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 Maspero Triangle on the banks of the River Nile.
The Maspero Triangle on the banks of the River Nile. - The district known as the Maspero Triangle is only a few minutes’ walk from most of central Cairo’s five-star hotels, yet few tourists – or indeed middle-class Egyptians – have ever visited it. Lying just north of Tahrir Square, it is hemmed in by giant advertising hoardings to the south and a sprawling clothes market to the north; to the west, on the banks of the river, stands a building housing the government’s mammoth propaganda complex. Most of the neighbourhood’s 41,000 residents live hidden from view in the shadow of the building’s communication masts, from which dozens of state television and radio channels are broadcast 24 hours a day to every corner of the country. “Everyone knows everyone here,” says Ezzat Abdel-Ain, a local metals merchant. “And everyone has heard a lot about the plans.” n common with many poorer areas of the city long coveted by investors and property speculators, the Maspero Triangle has been the focus of various redevelopment plans – none of which have actually materialised – for many years. Under the regime of toppled dictator Hosni Mubarak, massive top-down regeneration projects epitomised the worst features of Egypt’s exclusionary state: elite corruption, growing inequality and a planning process under which ordinary citizens were more likely to be forcibly evicted from their homes than consulted on the future of their neighbourhoods. With such a destructive track record, it is little surprise that some Maspero residents are instinctively distrustful of any new government proposals, and of the Gulf financiers who own much of Maspero’s property portfolio. “They want this land for businessmen,” argues Tarek. “Whatever they do, 90% will be for the rich and not for the real people. They’ll take our homes by force and kick us out to the desert.” And yet what’s notable about the latest iteration of the Maspero “masterplan” is that, from the outset, the emphasis has been on doing things differently. When work began in 2013, shortly after the rise to power of former military general and current Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, it took the form of a unique experiment – raising hopes that the new regime might be willing to enter a rights-based era of urban planning, geared more towards the needs of citizens than the interests of private capital. © Foster + Partners

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.