Egyptian Sprawl
By Alex Marshall
With its move to a new city in the desert, is the American University in Cairo buying sanctuary or isolation?
“I started wearing it six months ago; I just felt like I wanted to,” Nancy El-Orindy says about the traditional Hijab scarf that she, like many women in Cairo, wears over her hair. “We are supposed to be covered so we don’t attract too much attention from guys.” The 19-year-old student slouches in a wicker chair in the central courtyard of American University in Cairo, an unlikely school in the heart of the capital city of Egypt. Around her, classmates sit at café-style tables and chairs, and young men play basketball on a shortened, urban-sized basketball court behind a wire fence. As the students lounge, a half dozen or so cats, ubiquitous in Cairo, slink about the walkways, stairs, and tables.
Orindy’s story illustrates the Waring-blender whirl of money, culture, religion, and history in the region. On the one hand, she wears the Hijab as an example of her new commitment to her Islamic and Egyptian roots. On the other hand, she plays college soccer–a passion she probably picked up in her native Canada, where she was born to Egyptian parents. She speaks English better than Arabic. And the professional goal of this Hijab-wearing, Canadian-born soccer player? “I want to go to fashion school, to be a dress designer,” she says with an embarrassed smile. “I like Gucci and Prada.” She can’t wear the clothes of the designers she admires, she says, but she can still design similar items for other women.
Orindy is one of 5,000 students at American University in Cairo (AUC), a school that is confronting and capitalizing on similar cross-cultural forces. Founded by Presbyterian missionaries from Minnesota in 1919, it is presently “an Egyptian University with an international student body teaching an American-style liberal arts education,” says its immediate past president, John D. Gerhart. Many of Egypt’s most prominent officials send their children to AUC. Suzanne Mubarak, wife of Egypt’s current strong-man president, is a graduate of the school, as are the couple’s two sons. But despite its largely Middle Eastern student body, the board of the school is still mostly American, and some of its funding comes through a stream of income set up by the United States government. It is routinely called “the best university in Cairo,” and many Arabs see it as part of a way their region might modernize: by copying the best of American-style liberalism in the classic tradition, through openness, education, and scientific thought.
Now the institution is embarking on an equally cross-cultural expansion program. The school is moving its entire campus from the heart of downtown Cairo to a spot 30 kilometers or so outside the city, on the edge of the desert, where it will occupy 260 acres in the middle of a planned new city called New Cairo. AUC has hired some of the world’s top architects to design the grounds, buildings, and interiors. Currently under construction, the $300 million project is intended to help the school become, if it isn’t already, the premiere research and teaching university in the Middle East.
But the university is expanding at a time when the American presence in the Middle East is expanding in ways that are highly inflammatory, at least within the middle east. This past spring American jets were bombing Iraqi cities just across the Nile and Red Sea. As American troops neared Baghdad, 50,000 Egyptians protested the American war and battled police at Tahrit Square outside AUC’s front gates. In fact, several AUC students were injured fighting police. In moving outside the city itself, the school is escaping some of these turbulent forces. But is it buying sanctuary or isolation? In moving to a closed, gated campus in the suburbs, AUC is gaining space but may be losing its soul.
The map of New Cairo outlines 46,000 acres, or 72 square miles–the equivalent of almost three Manhattan islands. It is the latest in a line of a half dozen “new cities” Egypt has built over the last half century in attempts to channel its swelling population. Presently, New Cairo looks like the outer growth edge of Houston or Dallas, with the replacement of blocky Cairo apartment buildings for Texas-styles subdivisions. These apartment complexes are springing up on cul-de-sacs placed off wide, empty highways. Closer to the center city a typical pattern of amenities is going up, including two water-hungry golf courses and a huge Carrefour supermarket. If all goes as planned (a big if), state planners project that 2.5 million people, a population the size of Chicago’s, will live here. Near the site of the AUC campus two broad boulevards are planned; on a map at least, they are supposed to fan out in Beaux-arts style, with homes and other buildings between them.
In its location, shape, size, and relationship to the highway, the new campus essentially resembles a regional shopping mall. The new school will have two million square feet of floor space set on amoeba-shaped 270 acres. As with a mall, parking lots will ring the new complex, with shrubbery and other landscaping to soften their impact. Students, who in Egypt are accustomed to living at home, will drive or be driven on the city’s beltway highway to the school. Many students live in wealthy suburbs outside the city, so they will actually be closer to the new campus than the old one.
The buildings and spaces–designed by an international team of seven firms–are imaginative and subtle, drawing on the approach of Islamic architecture if not its well-recognized symbols. The campus has few horseshoe-shaped arches or minarets, but it does have a lot of courtyards, wooden screens, and pathways that blend inside and outside space–all common in Islamic architecture. At a time when upper-class Egyptians, like Texans, are proud of their ability to air condition spaces, the university will rely on substantially natural cooling devises like courtyards, “wind catchers”–open vents on upper stories that funnel cooler air into a building–and groves of lemon, palm, and olive trees. The primary architect is a joint venture of Sasaki Associates of Massachusetts, and Community Design Collaborative of Cairo, led by Abdelhalim Ibrahim Abdelhalim. On a site plan by Carol R. Johnson Associates and SITES International, Cairo, there’s also a library by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates; student housing, a main auditorium, and a campus center by Legoretta + Legoretta of Mexico City; and athletic facilities by Ellerbe Becket.
The school’s present campus occupies a relatively tiny 7.3 acres in the heart of an older “New Cairo,” the nineteenth-century city laid out by Khedive Ismail after a visit to Paris during its renovation under Baron Haussmann in the 1860s. The school sits at a central square as broad, Parisian-style avenues merge around it. In fleeing all this the university is gaining space and flexibility but losing a richer cultural context. Already privileged, its student body will have even less contact with ordinary Egyptians. Right now, the university has its own stop on the city’s new subway system, and it’s just a block away from the enormous Egyptian Museum, designed by the British under colonial rule. The medieval city is a short drive or walk away.
“They did not try hard enough to get it together downtown,” says one local architect. “There are plenty of good examples of urban universities, like the Sorbonne or Leiden. The students could even walk a half mile to a building. They will be away from everyone and everything on the new campus. I’ll be damned if I’ll go schlepping out there.”
Another potential pitfall for the school is whether suburban New Cairo will ever come together in a style that resembles what is on the planning documents. At a luncheon in February, after the official groundbreaking, at the Katameya Golf and Tennis Resort in New Cairo, school officials and city planners began arguing over the area’s future and who would pay for what. “We try to get natural gas, and [city officials] say, ‘Sure, for twenty million dollars,'” complains Hussein M. El-Sharwaky, vice president of new campus development at AUC. “We want a metro line, they say, ‘Okay. One-hundred and twenty million dollars.'”
One Egyptian planner urged the school to open the campus to the public. “Don’t put up a fence,” says Raouf M.K. Helmi, who has a son and daughter studying at AUC. “Open your playground, your library. Open your beautiful facilities to the people.” In fact, the new campus of AUC, like the old one, will be mostly closed. The public can enter the exterior courtyard, an arts center, and the school bookstore, but the bulk of the campus will only be admissible with a pass.
Sometime in 2007, the new campus is set to open. Although the school appears set to gain a bright new campus with all the amenities, it is hard not to conclude it will lose much of its connectivity with other citizens and sectors of society. In moving to the fringes of the city, an elite, isolated school will become more so.
Abdelhalim, the bearded wise man of Cairo architecture who came back to his native city after 11 years in Berkeley, says the new campus will be a center for the commingling of cultures and ideas, regardless of its location. Just as the school blends Islamic architecture within an American-style campus, he hopes it will fertilize the Islamic world with Western-style education, to produce a new Islamic version of it. The essential question, he says is “What does a liberal arts education mean in Egypt, within an Islamic community?”
–Published in Metropolis Magazine, September 2003