Rapid Growth Puts Pressure on Planners in Cairo

"The challenge is to put in place the necessary jobs and public transport to encourage people to move to new communities outside the core parts of the city."

"For us, the redistribution of the population is the entry point to planning in Cairo," says Mostafa Kamal Madbouly, chairman of the General Organization for Physical Planning, the government authority in charge of preparing for the future of the city. "If people were homogeneously distributed, we would not have a problem."

"But the story of Cairo in the past 30 years has been mostly one of a failure of planning. More than half the population lives in vast, self-built slums constructed illegally without government permission or the application of any zoning regulations."