Cairo's medieval urban history is notoriously complex, the product of several urban relocations, refortifications and competing religious communities. Yet, until recently, Cairo's modern development was viewed as a much more straightforward process. Abu-Lughod's ‘Tale of two cities’ exemplified the dual city approach that was fashionable for so long in the study of Cairo and other colonial cities.Footnote 1 For Abu-Lughod, the central feature of the dual city was ‘the introduction of western urban forms’ and the emergence of districts that were socially and physically modern alongside the traditional city.Footnote 2 Although Abu-Lughod has since modified her position, Raymond's recent epic history of Cairo repeated this ‘dual city’ view, observing that colonization produced ‘a boundary between different nationalities’, while Farhi similarly argued that foreigners turned Cairo's new Ismailiyah district into the ‘centre of a capital from which Egyptians were excluded’.Footnote 3 Chaichian's important comparative study of Egyptian and Iranian urbanization also allowed some ‘dual city’ assumptions to go unchallenged, despite recognizing the model's limitations.Footnote 4 The dual city thesis now has many critics. Studies of other Middle Eastern cities such as Tunis, Tehran and Alexandria have revealed the complexity of these urban forms and the very close mutual dependencies between the modern ‘western’ city and older settlements.Footnote 5 Recent work on supposed ‘dual cities’ in India has also highlighted a much more complex pattern of urban development, with research on Madras and Bombay illustrating the blurring of lines between ‘white’ and non-white communities and how modern urban forms were often fundamentally shaped by pre-modern settlement patterns and craft industries associated with the traditional economy.Footnote 6 Chaichian's work on Egypt and Iran has similarly recognized the existence of petty commodity production serving both the old and new urban economies, bringing with it a ‘semi-proletariat’ moving across indistinct boundaries, while Quataert has shown how traditional craft workers adapted to serve new industrial enterprises.Footnote 7 Recent historiography has also highlighted that even within the ‘traditional’ city of the Middle East there were often many different residential groups that retained the different social and economic characteristics of their antecedents.Footnote 8
Abu-Lughod's original view that, by the end of the nineteenth century, ‘Cairo had completed its physical and ecological mitosis into two distinct communities’ is now difficult to sustain for two reasons.Footnote 9 First, it neglects the differences within the communities of the traditional city and, secondly, the process of suburban spatial and physical transformation had only really just begun by 1900. The most dramatic changes in the urban morphology of Cairo took place in the period from 1900 to 1922, when the city underwent a rapid process of suburban growth. This process has largely been neglected by historians of Cairo who have preferred to focus on changes to the ‘historic city’ and the new commercial heart of the city to the west of Azbakiya. Yet the first quarter of the twentieth century saw the emergence of distinctive suburbs that gave Cairo much of what is regarded today as its ‘modern’ character. This process produced a wide range of spatial and architectural variety. This research focuses on some of the most important examples and explores the reasons for the plurality of suburban forms that emerged.
Suburbs as symbols of the modern – a reconsideration
The concept of ‘the modern’ is often applied to explain how specific technologies, frequently associated with bourgeois capitalism, are able to bring about urban change. In the context of colonial suburbanization, it is taken to refer to the emergence of new forms of urban space and new, usually foreign, residential groups.Footnote 10 Suburbs are therefore often taken to represent ‘the modern’ in both spatial terms and in their use of modern technologies, mass production, homogenized materials and mechanized services. This article emphasizes the limitations of this approach by focusing on how a variety of technologies were employed that, in turn, produced very different material, spatial and topographical outcomes. The concept of ‘the modern’ implies that the novel was favoured over the traditional. Yet many of the processes associated with suburbanization actually emphasized the protection and revival of what were thought to be ‘traditional’ norms. Suburban villas aped different historical styles, whether they be English Tudor, Bavarian Gothic or a local vernacular, while the physical layout of individual suburbs showed significant variation and drew inspiration from many sources.
In writing a history of ‘the modern’ in Cairo, one also has to be aware of the problematic nature of the concept in a city that had been ‘modernizing’ in different ways for well over a century before the British occupation of 1882. The emergence of capitalism and international trade is often regarded as an indicator of modernization. Yet in Cairo, capitalism had deep roots in the centuries-old tradition of Cairo as a great trading centre and in the ‘Islamic cultural revival’ of the latter years of the eighteenth century.Footnote 11 The importance of Mohamed Ali in the ‘modernization’ of early nineteenth-century Egypt has been the subject of many studies, with his development of irrigation, transport infrastructure and local industry providing much of the basis for future Egyptian prosperity. This phase saw the large-scale exploitation of cotton as a cash crop and the re-urbanization of Alexandria as a prosperous and ‘cosmopolitan’ port city. The reforms of Mohamed Ali brought with them substantial foreign investment and a rapid increase in foreign minority communities who were to play a key role in many elements of the Egyptian economy.Footnote 12 Greeks, for example, became very prominent in supplying business finance to usurers in the agricultural communities of the delta, and the Levantine Jewish community were increasingly important in land speculation and development.Footnote 13 Egypt was also very early in its development of technologically advanced inland transport facilities, such as the Muhammed Ali Canal and the Cairo-Alexandria railway of 1851, the first main-line railway in Africa.Footnote 14
If the nature and rapidity of urbanization are taken as a measure of ‘the modern’, this also presents a problem for those who would seek to argue that the coming of modern society in Egypt can be identified exclusively with the latter years of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth. If we accept Baer's estimates for urban population size, a problematic truth emerges. During the era 1821–1914, the most rapid rise in urban population seems to have come in the decades 1821–46, when the urban population rose from 9.5 per cent to 12.7 per cent of the national total. In the years 1897–1907, the proportion of the population that lived in major towns and cities actually declined from 15 per cent to 14.3 per cent.Footnote 15 By 1907, Cairo's population had reached 650,000, but in the previous decade it experienced a lower annual growth rate than Delta towns such as Damnhur and Bilqas and the four major towns in Middle Egypt, Madinat al-Fayyum, Minya, Bani Suwayf and Mallawi.Footnote 16 During this period, there was very little expansion of Cairo's poorer and working-class suburbs. Shubra was the only major exception, with its growth mainly fuelled by its proximity to the main railway station and supply warehouses.Footnote 17 This stalling of urban growth was partly due to Cromer's programme of agricultural improvements that encouraged peasants to remain on the land.Footnote 18 Urban growth was also retarded by ‘anti-modernization’ industrial policies that focused Egyptian economic development on the export of primary products, principally cotton and sugar, and intentionally inhibited the development of domestic industries that may have offered competition to British goods.Footnote 19 The result was that most of the new suburbs built before 1914 catered for the growing Egyptian and foreign middle class, the growth of which was linked to the expanding British-led central Egyptian bureaucracy.Footnote 20 Of course, for a deeper understanding of suburbia, a long-term perspective of the development of particular suburbs is required.Footnote 21 However, when undertaking this task, fitting Cairo's suburban development into established typologies of modern suburbia is problematic (see Figure 1).Footnote 22 Some suburbs, such as Ismailiyah, began as largely monofunctional residential middle-class suburbs but became overtaken with commerce. Others, such as Zamalek, retained their monofunctional residential character for a little longer but underwent transformation in the late 1920s. Meanwhile, Helwan and Heliopolis were conceived as multifunctional suburban ‘satellites’, but were multifunctional in very different ways.Footnote 23 Helwan was conceived as a resort town, while Heliopolis was to be a ‘balanced’ settlement with a mixed population and industrial employment.
Map of Cairo c. 1911 showing relative locations of (1) Ismailiyah, (2) Garden City, (3) Zamalek, (4) Helwan, (5) Maadi and (6) Heliopolis together with tramways and railways (extract from Wagner and Debes, Map of the Environs of Cairo, in K. Baedeker, Egypt and the Sudan, 7th edn (Leipzig and New York, 1914)).
Suburbs were not in themselves responsible for the introduction of ‘modern’ city technologies into Cairo's urban life. Street widening and improvement programmes could be dated to a Special Commission established in 1835. Modern water and gas supplies came to Cairo as early as 1865, with the establishment of the Cairo Water and Cairo Gas Company.Footnote 24 The telephone was introduced into Cairo in 1881 and its use was said in 1906 to ‘have become more general than in London’.Footnote 25 Electric tramways were developed from 1896. The application and deployment of these technologies was uneven but it did not follow a predictable ‘dual city’ pattern. Suburbs tended to be provided with public utilities from the outset, but modernization was not limited to these districts. Many small businesses were using telephones by 1914. By the Great War, tramways crossed Cairo, with lines penetrating deep into the ‘traditional’ city from El Musky to El Azar Mosque and south to El Manshiya and El Hayatim, and providing means of mobility from ‘old Cairo’ to the bucolic rural lines of Giza and northern Shubra.Footnote 26
Urban improvements in the central city were hampered by the lack of a municipal corporation for Cairo, with foreign interests under the Capitulatory regime reluctant to allow their consular authorities to cede rights of local taxation – a concession that would have been essential for the success of such an authority.Footnote 27 The planning of new developments was therefore largely left to private enterprise, loosely supervised by central government who provided the necessary legal concessions where public land or interests were affected. Land reform legislation in the 1850s permitted foreigners to own land and the next 70 years saw large-scale foreign investment in Egyptian real estate; by 1920, foreigners owned around 20 per cent of land in Egypt.Footnote 28 However, the lack of a municipal authority to plan or regulate development often produced a confusing mixture of old and new urban landscapes. Fire insurance maps of the Asbekiya district in 1905 reveal a bewildering mixture of small new grid-like street developments like Jardin Rossetti, surrounded by, and merging into, the alleys and passageways of the ‘traditional’ city.Footnote 29 This juxtaposition of new wealth and poverty often created a sense of insecurity, particularly as this was a time when recorded crime was increasing.Footnote 30 Suburbs offered wealthier classes an illusion of security, but it was only an illusion. Residents of exclusive suburbs like Maadi lived with the daily fear of bandits from nearby villages and, even in the exclusive Alexandrian suburbs of Ramleh, local Bedouin were inclined to see the lawns of luxury villas as excellent places for an encampment.Footnote 31 Much local policing was undertaken by untrained ghaffirs (watchmen) while the regular police were frequently accused of petty corruption.Footnote 32
The nationalist movement and civil resistance in 1919 and 1921 meant that post-war suburban development took place against a backdrop of increasing insecurity. In March 1919, the British military began using armoured cars and maxim guns to restore order, with predictably devastating results.Footnote 33 The next few years saw a continual period of strikes and civil disobedience, spurred on by insensitive policing and rising food prices. When the Cairo tramway and omnibus employees went on strike in August 1919, the fragility of suburban life was exposed. The donkey cart and rickshaw became the only means of transport. The continuing presence of the donkey in the suburbs represented the permeability of old and new technologies. For all the imported Vimto cordial and Johnny Walker whisky, suburbs continued to depend on the local traditional agricultural economies for much of their essential food supply – and that meant the continuing presence of the traditional souq (market) and farm cart. These dependencies, existing consumer preferences and the lack of an urban plan meant that suburbs were often the product of specifically local processes, utilizing resources and technologies according to local circumstance. Only through individual studies can one appreciate the varied impact of new processes and technologies on the overall shape of suburban Cairo.
The origins of suburbanization – the Ismailiyah quarter and the central districts
Although the Egyptian state played only a limited role in the management of suburbanization, the first suburb was planned as a corollary of Khedive Ismail's determination to bring European planning ideas to Cairo. The focus of developments was the Azbakiya quarter to the north of the walled city. Khedive Ismail began by demolishing traditional wooden houses and offering gifts of land to those prepared to build luxurious new buildings in the district. In 1869, Mahmud Falaki at the Ministry of Public Works produced a master plan for the ‘Hausmanization’ of Cairo, with wide boulevards cutting through the medieval city and a new residential district to the west of Azbakiya, called Ismailiyah, stretching down to what is now Tahrir Square and the Kasr Al Nil bridge. Had the entire plans come to fruition, major thoroughfares would have emanated from Azbakiya and the Abdin palace like the spokes of a wheel. However, the only thoroughfares that were implemented through the old city were those of Bab al-Hadid and Mohammed Ali, areas that required very little urban clearance. The only parts of the broader plans that were put into effect were those associated with the development of the Ismailiyah district.Footnote 34 The design of these streets reflected French practice with wide boulevards facing down onto midans (squares), all lit with ornamental oil and gas lamps in a Parisian style. Unfortunately, Egypt's financial problems of the 1870s meant that the take-up of properties was patchy and the area failed to become the stylish residential district that Khedive Ismail intended.
From the 1880s, Ismailiyah began to take on the character of a commercial suburb (Figure 2). The existence of good public infrastructure made this district the obvious location for commercial expansion and its proximity to the Nile made it attractive to developers seeking to benefit from the tourist boom of the late 1880s. Previously, all the leading hotels, Teak's, Hotel d'Orient and Hotel des Ambassadeurs had been in Azbakiya Square, but this gradually changed as Nile cruises and cheap land next to the Nile became available.Footnote 35 In 1867, travel guides lamented the ‘want of society in the Egyptian capital’.Footnote 36 Less than 20 years later, this had changed with the inauguration of the Opera House in Azbakiya and hotels and theatres in the new district. Land speculation coupled with the impoverishment of some of Egypt's traditional princely class, who had earlier occupied the suburb, helped accelerate this important change. Raafat's work on the area to the south of Midan Suleyman Pasha illustrates how land on which the palace of Prince Mohammed Ali Tewfik stood was first mortgaged and then sold to the Egyptian Land Company and a consortium of Syrian entrepreneurs.Footnote 37 The area was then divided and sold on in smaller parcels to those wanting to bring hotels, banks and retail developments to the district.Footnote 38 Much of the land surrounding what is now Midan Mustafa Kamel was taken by Italian Jewish developer Raphael Suares. This location, once part of the old hippodrome, was released for banking and retail development – and renamed Rondpont Suares. Similarly, Moise Cattuai Pasha owned a substantial piece of Nile-side property near Kasr al Dubara which he later sold for the building of the landmark Semiramis Hotel, completed in 1906.Footnote 39 This development and the success of the Savoy Hotel in Midan Sulleyman Pasha encouraged the movement of commercial and retail activity westwards from Azbakiya. The next decade saw the development of new landmarks including Café Riche and Groppi's patisserie, well known for its art nouveau features.Footnote 40 While these institutions were essentially European in character, services also developed to cater for Egyptian businessmen and aristocrats. The most important of these was the Mohamed Ali Club on Rue Sulleyman Pasha, designed by French architect Alexandre Marcel.
Midan Sulleyman Pasha in Ismailiyah, one of the grand commercial buildings erected in this ‘Paris on the Nile’ quarter (author).
The arrival of major department stores in the Ismailiyah district also did much to confer a sense of grandeur on the suburb. John Davies Bryan's, Stein's Oriental Stores and later Victor Tiring's became famous landmarks. However, their fame can be misleading as they were not typical of the retail landscape. For every department store there were dozens of smaller shops in the district, like the Bazaar Mourour, a modest three-storey vernacular building at the boundary with the Mousky district.Footnote 41 Even the grand ‘European’ thoroughfares such as Emad El-Din Street and Bab El Kadid were populated with smaller shops, catering for customers who were just as likely to be wealthier Egyptians as Europeans. Business names and descriptions suggest an ownership and clientele that were familiar with English, French, Greek and Arabic. It was a retail landscape in which one could buy the latest Parisian fashions, cricket bats made of English willow and Rowntree's chocolate, alongside shops selling traditional fuul and falafel, locally made furniture and baladi bread.
The transformation of the district into a commercial suburb helped encourage the development of a new elite residential suburb to the south of Kasr el Nil. This new Garden City district was inspired by Ebenezer Howard and similar European suburban planning movements.Footnote 42 Its roads cut through each other in a series of rambling tangled semi-circles and it was densely planted with trees and vegetation. It was in an excellent location to serve the city's commercial and political leaders as it was close to Ismailiyah and the new administrative district to the east that was later to house the Egyptian parliament. Garden City's origins were in a speculative commercial development, led by the Nile Land and Agricultural Company, a consortium of well-known European and Levantine entrepreneurs including Frantz Sofio, Charles Bacos and George Maksud.Footnote 43 The collapse of the Cairo land bubble during 1906–07 caused some difficulties for the company. However, as this was a relatively small development of 273 lots aimed at the very wealthy, it suffered less than some larger suburbs of the period. Despite its apparently European heritage, Garden City was most popular with the Egyptian, Levantine and Ottoman aristocracy and business elite. The largest property owners in the immediate post-war period were Egyptians, Prince Seif al Din, Medhat Yeken and Prime Minister Adly Yeken, and the Syrian financier Aziz Bahri.Footnote 44 With plots sold on an individual basis, Garden City exhibited a very wide range of architectural forms, some reflecting differences in national taste amongst Garden City residents. The Francophile Syro-Lebanese tended to support French architects, especially Georges Parcq who was particularly prolific in the period 1919–35. Egyptian aristocrats had a tendency to admire Italian Renaissance, Venetian and Arab-Norman styles associated with Italians Antonio Lasciac and Carlo Prampolini. Prince Seif al Din commissioned Italian architects to produce the three very distinctive Seif al Din buildings.Footnote 45 There was also local vernacular influence, with Islamic detailing sometimes placed onto modern neoclassical designs (Figure 3). Consequently, Garden City was characterized by its architectural variety drawing inspiration from around the Mediterranean.
Traditional mashrabiya and wooden decoration feature alongside modern villa architecture in Garden City (author).
Gezira (Zamalek) – an ‘English’ suburb
West of Kasr el Nil, in the middle of the Nile, is the island of Gezira. The island was linked to the mainland in 1872, with the completion of a toll bridge, but for many years most of the land on the northern part of Gezira remained in the hands of either the Khedivial family, whose Gezira Palace was to the north-east, or Christian religious foundations. Commercial residential development began in 1903 when Allan Joseph bought 100 feddans of land, on behalf of an English land company, from a religious institution.Footnote 46 Before this, there was very little building on Gezira island other than the Khedevial Sporting Club.Footnote 47 Residential development north of the Club, in what was to become known as the Zamalek district, was assisted by two initiatives. First, the construction in 1905 of the Boulaq Bridge provided more convenient and direct access to the centre of the city.Footnote 48 Secondly, the opening of a tramway route through Zamalek, from the central Ataba al Khadra district to the Giza Pyramids, provided a means of cheap, mass transit. In all likelihood, the tramway was built as a part of a wider land speculation, possibly the result of collusion between the British land syndicates who owned much of the land in Zamalek and the Belgian-owned tramway company. The Egyptian Hotels Company, headed by Lord Claude Hamilton, certainly made substantial profits through the sale of surplus land on their Gezira estate.Footnote 49 The immediate impact of the tramway was to make Zamalek a viable residential district for a middle class without its own carriages or automobiles. By 1915, much of the estate had been divided into plots and sold through speculators.
The development of ‘English’ Zamalek was, however, constrained by several important factors. The 1906–07 slump in the land market affected all speculative suburban development but the situation in Zamalek was exacerbated by the decision of the Egyptian government to withdraw future investment. In 1906–07, 19 government villas were constructed. These included three villas at the end of Ibn Zanki Street, built by the celebrated Ernest Tatham Richmond.Footnote 50 However, the appointment of Sir Eldon Gorst as successor to Lord Cromer as consul-general saw a change of policy and a temporary end to the building of these so-called ‘charity homes’ for Anglo-Egyptian government employees.Footnote 51 The British community dominated the early settlement of Zamalek, making up 52 of Zamalek's 82 long-term residents in 1913, but the withdrawal of government patronage meant that developers had to attract a wider range of customers.Footnote 52 Elite members of the British community, such as Sir Frederick Rowlatt, governor of the Central Bank of Cairo, and Sir Reginald Wingate, commander in chief of the Egyptian Army, were joined by prominent Belgians, including the head of the Sino-Belgian Bank, as well as Swiss and Jewish residents. After World War I, the number of Britons declined and by 1941 only 5 of the 19 Richmond villas were occupied by British residents.Footnote 53 As with Garden City, the increasingly cosmopolitan nature of the community was illustrated by the diverse architectural styles that began to appear. Rudiger Baron Biegeleben's Villa San Giorgio reflected his European heritage through a style of architecture that replicated that of a medieval Tyrolean castle.Footnote 54 Jean and Marcelle Hug's Swiss villa adopted a similarly Gothic style, with hints of eclecticism typical of its French architect.Footnote 55 There were sometimes significant differences to be observed between houses of the European community and those of Egyptian or Syrian residents. This can perhaps best be seen in the Palace of Prince Amr Ibrahim on Gezira Street, with its ‘neo-Islamic’ features and traditional wooden mashrabiya (decorative wooden screen) replacing the French windows that were a more typically Zamalek design.Footnote 56
The tramway and bridge that had done so much to make the city accessible from Zamalek also made Zamalek very accessible from the city.Footnote 57 The technology that created the possibility of the suburb undermined the quiet character that its planners and original residents had anticipated. Daytrippers began to make Zamalek a very busy district. This, in turn, brought about traffic management and crime problems and, later, the commercialization of the central streets around Avenue Zamalek. Foreign embassies soon occupied the larger villas, while shops, cheap pensions and petrol stations appeared on the main thoroughfare. By the time the northernmost tip of Zamalek was sold for development in 1934 most new properties were lower-middle-class apartments.Footnote 58 Such was the post-war pressure on Cairo and the impact of cheap transport that the ‘aristocratic’ English suburb changed its social characteristics in less than two decades.
Helwan and Maadi – suburban rivals
Helwan and Maadi took a significantly different form from both Zamalek and Garden City. The development of modern Helwan was, like Zamalek, close to a former royal palace but, unlike Zamalek, the presence of the royal quarters had a significant impact on the nature of suburban developments. The royal palace, named Ezbet El Walda, the ‘mother's manor’, was built in 1877 for the mother of Khedive Ismail.Footnote 59 The estate continued to be popular with royal household and, from the late 1870s, speculative developers began a ‘new town’ to the south to exploit the potential of the ancient mineral waters of Helwan district. A public railway ensured the area was just 30 minutes from central Cairo by train. This was not a conventional suburb but a new spa town with facilities for foreigners who wished to recuperate from illness or winter in Egypt (Figure 4). The 1914 Baedeker Guide compared Helwan with Harrogate, Bath and Aix-les-Bains, while the Egyptian Gazette rated it as ‘top of the list as a health resort’.Footnote 60 Laid out on a grid pattern, it featured simple neoclassical houses, many in ‘colonial style’ with wooden roofs and large verandas. The Grand Hotel des Bains, opened in 1888, became the dominant feature of the town centre. Unlike central suburbs, Helwan was able to benefit from changes in legislation introduced by the British that allowed small towns to establish their own municipality, although local politics revealed tensions between those residents who favoured public expenditure on improvements that would attract visitors and those who complained about rising expenditure that was being used to subsidize tourist facilities at the cost of Helwan's residential character.
The Helwan Pension: a typical neoclassical design with window features inspired by local architectural traditions (author).
Much of Helwan's success depended on its hotel and visitor trade and relatively few of its permanent residents commuted to Cairo on a daily basis. The town was conveniently situated for the Saqquara and Giza pyramids. The Helwan Observatory and unique Helwan Japanese Gardens also became key tourist attractions.Footnote 61 Unfortunately, these facilities were not able to revive the fortunes of Helwan after World War I. Its dependence on tourism for the success of its local economy and its relative isolation from Cairo meant the war years were lean years for Helwan, despite the presence of many allied troops billeted in the suburb. The elite tourism of the pre-war years never fully revived and the Grand Hotel next to the Japanese Gardens was turned into the Fouad Sanatorium.Footnote 62 Attempts by Helwan to become more of a residential suburb were frustrated by competition from a suburban rival. The ruthless commercial ambition of the developers of the new suburban community of Maadi, just a few miles to the north but closer to Cairo, saw Helwan threatened with a new model urban community, a community who were even prepared to cut rail services to Helwan to undermine its older rival.
The development of Maadi highlights the ruthless nature of much Egyptian land speculation and development. In 1888, Khedive Tewfik awarded a Jewish consortium, led by the families of Cattaui, Menashe and Suares, the concession to build and operate a railway line to Helwan, passing by the existing village of Maadi al-Khabiri. With no restrictions preventing those with railway interests indulging in land speculation, Felix Suares, chairman of the railway consortium, Jacques de Menashe and fellow Jewish investors bought up considerable parcels of land in the district. Sir Edward Palmer, financial advisor to the government, helped the group form a public company, the Egyptian Delta Land and Investment Company, to develop a residential estate.Footnote 63 The new company then bought land from its own directors’ families and associates for inflated prices. The Mosseri family alone made a profit of 65,000LE.Footnote 64
The Maadi and Helwan railway became the focus of a major battle between suburban developers. Baron Empain, a key figure in the development of the Parisian underground and, later, in the new suburb of Heliopolis, presented an attractive proposal to convert this key route into a pioneering electric railway. However, Egyptian Delta Light Railways, chaired by Sir Auckland Colvin, an English associate of Sir Edward Palmer, put together a successful rival bid.Footnote 65 This meant that, in effect, the Land Company had secured complete control of transport links to Maadi and Helwan as the only possible rival, an omnibus company, was controlled by related family interests.Footnote 66 It was not long before residents of Helwan began to complain that the railway company was favouring services to the new district of Maadi over the much more firmly established town of Helwan.Footnote 67
The Anglo-Jewish alliance within the Land Company was also an important factor in Maadi's urban design, a design that followed more closely the lines of an English-style ‘garden city’ than Cairo's Garden City itself. Maadi's road network formed a pattern of concentric half-circles, similar to English garden city plans, although the Maadi plan may also have taken its inspiration from the new plans for Khartoum, a city with which Maadi's leading architect John Williamson would have been familiar from his time spent in the Sudan.Footnote 68 Strict planning regulations guaranteed an airy feel to the suburb, with all properties limited to 15 metres in height and with the area of construction limited to less than half the size of the land purchased. At least 3 metres were required between houses and the roadside, garden fences could be not more than 2 metres high, while walls and shutters were limited to a select number of neutral colours approved by the Land Company.Footnote 69 The Company's associations with the Jewish banking sector meant that loans on very favourable terms could be offered to potential customers.Footnote 70
The tight planning regulations did not, however, inhibit the creative architectural development of the suburb. Some early properties were bought by the government for its Anglo-Egyptian staff, ensuring that the British community was a significant component of its initial residential mix.Footnote 71 Yet Maadi, like Zamalek, attracted a diverse population who again built properties that reflected a range of national styles. John Williamson's Greystoke Manor reflected the English preference for Gothic while Joseph Lichtenstern's Villa Austria was distinctively Germanic in style. Yet Maadi was never dominated by Europeans. The well-known ophthalmologist, Dr Mohamed Taher Bey, was one of the earliest Egyptian residents, while famous Syrian residents included Dr Fares Nimr Bey and Elias Neama Tabet. In the 1920s, the suburb attracted a significant number of senior Egyptian politicians, including Ahmed Khashaba, Mohamed Aflatoun and Wassef Semeika, and of the 107 homes identified in company records in 1929, less than half were occupied by Europeans.Footnote 72 Maadi, like Garden City, was a suburb defined more by class than by nationality, reflecting the cosmopolitan nature of Cairo's business and administrative elite.
Heliopolis – a new model suburb
The new suburb to the north-east of Cairo, Heliopolis, had the widest social mix of population of any new district. The site was designed from the outset as a self-contained settlement with schools, churches, shops, hotels and an industrial zone to provide local employment, with residential provision for all classes of worker. The suburb was the initiative of Belgian Baron Edouard Empain, a well-known figure in Europe due to his role in the construction of the Paris Metro and electric tramways in Naples, Madrid, Turin and Warsaw. Empain and his new company, the Cairo Electric Railways and Heliopolis Oasis Company, were aware of the rapidly rising costs of land in central Cairo and locations close to the Nile. Following their failure to gain control of the Maadi railway and access to southern Cairo, Empain and his company made a radical new proposal – to build a city in an unoccupied part of the desert to the north-east of Cairo, linked to the city centre by a fast electric tramway system. The novelty of the plan, and the risks involved, probably explain why Empain was able to obtain land from the government at just one Egyptian pound per feddan. Supported by Sir William Garstin, the British advisor to the minister of public works, the company secured a deal to acquire a total of 25 square kilometres of land, and construct a railroad and two electric tramways.Footnote 73
The site was close enough to allow transit to the city centre in less than half an hour, yet was sufficiently high above Cairo and the Nile valley to be a place ‘where the wind is cool and the air invigorating’.Footnote 74 The city was laid out on a grid pattern, but with angled boulevards converging on Queen Elisabeth Square and the Roman Catholic basilica. To the west of the basilica was Al-Ahram, the Avenue of the Pyramids, a wide boulevard laid in French style, with a wide strip of green land in the centre. This was the largely middle-class central district, with high-quality apartments, often above cafes, restaurants or shops dealing in luxury goods. At the opposite end of Al-Ahram was space for hotels and, later, the famous Greek Café, L'Amphitryon, opened in 1922. One block to the south of the Avenue was the city's main commercial street, laid out in the form of shopping arcades, which, by the 1920s, included a wide variety of businesses including French-style patisseries, jewellers, toyshops and bakers.Footnote 75 To the east of the basilica was the district made up of smaller properties intended for industrial and tramway workers, clerks and servants.Footnote 76 The areas to the west and south of the centre were set aside for sporting clubs, with the city's racecourse to the north.
Strict planning zones and tight controls on the size and type of property that could be constructed meant that a unique architectural character soon emerged. Empain insisted that all the major apartment blocks and arcades in the centre of the city should ‘conform to the traditions of this country’.Footnote 77 For Empain, and the most influential architects in Heliopolis, Ernest Jasper and Alexandre Marcel, this meant the adoption of a range of styles inspired by historic Islamic buildings.Footnote 78 Jasper and Marcel made extensive use of elaborate plasterwork, Arabic calligraphy and traditional motifs for decoration, while faux minarets featured on the end of major central buildings. The result was a city centre that merged many centuries of traditions in Egyptian architecture with a French-style city plan.
By the summer of 1907, over 100 houses were under construction, with around 3,000 workers employed on the site.Footnote 79 Unfortunately, the collapse in the land market during the same year meant that plots were not selling and the company was forced to economize, for example by buying poorer-quality bricks from local sources rather than importing from Belgium or France.Footnote 80 Fortunately, a year earlier, the Oasis Company had reached an agreement with the Egyptian government to allocate 400 villas and apartments for the exclusive use of government officials, helping to ensure the financial viability of the new city.Footnote 81 Although major buildings in the central zone were carefully planned according to Empain's ‘neo-Islamic’ agenda, many locations were set aside for bespoke villas and buildings (Figure 5). Empain's own villa was fashioned after Hindu temple architecture. Some villas displayed wide verandas, reminiscent of colonial domestic architecture in India (Figure 6), while some apartments had a distinctively Spanish neoclassical flavour.Footnote 82 Other Heliopolitan villas did reflect Islamic architectural traditions. The sumptuous palace of Sultan Hussein Kamel could easily have been mistaken for a mosque while Habib Ayrout's designs for lower-middle-class and working-class homes reflected local Muslim requirements for a salamlik, a reception room where guests could be entertained without entering family quarters.Footnote 83
Owners of large plots in Heliopolis were permitted to construct bespoke properties that reflected individual tastes. This Tyrolean-inspired example survives amidst the bustle of Boulevard Empain (now Nazih Khalifa) (author).
Despite Empain's vision, some apartments in Heliopolis adopted a more ‘colonial style’ (author).
Of all Cairo's suburban planners, Empain drew most heavily on modern technological solutions to solve logistical and public utility supply issues, although some, such as the Heliopolis sewage scheme, were a costly disaster. The problem of relying on electric trams was highlighted in the industrial unrest that followed World War I, with strikes cutting off the suburb during summer 1919.Footnote 84 The Company, largely dependent on the success of the rental sector, was also faced with the problem of rent laws introduced as a consequence of rising prices. Previously, the legal framework of the Capitulations meant that local rent laws were not enforceable against foreigners without the agreement of foreign powers, but the imposition of martial law meant that rent laws could be extended to all landlords and residents.Footnote 85 The scale of the rental sector in Heliopolis meant that the effects of this law had a greater impact on this suburb than those mainly based on the sale of long leaseholds.
The growth of Heliopolis against these difficulties can be explained by the success of the company in attracting cultural investment. Many religious institutions accepted the Company's offer of free land to build churches and schools. By 1923, Heliopolis had 23 primary schools, including two Catholic, two Greek Orthodox and three Islamic.Footnote 86 The Armenian community was also very prominent, in part due to the influence of Armenian businessman Boghos Nubar Pasha in the Oasis Company.Footnote 87 The construction of the luxury 400-bed Heliopolis Palace Hotel, the Winter Hotel and the Heliopolis House Hotel ensured tourist throughput.Footnote 88 Parks in Heliopolis became regular concert venues while the racecourse hosted events that mimicked the great races of Europe, including a ‘Heliopolis Derby’.Footnote 89
Yet the presence of apparently ‘European’ institutions should not be taken to indicate that Europeans dominated the population of Heliopolis. In 1914, only about one fifth of Heliopolis’ estimated 16,000 inhabitants were foreign.Footnote 90 During the inter-war years, the expansion of Heliopolis’ working-class districts saw the proportion of Europeans fall sharply. Heliopolis represented ‘modern’ suburbia in only a limited sense. Its plan may have been European but its buildings were built in a distinctive style that drew on local architectural traditions, used local materials and included features that were distinctively Islamic. Residents of Heliopolis were drawn from a range of backgrounds including many from the rising Egyptian professional class and those who served it.
Conclusions: the many dimensions of suburban modernity
The development of Cairo in first 40 years of the British occupation highlights the complex patterns of suburban development. The history of ‘modernizing’ forces in Cairo is not one that can be traced to a particular period of the late nineteenth century, nor should one see Cairo as simply copying western models. Cairo was a place in which the Orient and Occident were in dialogue. Some urban forms and technologies, such as the telephone, tramway and theatre, were rapidly adopted. Others, such as the public park and the boulevard, were much rarer. Boulevards were only successful where, as in Ismailiyah, shade was provided by very tall buildings or, as in Heliopolis, arcaded streets offered relief from direct sunlight.Footnote 91 In new central districts, such as Shubra, narrow streets and traditional street layouts continued as urbanization gathered pace. The ‘European’ boulevard and street layout continued to be the exception and where boulevards were built ‘traditional’ neighbourhoods, like the notorious Red Light district north of Azbakiya, continued to exist and prosper within their boundaries.
No dominant model for suburban development was established. Private entrepreneurs borrowed from both European and Oriental models to appeal to their foreign and Egyptian customers. The ‘garden city’ model was popular but only Heliopolis came close to being a self-sustainable city. Street plans varied from the eclectic to the formal grid. Architecturally, the suburbs varied greatly. In many, the architectural form simply reflected the taste of those who built the individual properties. In Zamalek, Garden City and Maadi, it was common for individuals to buy plots and then commission an architect to custom build a particular design. The result was a rich architectural legacy including English neo-Gothic houses and Swiss-style hunting lodges. Even in districts, such as Heliopolis, where the major central buildings were constructed to a distinctive ‘neo-Islamic’ style, commercial needs meant that in practice a wider variety of architectural styles emerged, reflecting different tastes and traditions.
The severe Egyptian climate encouraged the emergence of certain common local features. Wooden screens often replaced French windows, shady verandas were almost universal and tall ceilings featured in the most humble homes. Suburban planning in Egypt had some parallels with French colonial planning in Morocco in that planning was a product of the synthesis of western ideas about zoning and architectural clean lines combined with a need to produce buildings that reflected local cultural and climatic requirements.Footnote 92 However, in Egypt this process produced a very wide range of architectural forms with little consensus emerging about what a typically ‘modern’ Egyptian style should be. This was the result of the more cosmopolitan social structure of Egypt, where leading architects were often drawn from the Italian, Greek and Jewish communities. Successive British advisors to the public works department permitted diversity. British and European entrepreneurs in Egypt were primarily concerned with seeking profit, not imposing a particular political vision on developments.
Studies of suburbanization in Cairo suggest two important conclusions. First, the notion of a ‘dual city’ divided between European and Egyptian residents is misleading. None of the suburbs studied had a majority of European residents, and in most cases European residents made up significantly less than one in five of the people living in these districts. The once ‘English’ suburb of Zamalek was quickly transformed into one in which foreigners were heavily outnumbered. ‘European’ Heliopolis was one in which foreigners became an increasingly small minority in the inter-war years. Class, rather than nationality, was the key factor in determining residential choices. The application of a ‘dual city’ concept conceals very significant differences in the physical nature and social composition of the new suburbs. Secondly, detailed investigations into the development of Cairo's suburbs questions how useful the concept of ‘modernization’ is in explaining these changes. The slow rates of Egyptian urbanization mean that these changes cannot be seen straightforwardly as the by-product of a country becoming ‘modern’ through a process of migration from the land. While some of the suburbanization can be explained through the gradual emergence of an Egyptian middle class in an expanding government service, this long process could be traced to the time of Mohammed Ali and, in some suburbs such as Garden City and Zamalek, urban aristocratic and princely wealth was still a major factor in the demand for suburban housing.
Nor can one see this period as uniquely one of technical modernization or argue that suburbanization was inspired by particular technological innovations. Some new technologies, such as the tramway, were clearly important in facilitating some suburban growth. Yet in several suburbs, such as Garden City, Helwan and Maadi, tramways were non-existent or unimportant. Building forms and methods were often relatively traditional, reflecting the plentiful supply of cheap labour and the availability of materials. Wood continued to be used extensively for structural features and architectural decoration due to its relatively low cost.Footnote 93 In some cases, such as Heliopolis, imported brick technology was abandoned on financial grounds in favour of local production. Other innovations, such as plate glass technology, were extremely rare due to their unsuitability in the Egyptian climate. Iron and steel construction was also rare due to the high relative cost and the need to import pre-cast components. The wide variety of historically inspired architectural forms that emerged in suburbia and the range of suburban plans indicate that consumer tastes and entrepreneurial innovation, not new technologies, were the main factors in explaining the nature of Cairo's suburban growth. The lack of a local government body in Cairo and weak central planning ultimately left the city with a fragmented suburban shape that contributed to the city's chronic housing and transport problems of later decades. However, it also left a variety of ‘suburban solutions’ and a rich architectural legacy that reflected the diverse communities who once made Cairo their home.
