1Egypt has taken the threats of global climate change seriously. It has adopted all of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s (UNFCCC) protocols relating to global warming (in 1994, 2015, 2016 and 2017) and has incorporated global warming concerns in a range of national plans and visions, particularly Egypt’s Vision 2030, the Long-Term Low Emission Development Strategy 2050 and the National Climate Change Strategy 2050 (UNFCCC 2022, 3). It has also taken a number of very visible measures to mitigate the production of greenhouse gases (GHGs) (such as a bold programme to promote renewable energy sources1 and actions in the transportation sector), and it has implemented a number of measures to adapt to global warming (particularly to combat rising sea levels and salt intrusion in the Delta). However, there is one factor which seems to have been ignored: the creation and expansion of sprawling urban settlements in Egypt’s deserts, especially around Cairo. It is this factor that will, over the long term, inexorably increase the country’s carbon emissions far into the future.

The Links between Urban Sprawl and Greenhouse Gas Emissions

2Urban sprawl is more than simply low densities of habitation, although very low residential densities in a city or parts of a city are probably the single most direct measures of it. Urban sprawl also relates to fragmentation, dispersal and discontinuities in the whole built environment, to longer distances and travel trajectories and to the resulting dependency on the private car and the inefficiency of public transport.

3The literature on urban sprawl has so far mostly been directed at the phenomenon as found in Western countries, especially in the last fifteen years, as the issue of global warming has increasingly preoccupied scientists and urbanists. A good summary of the issues involved can be found in the 2018 OECD publication Rethinking Urban Sprawl (OECD 2018). This study notes that in most OECD cities, low-density urban areas have been increasing significantly in size since 1990, especially on suburban fringes of both metropolises and smaller towns. The OECD study links these trends directly to more traffic jams (and time costs), more GHG emissions, more air pollution, larger infrastructure investments and higher recurrent costs per user. The study identifies a number of contributing factors:

• Low average residential density, especially the percentage of a city’s population residing in very low-density areas (under fifteen individuals per hectare).
• Fragmented and discontinuous built environments, especially spatial segregation of land uses and a high number of large open areas.
• Many and dispersed ‘high-density’ multifunction concentrations or peaks.
• Lack of grid and supergrid primacy and lack of high-density corridors.
• Overuse of cul-de-sacs and gated communities.
• Excessive use of limited-access highways and high-speed interchanges.

4For the Western cities studied, the report strongly links these factors to increasing carbon emissions, which are mainly due to the fact that a sprawling, disconnected and dispersed built environment makes for longer average distances travelled and ever more personal vehicle usage. Not only are private means of conveyance comfortable and convenient in suburban environments, they are often the only such means available. And without exorbitant and endless public subsidies, it will be almost impossible to provide anything like convenient, frequent and low-cost public transportation systems as an alternative to these sprawling areas. In addition, there is, it seems, a reinforcing trend: as sprawling and low-density urban landscapes make the private car unavoidable, ever more space must be devoted to this private transportation (residential and commercial parking, service areas, drive-through commerce, etc.), and this further decreases densities of urban habitation and locks in these factors for the far future.

5What are the means of combating urban sprawl and its negative effects? Such urban sprawl, once in place, is extremely difficult to correct. However, in the long term there are a number of measures – mainly dealing with land-use planning and taxation – that can be used (see OECD 2018, 12–13; UN-Habitat 2011, Chapter 5):

• Relax maximum-density restrictions and avoid single-lot housing units.
• Reform property and land-use taxation in order to discourage large land parcels.
• Shift the cost of infrastructure on to developers.
• Introduce road-pricing mechanisms.
• Introduce/increase parking charges.
• Raise motor fuel taxes.
• Invest heavily in public transport.
• Retrofit buildings and encourage infill.

6These measures have had some success in containing or attenuating urban sprawl, especially in European cities where there is already strong community resistance to air pollution and the continuing destruction of natural habitats. Yet they are often opposed by private car owners and suburban residents, who can create very strong interest groups at the municipal level to lobby for preserving low densities and associated privileges. In other words, the struggle against urban sprawl is a difficult one politically and can have noticeable effects on reducing GHG emissions only over the very long term.

Egypt and Greenhouse Gas Emissions

7Egypt, as a lower-middle income country with a nominal GDP per capita of USD 3,500 in 2020, is not a large contributor to GHG emissions in per capita terms, at least when compared to Western countries or the Gulf States. However, Egypt has seen a sustained rise in its GHG emissions, mainly in the electricity and transportation sectors of the economy. Between 1971 and 2020, the country’s CO₂ emissions increased twelvefold (from 25 to 269.5 million tons), going up 6 per cent per year over the 2011–2016 period and doubling between 2002 and 2017. These increases are caused in large part by the transportation sector (gasoline consumption increased 7 per cent annually in 2011–2016.) And when looking at the country’s very low rate of private vehicle ownership (only 15 per cent of families have cars in urban areas), it is inevitable that this rate will increase with economic growth and that the upward trajectory of CO₂ emissions will become more acute.

8The Egyptian government is very aware of the transportation sector’s contribution to rapid increases in GHG emissions. According to Egypt’s report to the UNFCC titled First Updated Nationally Determined Contributions (UNFCCC 2022), under a ‘business as usual’ scenario, the transportation sector’s production of GHGs is expected to jump from 48,235 GgCO₂ in 2015 to 124,300 GgCO₂ in 2030, representing a colossal annual increase of over 10.5 per cent. This rate of increase far outstrips the expected rates of growth of GHG emissions from the electricity and other sectors. And whereas Egypt hopes to achieve considerable mitigation of total GHG contributions over the same period (a 33 per cent reduction in the electricity sector and a 65 per cent reduction in the oil and gas sector), hopes for CO₂ mitigation from the transportation sector are much more modest, at only 7 per cent by 2030. This modest mitigation will largely be because of an expansion of the metro and electrified rail networks in Egypt during the 2015–2030 period and the removal of subsidies on vehicle fuels. In other words, the government is aware of the serious problems that its transportation sector represents when it comes to the country’s contributions to GHG emissions.

Greater Cairo’s Urban Sprawl and GHG emissions

9The Greater Cairo Region (GCR) – made up of the Cairo Governorate and parts of the Giza and Qalyubia Governorates – had a population of 20.2 million in 2017, representing about 23 per cent of the nation’s total. However, the GCR contributes at least 40 per cent of national transportation emissions (45 million tons CO₂ equivalent) and contains over 50 per cent of all motorized vehicles in Egypt (the number of which is increasing at a rate of at least 3.6 per cent per annum) (Abbass, Kumar and El-Gendy 2021, 285).

10In the last two decades, the GCR has received a certain interest in problems of traffic congestion, air pollution and poor public transportation and their social and economic costs (World Bank 2013). More recently, the World Bank’s Greater Cairo Air Pollution Management and Climate Change Project has been supporting Egypt’s efforts to reduce both air pollution and climate pollutant emissions, in line with the country’s Sustainable Development Strategy (as contained in Egypt Vision 2030, see World Bank 2020). The main policies being supported include improving Egypt’s air quality management system, improving solid waste management in the GCR, supporting the introduction of electric buses and encouraging behavioural changes by communities and service providers as they relate to surface transport. However, the project does not include the promotion of any policies that could mitigate GHG emissions in the GCR caused by massive urban sprawl in desert new cities; this peripheral urban sprawl is not even mentioned as constituting a fundamental contributor to carbon emissions.

11A similar ignorance of sprawling urban development around Cairo can be found in what little literature exists on urban sprawl and the GCR. A quick Google search reveals that almost all academics and commentators who take up this issue restrict themselves to deploring informal or unplanned development, mainly on agricultural lands. This is ironic, since such unplanned development has, over 60 years, taken up only some 180 square kilometres (only a fourth of the area of Cairo proper and less than 7 per cent of the GCR’s 2019 urban footprint), and yet it currently houses over 60 per cent of the metropolis’s population. Such ‘unplanned’ development produces an extremely dense and compact urban fabric, hardly the kind of urban sprawl that the OECD and UN-Habitat, among others, describe. Yet, as is frequently the case in Egypt, informal settlements are blamed for a whole range of economic and social ills.

12It is undeniable that the GCR has experienced extremely extensive urban sprawl. This sprawl is massive, accelerating and, remarkably, all planned. It has produced and is still producing urban patterns that are most strongly related to increased GHG emissions (as enumerated in the OECD report mentioned above). But for some reason, such desert sprawl has been given little attention, probably because it is planned and has been sanctioned by the state as part of the government’s national new towns programme. This new towns programme, which was launched in the late 1970s, has already established some forty-five new towns throughout the country, and many more are on the drawing boards. Eight of these new towns have been set up around Cairo (Tenth of Ramadan, Sixth of October, Fifteenth of May, El Obour, Sheikh Zayed, El Shorouk, El Badr and New Cairo), and most of these new towns have had their boundaries extended several times.

13All these new developments around Cairo rely on the continued availability of empty tracts of public land. While in theory having ample empty public land available is an enviable situation that many metropolitan areas worldwide wish they found themselves in, in the GCR the exploitation of this resource over the decades has relied on the misguided belief that modern, high-standard, low-density, sprawling, car-oriented developments operating under top-down bureaucratic dirigisme would quickly create jobs, absorb the increasing metropolitan population and provide an attractive alternative to informal settlements. That this was not happening was already apparent in the 1990s, but the same policies have continued and even accelerated in the last twenty-five years, with more and more desert tracts designated for new-town expansion. The government’s announcement in 2015 that it would create a new administrative capital (NAC) east of Cairo on a huge 700 km² tract of land represents the most extreme example of these policies.

14The new towns around Cairo have been very successful in attracting modern commercial, entertainment, business, educational and medical activities, and these have become scattered rather randomly throughout new-town landscapes. However, there has been a near complete failure to create communities and economies in which the mass of the metropolitan population could thrive (Sims 2012). Instead, most residential development has been targeted at Cairo’s middle and upper classes (and the speculative real estate investment that goes along with this kind of development). This trend has become even more pronounced with the launch of the NAC in 2015. In effect, it has been difficult for the new towns around Cairo to attract even a small fraction of their intended population. According to the 2017 census, the eight new towns around Cairo had a combined population of just 1.3 million, only a paltry 6.4 per cent of that of the GCR. Census figures also show that the GCR’s population increased by 4.9 million from 2006 to 2017, while the new towns around Cairo absorbed only 14 per cent of this figure, with the rest absorbed by Cairo proper, mostly in informal settlements.

15The spatial configuration of the new towns around Cairo (including the NAC) is characterized by discontinuous built environments, segregation of land uses and numerous large open areas and wide traffic corridors. Dispersed high-density multifunction concentrations or islands are very common. Cul-de-sacs, mono-use enclaves and excessive limited-access highways and high-speed interchanges are the main vocabularies of urban design norms. These norms may be attractive to the car-oriented middle classes and allow for comfortable individual lifestyles, but taken together they demand mobility systems that inherently contribute greatly to GHG emissions and air pollution.

16These sprawling desert developments around Cairo are slowly being populated by car-owning segments of the GCR’s population; those who are relatively well-off. And travel from elsewhere in the GCR to the many commercial, industrial, service and entertainment attractions found in the new towns also requires, in most cases, the use of private vehicles over very long distances. Consequently, not only are these new towns not inclusive; their spatial layouts also generate transportation patterns that can only greatly increase carbon emissions.

Current Sprawl and Residential Densities in the GCR

17The most direct way to describe the dynamics of urban sprawl is to look at the composition of metropolitan population densities. This was done for the year 2017, and projections were made for the year 2027 (see Tables 1 and 2).

Note 1: ‘Cairo proper’ is all of the historical metropolis as it has expanded contiguously on both sides of the Nile (see Figure 1).

Note 2: ‘Authorized new areas’ are mostly the eight new towns around Cairo, including their formal extensions. Overall, as of 2017 perhaps a third of these new areas were already built-up and mature, although development is rarely complete and urban landscapes still show patchy spatial patterns, with undeveloped parcels sprinkled throughout. Another third of these authorized new areas is made up of plots that have been sold to developers or allocated to state agencies. On these lots, a few projects have completed their first phases and ground has been broken for most of the rest (see Figure 1) Finally, in the remaining third of these areas, vacant superblocks are still being allocated/sold, and off-site infrastructure is being installed.

18Overall, as can be seen in Table 1, Cairo proper – where almost everyone lives – had a gross area of 610 square kilometres in 2017, with a population of 18.6 million and a high average residential density of 30,491 people per square kilometre (305 per hectare). In contrast, the GCR’s authorized desert development extended over an enormous 1,880 square kilometres, three times the area of Cairo proper, but had a population of only one-twelfth of that of Cairo proper and a very low density of only 8.7 people per hectare.

19By 2027 (see Table 2), it is expected that Cairo proper will have expanded very modestly to 650 square kilometres but will have absorbed most of the population growth over the preceding ten years (an additional 5.5 million people). In contrast, authorized new areas by 2027 will have expanded dramatically to 3,810 square kilometres, more than doubling in size. The residential population of these areas will also have almost doubled (an additional 1.6 million). The result will be that average residential densities in the new desert areas will actually have slightly decreased, from 857 people per square kilometre to 840 people per square kilometre. In other words, the already huge imbalance between core and periphery densities in the GCR is expected to be maintained and even increase.

20This dualism in the GCR’s make-up is visualized in Figure 1. The sharp contrast between Cairo proper and the sprawling urban landscapes to the east and west is very apparent. And, as can be seen, yet more new town extensions and new projects are likely to be added to the far desert fringes. Figure 1 shows that there are major limited-access highways (ring roads and regional arteries that were finished in 2021) which will, inevitably, open up more, very far-flung virgin desert land for all kinds of sprawling and disjointed development.

21The low density and disjointed nature of peripheral development in the GCR can be highlighted by looking at the particular development of the eastern desert quadrant. This contiguous area, extending over 2,100 square kilometres (see Figure 1), is twice the size of the city of Los Angeles and also twice that of New York City. It contains the new towns of El Badr, El Obour, Tenth of Ramadan, New Cairo and El Shorouk, plus the NAC. But it also contains other developments, in particular the new Ministry of Defence, Future City, El Heikastep compound, New Heliopolis and the Robiki industrial complexes. And more schemes are being added to the south and east.

Figure 1. Greater Cairo with urban extensions and highways (Cairo proper in black; 1952 Cairo in light blue)

GCR Sprawl and the Problem of Public Transport

22In the decades of sparse and sprawling development in the new towns around Cairo, public transportation has been a neglected factor. Until recently, there were only very few and infrequent Cairo Transportation Authority (CTA) bus services out to the new towns (leaving informal minibus systems and tuk-tuks to meet demand). Thus, transportation has been a serious problem for carless families who might choose to live in one of the new towns (in fact, poor transportation services have for years been identified as one of the major obstacles to the development of Cairo’s new towns). With the exception of Fifteenth of May and, to a lesser extent, El Obour, all new towns around Cairo are tens of kilometres away from the city’s central areas or from any other large urban agglomerations. However, in 2016, the government announced the construction of a light-rail line with twelve stops that would link to the metro’s Third Line, serve the GCR’s eastern desert cities and terminate at the NAC. This line was inaugurated in July 2022. An ambitious monorail system is also under construction to link the NAC to Nasr City in the east quadrant and Sixth of October to Giza City in the west quadrant. These two projects represent a quantum leap for public transportation to Cairo’s new towns, but it remains to be seen how many people who own cars will choose to ride these new systems.

23Even if these public transportation lines will attract a large ridership (which some experts question due to fare prices, frequency, and access issues), movement within the new towns is and will remain an intractable problem. The issue is, again, space and distance. The new towns are planned on such huge scales and exhibit such low densities that it is hard to see how public bus networks could be made to function and provide frequent, convenient services from one neighbourhood to another without requiring huge subsidies. And it is unlikely that those with private vehicles will shift to these public transportation networks for in-town journeys. In fact, this is the main issue with both the light-rail and the monorail systems: how to get to and from the various stations, all of which are located far from residential areas and most of which are also far away from commercial and service establishments. In other words, the ‘last mile’ (or rather the last five to ten kilometres) is the crucial issue for public transportation in the new towns, This issue, in a sparse, low-density landscape that is already full of private car users, will remain the main challenge.

Summing Up: A GHG-Heavy Future for the GCR

24It should be clear that the ways the new towns around Cairo have been designed and have expanded during the last fifty years have created an enormous and discontinuous urban sprawl that guarantees the primacy of individual personal transportation and locks in the generation of large and increasing quantities of GHGs. And there is every indication that the processes that created this sprawl are set to continue unabated.

25It is difficult to see how such a depressing future can be avoided. Tinkering on the margins – more electric rail lines, more park-and-ride facilities, more shuttle buses on main corridors and more promotion of carbonless last-mile solutions – might help. But the task is overwhelming, given the structural conditions and the existing momentum for yet more sprawl. And unfortunately, the government does not yet have a policy to reduce private car usage in the GCR. Raising awareness among both citizens and decision makers might help if it were possible to demonstrate that continuing such sprawl policies will slow Egypt’s economic growth as well as compromise the country’s sustainable development.

26One might ask, does Egypt not have the right to create the same extravagant urban sprawl as has occurred in the West? After all, it is not Egypt that has contributed to the current global climate crisis. This is very true, but even if it were possible to ignore GHG increases, Egypt will still suffer from the high costs of urban sprawl – in terms of the unsustainable rise in fossil fuel consumption, increased traffic congestion, increased infrastructure costs and the drain on state budgets implied by such a car-oriented urban future.