The Egyptian Countryside Development Scheme, the gigantic national project recently commissioned by President Abdel Fattah El Sisi under the Hayah Karima (Dignified Life) initiative, aims to upgrade the large mass of the Egyptian countryside with all its more than 4,500 villages and neighbouring settlements, home to more than one half of the country’s overall population. Given the scheme’s set targets of modernising the social, economic and cultural facets of life in villages across the country within three years, it will certainly represent a substantial component of the state’s overall drive for the building of Egypt as a modern country that enjoys all potentials for comprehensive and sustainable development.Over the past few years, huge efforts have been dedicated to the construction of new cities in various parts of Egypt. Today, these cities keep rising as an impressive evidence of the state’s drive for modernising the entire spectrum of life and improving the quality of living for citizens. Looked at in combination, the Countryside Development Scheme and the grand plan of cities complement each other and foretell the futuristic scene of life on the entire land of Egypt, in addition to shortening the centuries-old gap between rural and urban centres and ensuring that the benefits and manifestations of comprehensive and sustainable development be equitably shared and proportionally spread nationwide.
Today, a review of the drive to build new cities would unveil a certain feature of special and great social value. While reflecting the state-of-the-art specifications and the world’s highest standards in construction and functionality, these cities, taking the New Administrative City and the New Alamein City as examples, do also have a distinguishing spirit. Representing this spirit are the two arts and culture cities in the New Administrative Capital and the New Alamein City.
Constructed in a record time of 30 months over an area of 127 feddans, the NAC’a Arts and Culture City is considered the largest such house of culture in the Middle East. With a chain of theatres and stages, art galleries, book and music libraries and an opera house, the city has been envisaged and planned to serve as a vast venue for the display of cultural events, fine arts, artistic performances and creative works. Special mention may be made in this connection to the city’s centre for young people’s creative works and activities which are indispensable for the maintenance and sustainability of cultural, literary and artistic vigour. The city also features a remarkable convention hall characteristically equipped with hi-tech audiovisual aids and has a capacity to seat 2,500 guests and spectators. By design and facilities, this city will indeed constitute a cultural and intellectual beacon, spreading cultural knowledge and learning and encouraging artistic creativity—admittedly two of the main goals of comprehensive and sustainable development as aspired by the Egypt Vision 2030.
The New Alamein’s Arts and Culture City that President Sisi toured recently provides another example of the state’s keenness to combine modern urban planning with assets for cultural vigour and creativity. Comprising a large opera house, a huge movie theatre complex, an open Roman theatre, the design of which revives the heritage of the historical Roman theatre stage, halls for musical concerts, a special complex for artistic production studios and a library, the New Alamein facility is evolving as a vibrant and integrated centre of artistic, cultural and intellectual activities for its dwellers as well as for people in the country’s northern coat region, be they inhabitants or summer vacationers. By all standards, it presents a commendable pattern of such urban development that invokes the requirements of cultural growth into the very core of the process of establishing new cities.
