Is haggling anything but a waste of time? My understanding is that it's like haggling for cars. The buyer never really wins, they at best "don't lose."
Haggling has no point in a supermarket where the cashier's responsibility is maximizing throughout, and the streams of customers are thick.
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.
>It allows the seller to have a huge markup on buyers who have little experience or time
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.
Nobody has little experience except tourists and they can afford it (and even with the huge markups the locally made stuff is probably cheaper than what it could be bought for in the U.S.)
It's not just the fixed pricing, but everything is more expensive there. Much more. The poor part of the population couldn't even dream to live in the new capital.
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.
They'll probably make it a condition of leasing real estate or maybe a local law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Gouna shows you can do that kind of thing in Egypt. They have western style no haggle with high prices.
This reminds me of the old joke: A weary traveller reaches Cairo and makes his way along the crowded and bustling streets. Upon finding a small hotel he enters and tells the clerk "I just want a nice quiet room."
The clerk looks astonished and exclaims "In Cairo?!"
This is supposedly a 'new capital' but it's really more of a new district on the current fringes of Cairo connected by rail service that will likely take less than an hour— more to the nature of Shibuya/Shinjuku (which only became busy districts after WWII) versus the old Chuo of Tokyo as opposed to Brasilia hundreds of miles away from the old cities. And Egypt is growing fast enough that the intermediate areas will probably get built out.
Just entertained myself staring at some Google maps satellite imagery. I'm not sure how up to date that is. But a couple of observations:
- 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.
Indeed it's quite sad to see a whole new city built from scratch, and designed to car-centric models from the 60s. Cramped buildings with little space for life to happen, wide crossroads. A 10km block of grass does not alleviate those problems.
The desert part can be a positive. I lived in Jordan when I was a kid and the coast (Aqaba) weather was worse than the desert: at Aqaba the humidity made the heat much harder to support, while in the north (Amman) it was dry and more pleasant and my skin and t-shirt were always dry.
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.
No comments on the political motivations of this move. In the 1800s, Parisian neighborhoods were demolished to make way for wide boulevards, as they were harder to barricade and easier to move troops through.
Similar situation in Cairo. Moving the government to a far off, easily protected location means mass protests are dramatically less effective.
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.
> 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)
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.
I had always assumed that that was just the official story, but that not getting millions of angry rioters over was a key (unspoken) motivation. But it seems I was wrong about that, too. I can't find a single source to back up my assumption, I don't know where I got it from.
Brasilia is, today, a large metropolis of nearly 3 million people (the 5th most populous metropolitan area in Brazil). One of the stated motivations to build the city near the geographical center of the country was exactly to get more people to move to that region of Brazil, which was, and still is to some degree, severely underpopulated compared to the coast (and has a great terrain for sustaining large populations). Very large protests are commonplace, so if getting away from angry rioters was in the mind of certain politicians at some point :) it definitely did not work (as others said, the project was planned since 1891, started in the 1920's and only finished in 1960).
You are not wrong, Brasilia has a large population, but the poor regions can't really reach the center of power just by walking (it's an extremely pedestrian-unfriendly city). It also has a flat landscape, unlike Rio that has lots of mountains - which makes this city of city planning much easier.
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
It may be close to Cairo but it has massive walls with tower like structures. The walls look rather like Trump's wall prototypes. Without knowing about it I drove past it on a bus the other week and was think that the hell is that thing? It looks a bit like a huge military base but grander. The entrance gates are quite something, about the size of 10 story buildings.
Egypt may just be following trends nearby: Equatorial Guinea (in Africa) is relocating its capital from Malabo (which is on an island) to Ciudad de la Paz (on the mainland). The country is ranked in the top 10 most corrupt in the world, by Transparency International. It is an outright kleptocracy, and living there is quite an experience, according to people I know. Interestingly, you can go there visa-free as an American, but if you are British, you better not even think about setting foot there. Construction of Ciudad de la Paz is being funded by countries that are either experiencing illiberal trends or have horrendous human rights records: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_de_la_Paz
> Interestingly, you can go there visa-free as an American
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 understand that. I just assumed if it was BigOil behind the scenes that wells/refineries must be involved which are visible. What kinds of shenanigans are going on? I'm totally not up to speed on what is occurring there.
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.
Madrid, Amman, Naypyitaw, Brasilia, Washington...history is replete with examples of governments who wanted to move out of unruly urban centers and start with a "clean slate".
...but it was, nevertheless, moved away from New York City and Philadelphia (the prior centers of government) and not located in Richmond or Baltimore (both of which existed as cities in the general area).
I was just reading a recent "George Washington's Final Battle" which details Washington's struggle to get the capital built where it is. The main reason for the location was to be somewhere halfway between the Northern and Southern states; any other more partisan location may have caused a breakup of the Nation. (at least that's what Washington believed)
You're confusing two different decisions: 1) to relocate the capital to a new federal district in a rural-ish area, and 2) to decide where that federal district was going to be located. You're talking about #2; I'm talking about #1. Washington's recommendation to pick a location in the south came several years after congress had already decided #1. If Washington had not pushed for it, DC would have been built in a different previously-undeveloped area, possibly in the north. Again, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_Mutiny_of_1783
I believe in some cases a capital was moved to a minor but already-existing city. Amman and Madrid are examples of this, so maybe they don't count as "purpose-built".
Can you explain what you want to tell about Amman? I lived there when I was a kid (and the city a lot smaller) and it is the only major city in Jordan the the only logical choice as a capital. The position is also good for a capital city, there is nothing in the south (I lived in Aqaba first).
Amman is the largest city in Jordan by some distance _now_, but when it was designated as the capital in 1921, it was much smaller. Its growth has come almost exclusively since then, and as a result of its designation as the captial, it became the largest city in the country.
Bonn, Germany’s capital from 49(?) to 1991 would also fit that pattern. There were far larger cities such as Munich, Hamburg, and Frankfurt in West Germany. Nobody wanted a strong German capital.
Egypt has had an idea of splitting into several large cities each specialising on a particular thing (science, governance, etc) since the 90s. This could just be the start of that plan.
And that itself is a great way to kill innovation and advancement. The core reason cities are good at economic growth is the mixture of dissimilar ideas.
The reason cities are good at economic growth is because of agglomeration. If anything if you look at the actual characteristics of innovative communities they are very homogeneous, not dissimilar. See Silicon Valley or the Manhattan Project, or the Prussian bureaucracy, or Soviet scientific communities.
Most innovative communities aren't some bleeding-heart melting pot but actually look like cults weary of outsiders.
Californian counterculture today still has a self image of diversity but in reality it has its roots in a very like-minded white, middle-class bohemian culture, which is not coincidentally the exact class that dominates tech.
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.
Yet Beijing is still home to some of the best universities in the country and the world. Honestly I've heard of Shenzhen as the manufacturing capital or the tech capital, but it's the first time I'm hearing of Shenzhen as a research hub.
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.
I suggest you look up the history of Kazakhstan's capital move. Capital moves are often used by authoritarian leaders to consolidate their power by using the move as an excuse to punish and reward underlings, isolating themselves from threats to their power, and using geography to keep politically influential people under their control.
The move of the capital from Almaty to Astana wasn’t just about Nazarbaev increasing his own personal power. It was also an attempt to keep the country viable in its current borders by lowering the chances of the ethnic-Russian-dominated north seceding.
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.
Eh, it was one king. Only Legitimists consider Louis XVI's son to have been king, and his death was from illness (perhaps hastened by neglect), not a formal execution.
You can advance the science of chemistry, you can set up a democratic republic, you can establish the metric system, but you execute ONE KING, and all that people will remember--
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.
To be honest, the historical stereotype of France that I've heard mentioned most as an American is their surrender in WWII, not the regicide in the French Revolution. I imagine it might be different in Europe, though.
* 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.
No, it was an orgy of terror by which France replaced a weak king with a strong emperor. The lesson being, don't become a weak king or these forces will be unleashed again.
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 :-)
> That is bit too paranoid, some people want to live, not just protest. 18th century Paris was filthy place and needed makeover.
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."
Failed revolution. The military then immediately seized control in a coup d’état and threw the new and popular president in jail planning to execute him before he died of a heart attack.
In multiethnic states, revolutions only have a claim to be legitimate popular revolutions if they have the support of all major ethnic groups. In Egypt, the new regime after the revolution did not have the support of the Copts at all.
Don't know where you're getting the rules for legitimate revolutions. The revolution led to a fair democratic election. Winners of democratic elections are considered legitimate, not just if a 6% minority disagrees, but even if 49% disagree with the result.
Again, winners of democratic elections are often only considered legitimate if they protect the rights of ethnic minorities. Otherwise they are viewed as oppressors supported by the dominant ethnicity. Mob rule != democracy.
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.
Depends on the minority. The ever-present minority of people with merely different political views who can just comfortably wait until the next election, do not make an election illegitimate. But if it’s a religious or ethnic minority and its basic human rights and prosperity are threatened by the new regime, then that does suggest that the new government lacks legitimacy even if a majority of the population voted for it. And that was definitely the case with Egypt’s first post-Tahrir Square government and the Copts. A population cannot vote its universal human rights away.
I think instead of "legitimacy", which doesn't mean anything, what you're really saying is "approved by the West and Israel". Similar to Gaza's election or many South American socialist governments, if people make the wrong choice then democracy is discarded.
It is a typical retort to anyone criticizing Egypt's first Tahrir Square government that they are representative of "the West and Israel", when in fact the notion that there exist certain universal human rights that any state is bound to respect, is upheld even in many countries outside of the West and Israel.
Oops, was I a bit sly? Perhaps that equation should be amended to read "(occasional) mob rule".
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?
You guys talk about Morsi being some beacon of democracy when he was a staunch Islamist who went so overboard that people hated him in a year. You forget that Sisi gained power because he was EXTREMELY popular right after the army removed Morsi - Morsi was that much of a cunt.
It’s hard to suggest with a straight face that the Sisi junta is more democratic or less autocratic than Morsi’s legitimately elected government had been, regardless of the latter’s shortcomings (not that he was there long enough to even really pass judgement). Or that Morsi was not strictly an improvement from a due democratic process perspective as compared to Mubarak’s monarch-like status.
I'm not suggesting that either. I'll accept Sisi as more democratic when he actually steps down; until then, some problems, different face.
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.
See Washington DC today, essentially the same thing is happening there as the Capitol complex and building that the citizens used to be able to just walk into and knock on their representatives' office like any other government office, has now been surrounded by concertina wire and fencing and militarized like the green zone in Iraq was.
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.
That was very effective in Brazil, Brasilia was built in the middle of nowhere, far away from any of the existing large population centers and has basically no economy other than working for the government so if you live there you want the government to stay as it is.
Kind of. I mean, that's pretty much the reason it stayed there after being the provisional capital.
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 didn't know this was happening. So I went to Google Maps and checked it out, and it is a huge project.
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.
This is not the first time Cairo had a planned city. They have lots of them, and they have been relatively successful in attracting upper middle-class and keeping them there. The city is unlikely to fail, mainly due to the large number of civil servants / military Egypt already has (they are a 100m nation after all). So it'll get a boost, and if policies are well implemented, they can attract a few other millions.
A $2.2 billion loan to a country with a concerning GDP [1] and a third of its population in poverty is one way to expand your reach. China is really busy.
China has a huge migrant population ready to move to any newly built city. They can afford it because of the sheer population size. Not to mention they already figured out how to build functioning cities. Building a dozen more isn't a challenge. Meanwhile egypt still has to pull itself up on its bootstraps. A failed city would be a huge setback.
Brazil undertook a similar project and moved the capital from Rio de Janeiro to Brasilia in 1960.
This was a big mistake.
Brasilia is like giant robot very far away from the people and with no connection with society. Brasilia has the highest income per capita in Brazil and it doesn't produce anything.
Rio Janeiro, the old capital, was left with no alternative and has been decaying ever since.
The U.S. avoided this outcome for a long time, but it's in the process of happening to D.C. too. D.C.'s median household income was only slightly higher than the national average in 2006. But by 2015 it was almost 40% higher: https://www.washingtonian.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/DC-....
Under Anthony Williams, Washington, DC, made progress on improving city government. Under Adrian Fenty the school reforms included an openness to charter schools. I suspect a fair number of upper-middle-class households decided that it was better to stay in the city and send the kids to Yu Ying, Washington Latin, etc. than to move to Bethesda or Potomac.
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.
I’m willing to bet it’s almost entirely more money being made from contracting and lobbying. None of the people living high on the hog in DC send their children to public or charter schools.
How much has the federal spend increased in that same time period? A lot.
I don't mean this as an attack, but do you live in DC? The stereotype is actually that the very wealthy lobbyists and contractors live in VA where the taxes are lower.
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%.
An influx of young professionals and a consequent push of older, browner folks out. A bunch of neighborhoods in Southeast have changed character substantially in the last couple of decades.
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.
Yeah for sure. Hopefully we can continue to evolve ways to share all the new gains, especially with people who got pushed out who weren't property owners.
High on the hog by the standards of the big coastal cities, or high on the hog by the standards of Midwestern or Southern small towns?
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.
Not sure it's the same, DC is effectively part of a connected set of Northeastern US cities starting in Boston (or NYC) and going down to DC. So there's a lot of cultural linkages and travel between those areas. It's not in the middle of nowhere disconnected from society.
To play devil's advocate DC is more a part of the urban DMV area than it is anything else and most of middle America and the south (and a sizeable minority on the west coast) would argue that both the DMV and the northeast corridor are disconnected societies from the rest of the country.
The US is a large and diverse country, no matter where you put the capital it will be in a society disconnected from the rest of the country. You could build the capital in a corn field in ohio and it would be culturally disconnected from the coastal areas which, importantly, is also where most of the people live.
Coastal states is a hell of a lot more misleading than "coastal counties"
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.
Exactly. I got downvoted unfortunately, which means that at least someone thought it was a ridiculous question. It's not.
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!
Are you defining coastal county as a county with at least one border on the coast? That's pretty misleading, as someone could live a 1/2 hour from the beach and not be in a coastal county. But, I think most people including that person, would consider themselves to be living on the coast.
YUP! I live in Orlando FL, a city with no county boarders on the ocean. Orlando is 1 of 2 "inland" cities in the state (the other being Gainesville), but I drive 35m east and I'm at a beach on The Atlantic Ocean, or I can drive 90m west and be at a beach on the Gulf of Mexico.
We are definitely a coastal city even if we aren't a coastal city :)
> Only about 40% of the population lives in a coastal county
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.
Almost 1/3 of the US population lives within about day's drive of DC - https://www.statsamerica.org/radius/big.aspx. That's pretty central given how spread out America is. You could certainly argue that they're culturally different from places like the midwest, but I don't think 'disconnected society' makes sense when they're such a substantial fraction of the total.
[1] Let's say a day's drive is around 400 miles, since if you go north traffic is rough.
1 in 6 Americans live somewhere in the Northeast corridor so it can't be that disconnected. There's plenty in common with the other large urban centers too.
Is DC any more different from middle America than any city is from distant rural areas? Take NYC vs Upstate or Chicagoland vs Southern Illinois. Or even Louisville-Frankfort-Lexington vs rural Kentucky.
Less so, arguably. Although DC is part of the Boston-New York-Washington corridor, it has a thriving culture that originated with the migration of black people out of the south. It is in no sense a rural culture, but it has roots and relatives in rural parts all over the south.
Sadly, it's not a great BBQ town. A buncha years ago the Washington Post ran a contest for a local food, and they best they could come up with was the half-smoke. Though I suppose you could put some mumbo sauce on it.
I'm not sure who first used it; but, millennials and other young people started using the term about 15 years or so ago to refer to the Washington DC metro area -- District Maryland Virginia. The local media picked up on it and started using it. Old farts like me still think "Division of Motor Vehicles."
DC, Maryland, Virginia. The 3 share common borders and most of the DC politicians and workers actually live in the 2 states. It's only fairly recent that having a residence in DC became fashionable.
Baltimore is a very distinct city with a distinct identity, although the border between DC suburbs and Baltimore suburbs is kind of vague; I wouldn't consider Baltimore part of the DC area.
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.
As my sibling comment points out, VA sprawled a lot further than MD did. The US-15/Quantico line in the VA is really quite close to the boundary between suburban sprawl and true rural. Cross the Potomac, and you cross from sprawl on the VA side to rural lands on the MD side: the western and northern reaches of Montgomery County are definitely rural, similarly for the southern reaches of Prince George's County.
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.
Virginia wanted to grow its exurbs, and Maryland didn't. Virginia created a lot of large houses on former farmland, where Maryland preserved more of it.
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.
What do you mean it’s happening in dc? Are there plans to move the capital? I think the two data points you provided, while interesting, don’t make much sense on their own.
...and as a part of a deliberate effort to reduce the size and effectiveness of government agencies.
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.
This is wildly overstated. The big example here is the Department of Agriculture moving headquarters to Kansas City.
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.
To be fair its not like they are moving the capitol hundreds of miles away inland. The new location is almost a suburb. Also Cairo gotta be one of the biggest craziest urban jungles in existence. Having grown organically since the beginning of time basically. Not to say this isn't political motivated, but sometimes is better to build up from scratch.
I want to echo this. I am stunned anything productive gets done in Cairo. Flip a coin whether the traffic nightmare lets you get to a meeting on time or even the office in less than 4 hours.
I, probably naively, took this as more of an efficiency move rather than political.
Yes, one has to be astonishingly ignorant of history to think that cloistering a society’s leaders in an ivory tower will result in long term stability and prosperity.
Ottawa, Canada wasn't purpose-built but was an insignificant city meant to be a neutral choice of capital between Anglo and Francophone Canada. This has also worked fine.
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.
When you put it like this it sounds like Brasilia doesn't have any life or non-government people living there. Over the last few decades Brasilia has changed a lot and it is considered by many a good place to live. It also has developed suburbs (satellite cities) in its vicinity, just like any other major metropolitan area in the country.
These projects are usually driven by vanity not reason. They don't always fail though - Australians may want to weigh in but as far as I know Canberra works alright?
It was planned around 1900, and "the Sydney–Melbourne rivalry was such that neither city would ever agree to the other one becoming the capital. ...Eventually, a compromise was reached: Melbourne would be the capital on a temporary basis while a new capital was built somewhere between Sydney and Melbourne."
I am astonished at how unpologetically dystopian this is from the name "New Administrative Capital" to completely cashless meaning you cannot live there without being tracked by Chinese surveillance. This entire endeavor seems to be funded by China on a strangling loan. Usually HN is quick to point this out. If this was taking place in Boston or Stockholm, I can only imagine the pushback. Why double standards?
That is likely the main reason. In Myanmar, they did the same a little over a decade ago. By moving up north to a newly built city with 20-lane highway and lots of bunkers to hide (I only saw photos of them being built and they are most likely for the military government and their families to hide out before they move away if something happens), the military thinks it can buy some time and defend better in case of civil war or foreign invasion.
> 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 west does it → Colonization
When the east does it → Charitable Chinese living to Communist ideals, totally not trying to subjugate a country economically when they can't pay back loans.
I agree. It goes both ways. I think the above commenter is either a Chinese or an empathizer. I recent had a back-and-forth conversation with someone from China on Reddit and it really surprised me that the person seems to think his government's actions are all good/fair:
https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/m535p0/at_least_...
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).
classic feudal times scheme - the lord is in the castle up on the hill and the populace in the village down. The lord easily projects the power while being practically unassailable back - that asymmetry naturally allows the lord to practice unlimited unchecked power.
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.
Luxor, "a Julia package for drawing simple 2D vector graphics", "a high-level easier to use interface to Cairo.jl", is so named because it's Cairo "for tourists!"
The best analogy is Turkey: gargantuan clotted Istanbul vs nice and quiet Ankara. While almost 20% of turks are living in Istanbul, situation in Egypt is even worse: about 30% of egyptians are living or working in Cairo-Giza conglomerate. It's pretty almost unlivable place by Western standards, besides several districts like Maadi or Garden City.
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.
Here's an video overview of the project and all three stages of development. The yet unnamed City is expected to be finished in 2050. B1M https://youtu.be/P0fkucDtTRE
Conveniently forgetting the other 18 capitols in ancient times, that lasted just a Pharaoh or two (including Thebes 3 times). And then the 4 'modern' capitols.
> 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.