Glass towers, modernist boulevards and elegant roof gardens ... Can Foster + Partners’ vision for Cairo’s Maspero Triangle avoid the controversies of Egypt’s past megaprojects, and encourage a new era of urban design – and democracy?
stone’s throw from the River Nile, nestled deep within a labyrinthine tangle of narrow alleyways, bustling coffee shops and peeling paintwork, Tarek is staring at a phone. The images on the screen depict a sleek, modernist boulevard overlooked by a row of glass skyscrapers. Roof gardens crown each building, and on one balcony, a lone, elderly Egyptian man is playing chess and pouring tea.
Each rendering has been produced by Foster + Partners, Britain’s most prestigious architecture firm which has just won a competition to redesign an iconic district in central Cairo, vowing to “set the benchmark for urban regeneration throughout the country”. As part of its plans, the street on which Tarek is standing will eventually become a lagoon, lined with “cafés, restaurants and shops that will make this a highly desirable leisure destination.”
The Foster masterplan has also come under criticism for failing to preserve any of the area’s unique 19th-century architecture, and for attempting to impose a “Haussmann-style” order on the neighbourhood. But perhaps most worrying for the Maspero community – the issue of what will happen to existing residents – remains clouded with uncertainty.
In a statement to the Guardian, Foster + Partners state: “The competition for the Maspero Triangle was run under the auspices of the UIA (Union of International Architects). We understand that the local residents and landowners were involved in the competition process … The Ministry of Housing is currently considering the next steps.”
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In the masterplan’s glossy, homogenised renderings of Maspero’s future, the fiercely contested past and present of the area (and the country surrounding it) is nowhere to be found. The Maspero building has been the site of several political flashpoints in recent years, including multiple demonstrations against the state news complex, and a notorious army massacre of 28 largely Coptic Christian protesters in 2011. In contrast, the Foster images depict imaginary, compliant figures nestled within identikit beige blocks and gleaming glass towers – subjects of what Egyptian writer Adham Selim calls Egypt’s “regime of graphics”, which specialises in serving up pixelated dreams of tomorrow in order to better exert control over today.
Not everyone has lost faith in Maspero’s potential, however. Some of Egypt’s most respected urbanists are still cautiously optimistic that, if implemented sensitively, the Foster + Partners vision could result in a real step forward in progressive planning compared with what came before.
Many residents, too, are excited by the prospect of concrete change – though steadfast in their insistence that they will not be moved from the area. “Who doesn’t like the look of this?” remarks Ezzat Abdel-Ain. “But there is a group of us who will never leave here. There is no life outside of it, this place is my soul.”
It is, perhaps, telling that in the Foster renderings, only one recognisable Maspero landmark remains: the state propaganda building, its mast intact and presumably still beaming out digitally-composed images of Egypt’s future to its inhabitants. Whether or not Tarek’s question – “Where are we in this picture?” – will, by that point, be answered, remains to be seen.