Cairo is perhaps one of the world’s most famous capital cities, with a rich history that spans over 1,000 years. Its chapter as capital, however, is soon to end – and going from recent satellite imagery, its megaproject replacement is finally taking shape.
The plan to move the capital was first announced back in 2015, with the aim of constructing the new city, currently dubbed the New Administrative Capital (NAC) – they’re still working on the name – set to sprawl over a 700 square kilometer (270 square-mile) wide area just 45 kilometers (28 miles) east of Cairo.
It wasn’t much longer after that construction began – though by 2017, when cameras on NASA’s Landsat 9 satellite snapped fresh images of the development, it still very much looked like a bunch of lines in the desert.
Not a lot to look at in 2017.
Image credit: NASA Earth Observatory image by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey.
Skip to August 2024, and those lines have transformed into some of the megaproject’s most mega landmarks.
As of August 9, 2024, there’s much more to see.
Image credit: NASA Earth Observatory image by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey.
The waved line of green amongst the beige is Green River Park; designed to be a space for both pedestrians and cyclists, featuring lakes and some of Egypt’s native flora, at 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) long, it’s already over twice the length of New York’s Central Park.
Hence its current title, the new capital is also home to a plethora of government buildings, the most noticeable being the new hub for the Ministry of Defense dubbed “the Octagon”, which from above looks a) kind of like a crop circle and b) well, more circular than octagonal. Up close, however, the center contains a series of octagon-shaped buildings.
Why build a new capital?
Given the time, labor, and cost associated with such a major project – initial estimates were $45 billion, but more recent estimates suggest it’ll wind up closer to $58 billion – it’d be easy to wonder why they’re bothering with a new capital when one already exists.
One of the main suggestions is that Cairo’s population has boomed in a relatively short period of time.
In 1950, the city’s population stood at just under 2.5 million; 74 years later, it’s now estimated to be 22.6 million. With the vast majority of that population living within 20 kilometers (12 miles) of the Nile coursing through it, people are also densely packed in.
“Cairo isn’t suitable for the Egyptian people,” Khaled El-Husseiny, spokesperson for the project, told The Guardian in 2018. “There are traffic jams on every street, the infrastructure can’t support the population, and it’s very crowded.”
With the new city designed to provide homes to more than 6 million people, it’s hoped that it’ll relieve at least some of the pressure on the old capital.
