A few weeks ago, the family of Rahim El-Rawy, who live in Ezbet El-Haggana (now the City of Hope) next to the wall of the “Gardenia” compound, were surprised by a visit from a delegation of Cairo Governorate employees who came to put marks on neighbouring houses, as part of what they described as a “survey” process in preparation for new demolitions. The employees explained that they were numbering the houses and collecting data on the residents and the ownership of the properties, without specifying the value of compensation, saying only that they were “carrying out instructions” and that the details were with governorate officials.
The matter alarmed residents, who recalled the experience of 2022, when the authorities demolished about 700 buildings to construct the “Shinzo Abe” Axis linking Mostafa El-Nahhas Street with the Cairo-Suez Road, and compensated those affected with units in projects such as “Ahalina” and “Al-Asmarat”. Later, 232 more buildings were demolished next to the “Gardenia Triangle” as part of the plan to develop the “City of Hope”, and their owners were offered the choice of an alternative flat or financial compensation of EGP 5,000 per square metre.
Rahim tells Zawia3 that most residents preferred the alternative units after promises that they would be built on the same site, but construction work continued for more than two years, and they later discovered that the replacement option had been cancelled and that financial compensation was the only alternative. He adds that the new flats, which were built in place of their homes in the “Al-Amal Compound” project, made up of 12-storey buildings being constructed by the “Contrack” company for urban development, are being offered for sale at prices ranging between EGP 2.6 million and EGP 3.5 million, at a price of up to EGP 35,000 per square metre, while the land was bought from the residents at EGP 5,000 per square metre, which means that these units are intended for public sale, not for compensating the residents.
Ezbet El-Haggana is located in Nasr City in Cairo, between the “Shinzo Abe” Axis and the Suez Road, and close to luxury compounds such as “Gardenia”. It is considered one of the largest unplanned areas in the capital, and while residents believe their numbers exceed one million people, official statistics had estimated them at about 39,432 people in the general census of the population of Egypt for 2006, issued by the Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics (CAPMAS). The population of East Nasr City, which includes “Ezbet El-Haggana”, is estimated at about 685,361 people according to 2024 statistics, which makes it one of the most densely populated districts in Cairo.
Today the area bears the name “City of Hope”, a demolition and reconstruction project being implemented by Cairo Governorate in cooperation with the Armed Forces Engineering Authority and the “Contrack” company for urban development. However, many residents see it as closer to a profit-seeking real estate investment that takes advantage of the strategic location surrounded by main axes and upscale residential areas, rather than a project that fulfils the residents’ hope.
In 2022, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi gave the name of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to a road linking the Nasr City area and the Ring Road with the Suez Road. The axis is 8 km long and passes through the City of Hope, formerly Ezbet El-Haggana, for a length of 2 km; it also passes by the car market, its width reaches 37 metres, and above it are four bridges whose sides were built in the Japanese style. Cairo Governorate, in cooperation with the Engineering Authority, built 4 bridges along the route of the axis in Nasr City.
Meanwhile, Cairo Governor Ibrahim Saber announced in July 2024 that the new City of Hope, which is to be established on an area of 10 feddans, will be a model for developing unplanned areas, as 22 residential buildings will be constructed inside the city, with all services and utilities available, to provide them with a decent life as part of the state’s plan to develop unplanned areas. He pointed to communication with citizens, surveying their opinions and learning their wishes before the demolition work, whether obtaining financial compensation for those who wish, or returning to the area after development.
According to the governor, the survey work for establishing the new City of Hope in the former Ezbet El-Haggana included 232 buildings comprising 1,166 housing units, 224 shops and warehouses, and 23 plots of vacant land. The price per residential square metre was estimated at EGP 5,000, while those wishing to return are offered a rent allowance of about EGP 30,000 until the implementation of the project is completed.
Real estate investment?
Forty years ago, Mohamed Samer moved to Ezbet El-Haggana, known today as the City of Hope, to live with his family in harsh conditions, as neither electricity nor water reached the houses. Mohamed used to study by the light of a “kerosene lamp”, and spent his days carrying jerrycans of water from a distance of more than a kilometre, dripping with sweat under the scorching Cairo sun, and suffering, like other residents of the ezba, from the lack of transport, which ended at the Ideal Almaza station on one side and at “El-Asher” on the other.
The years passed, and the features of the place changed, from shacks and small houses to residential buildings with utilities, but Mohamed now clearly sees that the ezba, which its people built with their own hands, has become a target for real estate investment projects in which a housing unit is sold for millions of pounds, while crumbs are thrown to the original residents whose homes the demolitions will reach.
He tells Zawia3: “EGP 5,000 per square metre is not enough to buy even a room in a working-class area. My flat is valued at about EGP 400,000, while the alternative flat in the City of Hope is priced at EGP 2,400,000, with the difference to be paid in instalments for the rest of my life, and the flat will be taken from me if I cannot pay.. just like that, I find myself on the street.”
Mohamed does not understand how Cairo Governorate will remove him from a house in which he spent his life, and which his family helped build from their daily bread, so that a project whose units are sold for millions of pounds can be built in its place. A lump seems to form in his throat when he compares the situation of the residents with that of those who used to live in shacks under high-voltage cables, who immediately obtained flats that were equipped and furnished with furniture and electrical appliances, while the owners of flats and buildings in the ezba are now threatened with eviction and homelessness.
“Most of us live at subsistence level; we can barely pay the electricity and water bills. We cannot buy a new house, or even pay instalments,” Mohamed explains, and he concludes his conversation with us by saying: “As for me, I will not leave unless they give me what enables me to buy a similar flat. We will not leave our homes: either we die in them, or we die if we leave them.”
Another group of families living near the wall of the “Gardenia” compound in the City of Hope had been surprised by governorate employees putting demolition marks on their homes, among them Yasmine Hamdan, at the beginning of this August.
The employees did not disclose any information about the fate of the residents or the compensation that would be paid to them, which provoked their concern and anger, and when it was rumoured among them that the Cairo governor would come to visit the area to discuss the matter with them, they went out into the street and gathered, as Yasmine tells Zawia3.
According to Major General Ahmed Gouda, head of the East Nasr City district, the demolitions in Ezbet El-Haggana, or the City of Hope, covered 232 buildings comprising: 1,166 housing units, 224 shops and warehouses, 23 plots of vacant land and one mosque. As of January 2025, 171 buildings had been completely demolished, while 19 buildings are being partially demolished, 11 buildings have been evacuated, and another 31 buildings are awaiting demolition in the coming period. The demolitions are concentrated behind the Third Nasr City police station, on an area of about 10 feddans, while the number of citizens who have received financial compensation reached 1,027 citizens among residents and shop owners. Financial compensation is estimated at about EGP 5,000 per residential square metre, while the price per square metre for shops is EGP 10,000, the price per square metre for warehouses is EGP 7,000, and the price per square metre for vacant land is EGP 8,000. As of June 2024, about EGP 162.6 million had been paid out to 477 cases through the post office.
According to Cairo Governorate, the demolitions aim to transform Ezbet El-Haggana from an unplanned area, which it described as “informal”, into the civilised City of Hope, which will include the construction of 22 residential towers equipped with basic services (water, electricity, sewage, planned streets, in addition to the widening of the Shinzo Abe Axis, known as “Al-Wafaa wal-Amal”, to improve traffic flow and reduce congestion. 672 houses (567 in the first phase and 105 in the second phase) have been demolished to widen this axis.
Extracting the market value of areas
For her part, urban policy researcher Hind El-Ghazal considers that the demolition work taking place in Ezbet El-Haggana, which has been turned into the “City of Hope”, is an extension of the state’s approach of evacuating areas that have existed for decades and moving their residents to alternative housing communities on the outskirts of cities, often without achieving spatial or housing justice. She explains that the state appears to be on a path of “emptying the old city” and extracting its high market value, whether in terms of location, services or land value, which makes it coveted by investors, and points out that this pattern of displacement reproduces the idea of “ghettos”, as residents are moved to housing complexes of disparate social composition, as in the “Ahalina”, “El-Mahrousa” and “Al-Asmarat district” projects.
The researcher notes that current policies do not provide a fair and clear mechanism for compensation, and that the official discourse is marred by contradictions, citing previous statements by the Minister of Transport and Industry, Lieutenant General Kamel El-Wazir, in which he said that residents have no right to compensation because the land is owned by the state, despite their settled residence, which the law recognises. She explains that the Informal Settlements Development Fund, which was established in 2008, used to adopt classifications for areas (unsafe, in need of improvement, unplanned), with previous attempts to develop some areas by involving residents in the process, as Minister Laila Iskandar attempted, but current policies do not follow a comprehensive plan; rather, they deal with each case separately, while using the description “informal settlements” as a weapon to justify eviction and strip away the right to remain.
She tells Zawia3: “The term “developing informal settlements” has become extremely ambiguous under military neoliberal policies, as the goal does not appear to be serving residents so much as extracting the market value of areas, in addition to a security dimension related to emptying central areas such as the surroundings of Tahrir Square to prevent any potential gatherings. The scope of the demolitions’ targeting has also expanded to include planned areas that were not classified as informal, such as Almaza and El-Sabtia, and this is part of the policies of urban exception, which I discussed in my master’s thesis”, which are based on suspending laws and recognised urban classifications in order to pass specific projects or decisions, such as building bridges, regardless of the legal status or social class of the residents, so that the decision lies in the hands of a single body without clear criteria”.
El-Ghazal believes that achieving housing justice requires dealing with each case according to its specificity and involving residents in the development process, instead of stereotyped solutions based on forced relocation to the outskirts, stressing that what is happening now is a reshaping of Cairo’s demography and the moving of the poor (and sometimes the non-poor) to the margins.
For his part, a human rights source specialising in housing and urban policies, who declined to be named, considers, in statements to Zawia3, that the project to develop Ezbet El-Haggana is nothing but a facelift to raise the value of the investment housing project being built next to it, and that what is happening is not a development project, since the evaluation of the project should begin with the residents’ wishes regarding development. Unlike the residents of the cable shacks, who were already demanding to be rehoused because of the poor quality of their homes, the residents of the ezba did not ask to be rehoused, as they live in concrete houses that they built themselves in a way that suits their needs.
The source explains that the ezba has long suffered from problems centred on public services, such as schools, hospitals, youth centres and utilities in some places, all of which could be solved without any demolitions, stressing that compensation is usually unfair because the government does not take the existing situation into account: if alternative flats are provided, they are smaller, and if financial compensation is paid, it is lower than the market price, which means evicting the residents to another place, and therefore this is not development. He asks: did the government take into account those who applied to legalise their land under the squatting law approved by the House of Representatives, or applied for reconciliation over a building violation? And if the answer is yes, why does it allow some to legalise while it demolishes the homes of others who are in the same situation?
The right to housing
Human rights lawyer Malek Adly, head of the Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights, criticises the government’s policies in dealing with demolition and development operations in unplanned areas, which it describes as informal, stressing that the government displays a fundamental problem in respecting private property and settled legal holdings, and that these practices constitute an infringement of citizens’ right to housing and social security, which is one of the elements of national security, since making a citizen feel unsafe even in his own home harms social stability.
Adly does not separate these practices from legislative intervention to cancel existing legal contracts, as happened with the old rent law, which violates the principle that “the contract is the law of the contracting parties” enshrined in the Civil Code and the Constitution, which reflects a continuing government approach of restricting the right to housing, similar to what happened in the cases of Warraq Island, Nazlet El-Semman, the Almaza housing, Rafah, Sheikh Zuweid and the demolition areas linked to the extension of the axes, and now the City of Hope.
Regarding compensation, he tells Zawia3: “The Expropriation Law No. 10 of 1991 stipulates that the value of properties be assessed at the market price at the time the expropriation decision is issued, with the amount deposited in the bank with its interest until it is received, but he questioned the concept of “public benefit” that the government currently adopts, and the eviction of the poor from high-value areas to build investment projects for the wealthy cannot be considered a public benefit, whereas the correct concept is linked to infrastructure, defence and national security projects, not to replacing the residents of working-class areas in favour of luxury real estate projects.”
The human rights lawyer explains that settled legal holdings include allocation decisions and riverbank accretion lands, while “squatting” on state property does not confer ownership, but he called for its definition to be reconsidered, noting that the public interest may require keeping the residents who have developed the land for decades instead of expelling them after its value has risen, and criticising the prevailing logic in dealing with “state land”, which is fundamentally the property of all citizens and not the property of officials, and the role of the state is to manage it for the benefit of the people, not to turn it into a tool for profit at the expense of the residents.
For his part, Medhat El-Zahed, head of the Socialist Popular Alliance Party and head of the Civil Democratic Movement, stresses the importance of guaranteeing the right to housing, insisting that any development project must not undermine this right or harm the interests of residents linked to their areas, and insisting that the role of the state is not limited to imposing fees and building bridges, but begins with guaranteeing citizens’ fundamental rights to housing, education, health, food and work, and equal opportunities in public services, in a way that guarantees a decent standard of living far from the poverty line.
He tells Zawia3: “Population blocs in areas such as Ezbet El-Haggana are tied to the place in terms of workshops, schools and workplaces, and moving these blocs is an extremely sensitive matter that requires a comprehensive study, as it is necessary to preserve the residents’ way of life or provide decent alternative housing in the same area, such as, for example, building residential towers on limited spaces that can accommodate the residents of an entire street, instead of eviction.”
El-Zahed criticises the valuation of the square metre in Ezbet El-Haggana at EGP 5,000, considering it far below the market value and not enough to enable residents to obtain alternative housing, stressing that this compensation is unfair and contrary to housing justice, and calling on the government to play a direct role in resolving the crisis, citing the existence of hundreds of thousands of closed housing units that have turned into blocks of cement, and the fact that the prices of units offered through the various authorities exceed the means of the majority of Egyptians.
The head of the movement stresses that solutions must be based on broad community participation and on taking the assessments of stakeholders into account, instead of unilateral moves by the central bureaucracy that lead to crises erupting, criticising the suspension of local councils for decades, explaining that they were the basis for addressing local problems by virtue of their closeness to citizens, and calling for the involvement of civil associations and residents’ associations in an attempt to reach consensual solutions that ensure residents are not harmed and avoid top-down administrative decisions that do not take their interests into account.
Demolitions along the axis
For his part, MP Amr El-Sonbaty, member of the House of Representatives for the Nasr City constituency, denies, in a statement to Zawia3, that any gathering of residents of Ezbet El-Haggana (the City of Hope) took place in recent days to reject the demolitions, explaining that what happened was that some residents contacted him individually while he was outside the country, and that he will follow up the matter with them as soon as he returns.
El-Sonbaty stresses that the residents’ main demands centre on increasing the value of compensation, pointing out that the state always provides two options for those affected by demolitions: financial compensation or obtaining alternative housing in social housing projects, which has been applied in other areas before.
The MP explains that the ongoing demolitions in Ezbet El-Haggana are limited to a narrow scope concerning the extension of the “Shinzo Abe” Axis and do not include the rest of the area, reassuring residents that the situation is stable and that he is keen to convey messages of reassurance to them, and stressing that the state of calm and satisfaction will increase as communication between him and the residents continues.
While the authorities insist that what is happening in Ezbet El-Haggana is a development process aimed at providing a decent life for the residents, who will be compensated for the demolition of their homes, human rights defenders consider it a disguised forced eviction, accusing the government of seizing land at low prices and turning it, in partnership with real estate investment companies, into high-priced housing projects to which the original residents cannot return, in a recurring pattern of class-based eviction under the slogan of development.
Meanwhile, specialists stress that the right to housing is not limited to providing walls and a roof, but includes the right to remain in the place where life and community were built, and they insist that real development must guarantee that residents remain in their areas after they are developed, and that any project that does not guarantee their actual return must be halted. The “City of Hope”, in their view, should not be built on the ruins of the dreams of families who spent decades building homes on land that the state sees as an investment resource.
Editorial clarification: The law on the expropriation of real estate for public benefit to which lawyer Malek Adly referred in his conversation with Zawia3 is Law No. 10 of 1990.
