Egypt is currently running a race against time to populate its new administrative capital, located a few dozen kilometers east of the current capital Cairo.
In the heart of the new city, workers are carrying out the finishing work on wide boulevards including the various government offices, a huge domed parliament building, a spacious presidential palace and a row of impressive mosques.
The large business center that is taking shape will be connected to the city’s residential neighborhoods by light rail and next to it is a huge park that is about ten kilometers long. The iconic tower that stands in the heart of the new business district has already reached its peak and overlooks the empty desert landscape around it. Many of the projects are already nearing completion and the population should start as early as the summer months.
Despite the many institutions the new city will be proud of, it still does not have a unique name and is simply referred to as the “new administrative capital”. The city is designed to be clean, spacious and technologically advanced, away from the urban chaos of Cairo.
The emirate funding for the project was halted in 2015, but this did not deter the Egyptian government, which has pledged to invest $ 25 billion in the project, alongside funding from private investors from around the world.
“The rate of completion of the various projects across the city is currently at 60 percent,” Khaled Husseini, a spokesman for the new administrative capital project, told Reuters. He explains that the arrival of the first civil servants to the city is expected as early as July and the official opening, which will include the relocation of the Presidency and Parliament to the city, will come at the end of 2021.