Image credit: Yahia Shawkat. Over the past two decades, the Egyptian government has authorized two national programs for the development (rather than upgrading) of so-called “ashwayat” (literally randomly constructed housing), no less than three programs for subsidized housing, and the creation of no fewer than five different government agencies to address housing and urban development, not to mention the billions in public spending directed to the programs of these agencies.
Yet impoverished communities continue to protest the dire state of public services and soaring housing prices, government agencies complain of informal urban sprawl on agricultural land, and media sensationalize residents of dangerous ‘ashwayats’ and ‘graves’. Is Egypt’s civil administration and planning professionally run, based on research and analysis, or is it as “random” as the housing it claims to improve?
Temporary Definition of “Ashwayat”
From 1993 to 2008, Ashweyat was defined as “areas that are difficult to control from a security standpoint due to their informal nature,” according to a parliamentary inquiry outlining the first government project to develop informal areas. This public interest, after nearly two decades of self-built housing, was a response to the urban disaster of the October 1992 earthquake, which killed more than 500 people and left 10,000 families homeless. and the political disaster, the fiasco of the “republic” or “emirate” of Imbaba, where the media exaggerated the social role played by Jama’a Islam after the earthquake in the working-class district of Giza.
Therefore, in addition to demolishing 20 areas deemed unsuitable for development, the government’s main objective was to impose state control on forgotten informal areas through infrastructure development projects such as water supply, sewage, and roads in the 1,201 areas designated as informal.
The “development” plans mainly focused on evicting residents and then selling the land.
Fourteen years later, and according to the CAPMAS report, only a third of these areas had been ‘developed’, the definition of informal areas had changed and the national project was quietly discontinued.
After a rockslide in Cairo’s Al-Dweiqa district in September 2008 killed more than 115 people, the government began to focus on what it called “dangerous areas”. These were deemed to pose a risk to residents based on four different criteria: presence in unstable cliff areas or flood zones, significant state of disrepair of buildings, presence of sources of contamination, or lack of secure title. Meanwhile, Article 62 of the Uniform Building Code (Law No. 119 of 2008) prohibited the extension of public facilities into informal buildings, i.e. all buildings that fall within the scope of work of the first informal housing development project.
So a national at-risk area map was created, with 208,000 homes “developed” in 404 at-risk areas and home to more than 800,000 people. The 12 million people still living in the remaining 871 undeveloped informal areas of the original project are conveniently forgotten.
A recent report on Egypt’s progress towards the Millennium Development Goals found that despite significant reductions, only 14 percent of the “at-risk areas” (by number of houses) had been “developed” over the past six years.
The main reason for the slow pace of the project was that residents in most of the areas planned for development resisted the plan, which primarily focused on displacing residents, sometimes through forced eviction, and then selling the land for real estate investment purposes based on a cost recovery mechanism called land value recovery. The most famous of these communities are Cairo’s Maspero Triangle and Ramlet Brak, which were also part of the neoliberal Cairo 2050/2052 plan. But Luxor’s hammam district is lesser known, and it happens to be in the way of the tourist attraction, the Avenue Sphinx, which runs through the city.
The third change began in 2014, with Article 78 of the new constitution providing for the right to adequate housing and the state’s commitment to “developing a comprehensive national plan to address the ‘Ashwayat problem’, including re-planning and infrastructure development… and improving the quality of life of the people.” This was the first appearance of the term ‘Ashweyyat’ in Parliament, something similar to the definition of a problem and the approach to solving it.
In his first public commitment as a government official, the former minister of urban regeneration and informal settlements said no one would be forcibly evicted, and he worked to reform the law to ensure secure housing for residents of informal areas. However, after the ministry was dissolved, the work on developing the law and amendments was postponed indefinitely.
The creation and dissolution of capricious government agencies
Image credit: Yahia Shawkat. In May 2008, the Uniform Building Code, Law 119/2008, was ratified, and within its provisions two new institutions were established. The first was the Supreme Council for Urban Planning and Development (SCUPD), chaired by the Prime Minister and attended by the Ministers of Defence, Investment and Housing.
SCUPD is “specialized in the adoption of policies and interagency coordination for urban planning and development” (Article 3). The new law also provides for the establishment of a new fund to repair and rebuild houses at risk of collapse through subsidies and interest-free loans for the poor (Article 97). However, the government waited until the Dweika disaster in September of the same year to establish these new institutions, and in October issued two Executive Orders 298/2008 and 305/2008. The first established the SCUPD, and the second created the Informal Settlement Development Facility (ISDF) as a cabinet agency, which was completely different from the agency listed in the law.
In August 2012, with the establishment of President Mohamed Mursi’s government, the water and sanitation portfolio, which accounts for about half of the budget of the Ministry of Housing, Utilities and Urban Development, was separated without any explanation, and the Ministry of Water and Sanitation was established. The new ministry lasted less than a year until July 2013, when Adly Mansour’s first government dissolved it, again without explanation, and reassigned its portfolio to the Ministry of Housing.
In May 2014, Interim President Adly Mansour promulgated the Social Housing Law, Law No. 33 of 2014, which provides for the establishment of a Social Housing Fund headed by the Minister of Housing to take over the financing, management, and construction of housing units for social housing programs (Article 8). This was despite the existence of the Guaranteed Subsidy Fund, another fund also under the Ministry of Housing, which “coordinates with government agencies to build affordable housing” (Presidential Decree, April 2003).
Forty-four percent to two-thirds of Egyptians are deprived of secure tenure, and more than half lack access to adequate sanitation.
A month later, in June 2014, when President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi’s first government took office, the Ministry of Urban Renewal and Informal Settlements (MURIS) was unexpectedly created by combining the ISDF, which had previously been part of the Cabinet, and the Solid Waste Management Department, which had been part of the Ministry of Environment.
Was this an effort to apply the Constitution, since one of the new minister’s responsibilities was to copy Article 78 of the Constitution on the right to housing (Prime Minister’s Decree 1252/2014)? Or was it in response to the demands of the People Who Love Egypt for Informal Housing Development campaign during the presidential election? we never know.
In September 2015, following a recent cabinet reshuffle, MURIS was dissolved without explanation and ISDF was transferred to the Ministry of Housing.
In October last year, planning ministry officials said the government was preparing a new unified planning law. Among its provisions is the creation of a Supreme Council for Planning and Development, replacing the Supreme Council for Urban Planning and Development, which was established only seven years ago, with the aim of “ending contradictions and duplications in the legal framework of sectoral planning, spatial planning and the use of state land”.
Is it just a framework for urban development, or will failure continue?
The proportion of Egyptians who do not have adequate housing is staggering. Between 44 percent and two-thirds of Egyptians are deprived of secure housing and at risk of eviction or forced eviction (with little data on housing). More than half of Egyptians do not have access to adequate sanitation, putting them at risk of health problems and their homes collapsing due to rising water tables.
More than 2.3 million households are not connected to a safe water source (no running water in their homes), forcing family members, including women and children, to perform unfair labor to transport water. More than 1.3 million families live in highly crowded environments (one- or two-room housing), the majority of which use shared bathrooms. Between 800,000 and 1.6 million households live in the planned buildings, and collapses kill 200 people and displace more than 800 households each year.
These are all symptoms. The reason for this is the deregulation of the housing market. Rapid increases in housing prices (owned or rented) have far exceeded wage increases, forcing a significant number of Egyptians to rely on inadequate housing. Therefore, any program aimed at upgrading so-called “ashwayat” must address both the deprivation and its root causes outlined above. And for such integrated programs to work, they should be provided with an administrative framework that is competent, transparent and allows for the democratic participation of communities seeking to improve their living conditions. However, these two prerequisites have not yet been realized.
First published in Arabic on Al Shorouk on October 29, 2015. Translated by Mariam Ali.
