With the Middle East’s martial concerns filling the news, it was a change of pace this month to visit the region’s biggest city, Cairo, and examine more quotidian concerns, namely its urban planning policies and problems.

With approximately 18 million people (estimates vary), Cairo can be seen as both a problem and a solution to the challenges of a developing country. Cairo is, in one analyst’s term, a “Mega-city” – a huge, expanding cloud of population, much of it poor, that by some estimates is adding 1.25 million people a year. Where all these people live, how to give them water, dispose of their waste, and allow them to travel, are the central questions. The challenges of Cairo are, in a word, infrastructure.

In that, it is perhaps similar to New York, a metropolitan area it will soon surpass in size. But as our region struggles to add trains to the airport and another Hudson River rail tunnel, Cairo is more akin to New York of the 19th century. It is struggling to add a sewer system, subway service and parks.

All these needs have meant enormous investments in infrastructure. They are funding it in part due to help from their past (and some might say present) Colonial masters, France, Britain and the United States. The French helped finance and build the new subway, while Britain and the United States have helped finance and build a new sewer system as well as various other infrastructure projects seen around town. (The peace settlement with Israel has provided enormous financial benefits for Egypt. Since the Camp David accords in 1979, Egypt has received about $25 billion in aid from the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID.) On the streets, Cairo is a bustling, lively place at all hours. Even at midnight, streets are full, with people sitting drinking tea and playing backgammon. About a third of the women wear the Hijab, the Islamic scarf or veil that wraps around the head, while a tiny percentage also wear the niqab, the veil that covers the face completely.

Long-time Cairo residents notice that the percentage of women wearing traditional Islamic dress has increased tremendously in the last decade. It is a statement now not only of religious faith, but of national identity.

Not only were the sidewalks crowded, but the streets themselves were jammed with cars, mostly tiny, box-like black and white Fiats that were usually decades old. Traveling a mile or two by car, often the only option, could take an hour.

The Metro: Tunnels Through Sand All this street congestion is one reason why the city’s new Metro has caught on so quickly. Line 1, which connected two existing suburban railways through a four-stop, center-city subway, opened in 1987. It has 27 stations. Line 2 opened in 1999 and has 18 stops, 13 of which are underground. Line 1 cost $585 million, much of it from France. Egypt financed the $3 billion for Line 2 mostly by itself.

The two lines cut across the city in a rough Xpattern, with Line 2 running beneath the Nile River to Giza, where the Great Pyramids await. Despite its newness, already 1.8 million “Cairenes” use the Metro daily. By comparison, this is almost three times the 625,000 riders daily on the Washington, D.C. metro system. People use the Cairo Metro even though its price, 50 pilasters (about 10 cents), is considered high.

In its design, the Metro is clean and neat, with wide passageways and platforms. Designing the individual stations involved factors that were more common a century ago in New York. In Cairo, much of the population is illiterate (one estimate was only a third of the population could read and write), which is why the subway designers have given individual stations strong visual identities.

At the Opera station on Line Two, for example, images of Pharonic women in ancient Egyptian dress, inlaid in tile on the station walls, greet those who pull into the stations.

“This helps people figure out where they are,” said Ezz Eldin Fahmy, a principal and architect with EHAF Consulting Engineers in Cairo, the firm that designed the stations. “When they see the triangles look like boats, they know they are in Rod El Farago station. We had the theme of boats because this used to be the only port on the River Nile.” Under design is a third line, which will cut across the city to from east to west, and extend eventually out to the city’s airport.

Waste In and, Hopefully, Out Until recently, the city’s overburdened sewer system backed up more than 100 days a year, flooding the streets with raw waste. The city’s only formal sewer system was one built by the British just before World War I for a city of about one million people. It was grossly inadequate.

Using US-AID and British money, the city over the last two decades has built an entirely new sewer system, including an enormous treatment plant north of the city. Because the old system was so overburdened, this did not mean simply expanding a new system, but building a new one from scratch.

“They had to rethink the whole network,” said Mona Serageldin, professor of urban planning at Harvard Design School and a Cairo native who teaches a course on the city. “It was a major challenge in design.” The core of the new system was a “trunk line” – the central line to which others attach. This trunk line is 5 meters in diameter, and extends in a sloping, gravity-fed descent from south to north through the city until it ends up by the new treatment plant at a depth of 25 meters. Now completed in its core phases, it is one of the largest sewer projects in the world.

But the city is still struggling to connect everyone to it. Millions of the city’s residents live in illegally built concrete and brick apartments that scatter out across the desert in endless waves. One analyst estimated that 25 percent of the households in Cairo lack water and sewer connections.

As this mega-city struggles with sewers and subways, it’s also fighting to direct overall growth patterns. To keep sprawl from gobbling up agricultural land up and down the Nile, the government is redirecting growth to the east and west, into the desert. This has meant the establishment of several “new cities.” One of them, New Cairo, has a growth area of 43,000 acres – the equivalent of nine Manhattans in land area – and 2 to 3 million people are expected to live there.

It’s difficult to love this new “city” blooming in the desert. One section of “New Cairo” looked like a Middle-eastern version of outer Houston, with mega-supermarkets, concrete apartment buildings and even a golf course blooming from the desert.

Still, directing growth there seemed better than by the Nile, and plans are to eventually have transit.

The city is also building parks. The biggest is the new 87-acre Al-Azhar park, planned as Cairo’s “Central Park,” built just outside the Medieval city walls on a 1000-year-old garbage dump. (City inhabitants essentially pitched their garbage over a wall, and the pile eventually grew higher than the city itself.) Now under construction, this park will include promenades, restaurants, orchards and ponds. Buried underneath this calm environment are more serious functions – three enormous water tanks, each 80 meters in diameter, the size of small stadiums.

“We have 16 million people and we have almost no open space – nothing,” said Dr. Maher Stino, one of the park designers, as he led a visitor around the park site. Nearby, workers chiseled away at slabs of limestone for a park restaurant.

“We want to help the public understand what a park is and how to appreciate plants and nature.

We also want something unique to Cairo. We don’t want a copy of Regent Park [in London].” As the New York region struggles with its own challenges, it can perhaps gain a bit of perspective in seeing a similar sized region struggle with far greater ones.

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First Published Feb. 20, 2003, in Spotlight on the Region, the newsletter of Regional Plan Association in New York City.