CAIRO A shelter of their own: informal settlement expansion in Greater Cairo and government responses Manal El-Batran and Christian Arandel SUMMARY: This paper describes why there has been a rapid growth of informal settlements in Cairo when there was an over- supply of formal housing, and why most new informal settle- ments develop on scarce agricultural land while large stretches of desert nearby remain mostly undeveloped. The paper also re- views the changes in the Egyptian government’s housing and land policies over the last 40 years, including attempts to up- grade informal settlement and to combine upgrading with the development of settlements for middle-income households. Manal El-Batran works at the I. INTRODUCTION Housing and Building Re- search Centre (HBRC) in Cairo. Her main interests are in urban CAIRO, THE CAPITAL of Egypt, is situated in a place from where land policy and gender issues, it controls the apex of the Nile Delta at the junction of Upper and she is developing a course and Lower Egypt. This helps explain why this site was also cho- on practicing the incorporation sen by ancient Egyptians, the Byzantine Empire and early Arab of gender concerns in human conquerors to establish important urban centres. In its present settlements development pro- configuration, Cairo comprises the city of Fustat, established in grammes. Christian Arandel works at the Urban Manage- 640 AD, and the city of Al Qahira, established in 969, which (1) ment Programme’s regional gave its name to the present day metropolis. office for Arab Countries in Throughout its history, Cairo has exerted an unrivalled eco- Cairo. nomic, political and demographic supremacy over the rest of the country. (2) Today, with approximately 12 million inhabitants, Addresses: Manal El-Batran, 7 it is one of the world’s “mega-cities” and is beset by problems Abbas Hamza Street, Nazlet el that are similar to most other large cities in the South. Cairo Batran, El-Haram 12111, Giza, Egypt, e-mail: mbatran@ suffers from the burden of supporting a population growing faster frcu.eun.eg; Christian Arandel, than its ability to expand infrastructure and provide basic serv- 3B BahgAt Ali Street, Zemalek, ices. As it expands into agricultural areas to the north and west, Cairo, Egypt, e-mail: eqi@ consuming 500 hectares of prime agricultural soil every year, powermail.intouch.com. Greater Cairo progressively absorbs adjacent villages. It is a very dense city with problems of transportation, inadequate drainage and sewerage, and lack of usable spaces. Among the most visible manifestations of the challenges posed by rapid urbanization are the informal settlements on the pe- Environment and Urbanization, Vol. 10, No. 1, April 1998 217 CAIRO 1. General Organization for riphery of Cairo. These have developed mostly on private agri- Physical Planning (GOPP) and cultural land and, less frequently, on publicly owned desert land. IAURIF (1983), Greater Cairo They show the inability of the state and the private formal sec- Region: Long Range Urban De- tor to meet the demand for land and housing. Even the most velopment Scheme, Master Scheme, General Organization of efficient housing policies could not have averted the phenom- Physical Planning, Cairo. enon but this paper suggests that the government of Egypt’s housing policy contributed to making the informal sector the 2. UNCHS-Habitat (1993), Met- predominant channel for providing shelter to the urban poor. ropolitan Planning and Manage- This is best illustrated by two paradoxes. The first is the spec- ment in the Developing World: tacular growth of informal settlements which took place in a Spatial Decentralization in Bom- situation of oversupply of formal housing units. The 1986 cen- bay and Cairo, Nairobi. sus revealed that there were 1.8 million vacant housing units in 3. In 1976, Osman Ahmed Egypt and 523,000 in Cairo alone. The second paradox is that Osman, then Minister of Con- spontaneous urbanization occurs mostly on scarce and precious struction and owner of Egypt’s agricultural land while large stretches of desert land located in largest construction company the immediate vicinity of urban centres remain mostly undevel- (Arab Constructions) declared, in oped. a self-serving speech, that Egypt needed to build at least 100,000 However, the first of these paradoxes is explained by the fact new housing units to meet the that vacant formal housing units are not affordable to most ur- current and future demand. It was ban dwellers. (3) The second is explained by the efficiency of the later demonstrated that this was informal housing sector: those owning or developing private not the case and that, in fact, the agricultural land have been better able to respond to market supply of housing units exceeded demand than the government authorities which controlled the the demand. For more details desert land. To better understand how this happened, the pa- see Milad, Hanna (1992), Le Logement en Egypte, Essai Cri- per first reviews how and why the informal settlements devel- tique, CEDEJ, Cairo. oped, with a special emphasis on the government’s housing and land policies. Then it assesses the efforts that have been con- ducted over the past two decades to address the problems posed by informal settlements. II. ROOT CAUSES OF INFORMAL SETTLEMENT EXPANSION a. Population Growth THE GREATER CAIRO region encompasses the city of Cairo, the city of Giza, three secondary cities and a few villages in the governorates of Qaliobia and Giza. Current estimates suggest a population of around 12 million inhabitants - compared to 1 million in 1930, 6 million in 1965, 8 million in 1976 and 10.66 4. GOPP & IAURIF (1991), million in 1986. (4) The total built area of Greater Cairo is 220 Greater Cairo Region Master square kilometres within a total area of 330 square kilometres. (5) Scheme: Implementation As- This makes it one of the densest cities in the world. For in- sessment Updating Proposal , Cairo. stance, its built up area encompasses little over twice the area of the city of Paris proper (which covers 105 square kilometres) 5. Saker, H. (1996), “New urban but it has a population more than five times as large. communities: have they improved For the country as a whole, the population has grown ten-fold the situation of central areas? during the last century and a half while the population of Cairo Greater Cairo region case stud- has grown more than thirty-fold. Most of Cairo’s physical ex- ies”, paper published in the Pro- ceedings of the 20th INTA Annual pansion has occurred on agricultural land located at the pe- World Conference: New Urban riphery of the city. The Greater Cairo region now represents Communities: Past Experience about 22 per cent of the total population of Egypt and 43 per and the Future of Cities, Cairo. cent of its urban population. 218 Environment and Urbanization, Vol. 10 No. 1, April 1998 CAIRO Greater Cairo’s rapid population growth rate can be explained both by a rapid natural increase and by rural-urban migration. Between 1935 and 1965, net in-migration accounted for ap- proximately 35 per cent of this growth. Recent census data show a decline in the importance of migration as 80 per cent of Cai- ro’s population growth today arises from natural increase. As a result, Cairo’s population now grows at approximately the same rate as the rest of the country. b. Housing Policy The systematic involvement of the Egypt’s government in the provision of public housing started with the 1952 revolution and the rise to power of Gamal Abdel Nasser. The new govern- ment’s interest in housing manifested itself in two main ways. The first was a series of laws passed at five-year intervals to reduce and control the rents of housing units constructed after 1944. The second was the state’s involvement in the construc- tion of low-cost public housing built on the outskirts of Cairo and in cleared “slum” areas in the centre of the city. From 1965 to 1975, there was a sharp drop in the production of public housing due in part to the priority given to military expenses as a result of a quasi-permanent state of war. As the population continued to increase and urbanization followed, the gap be- tween demand and supply, both private and public, greatly wid- ened. After 1975, President Sadat engaged the country in a new direction, namely the Open Door Economic Policy (Infitah), marked by a greater political and economic opening to the west and a move away from a state controlled economy towards a 6. Waterbury, J. (1983), The Egypt market economy. (6) With regard to housing, the government of Nasser and Sadat: The Politi- announced that it would only be responsible for the construc- cal Economy of Two Regimes , tion of low-income housing, and the private sector would have Princeton University Press, the primary responsibility for providing housing units to the Princeton. middle and upper-classes. In addition, the state disengaged from the production of rental housing and maintained the policy of rent control with only minor modifications. As both the private and public sectors disengaged from the rental housing market, those seeking rental accommodation were denied access to the formal sector. The impact was all the more severe as the private sector catered almost exclusively to the needs of the upper- class. In addition, the rents charged for the public housing built in Cairo during the 1960s and 1970s, and in Cairo and the new towns in the 1980s, were not affordable by the poor. The informal housing market became the only market that was affordable to urban dwellers with low or middle in- comes.