Egyptian Sprawl
With its move to a new city in the desert, is the American University in
Cairo buying sanctuary or isolation?
By Alex Marshall
The Metropolis Observed
August/September 2003
"I started wearing it six months ago; I just felt like I wanted to,"
Nancy El-Orindy says of the traditional hijab scarf that she, like
many women in Cairo, wears over her hair. "We are supposed to be covered
so we don't attract too much attention from guys." The 19-year-old
student slouches in a wicker chair in the central courtyard of the American
University in Cairo (AUC), an unlikely school in the heart of the capital
city of Egypt. Around her classmates sit at café-style tables and
chairs, and young men play basketball behind a wire fence. As the students
lounge, a half dozen or so cats, ubiquitous in Cairo, slink about the walkways,
stairs, and tables.
Orindy's story illustrates the Waring-blender whirl of money, culture, religion,
and history in the region. On the one hand, she wears the hijab to
show her new commitment to her Islamic roots. On the other hand, she plays
college soccer--a passion she picked up in her native Canada, where she
was born to Egyptian parents. Orindy speaks English better than Arabic.
And her professional goal? "I want to go to fashion school, to be a
dress designer," she says with an embarrassed smile. "I like Gucci
and Prada."
Orindy is one of about 5,000 students at AUC, a school that is confronting--and
capitalizing on--similar cross-cultural forces. Founded by Presbyterian
missionaries from Minnesota in 1919, it is presently "an Egyptian University
with an international student body, teaching an American-style liberal arts
education," says past president John D. Gerhart. Many of Egypt's most
prominent officials send their children to AUC. Suzanne Mubarak, wife
of Egypt's current strongman president, is a graduate, as are the couple's
two sons. Despite its largely Middle Eastern student body, the school's
board is mostly American, and some of its funding comes from the U.S. government.
It is routinely called "the best university in Cairo," and many
Arabs see it as a model for how their region might modernize: by copying
the best of American-style liberalism in the classic tradition, through
openness, education, and scientific thought.
The institution's next step in following that model is an ambitious expansion
program. The school is moving its entire campus from the heart of downtown
Cairo to a spot about 20 miles outside the city on the edge of the desert,
where it will occupy 260 acres in the middle of a new planned city called
New Cairo. AUC has hired top architects from around the world to design
the grounds, buildings, and interiors. Currently under construction, the
$300 million project--set to open in 2007--is intended to ensure the school's
position as the premier research and teaching university in the Middle East.
However, the university is expanding at a time when the American presence
in the Middle East is controversial, to put it lightly. This past spring,
as American jets bombed Iraqi cities, thousands of Egyptians protested the
war and battled police at Tahrir Square, outside AUC's front gates. By moving
outside the city, the school will be escaping some of these turbulent forces.
But is it buying sanctuary or isolation?
The map of New Cairo outlines 72 square miles--the equivalent of three Manhattans.
It is the latest in a line of "new cities" Egypt has built over
the last half century in an attempt to channel its swelling population.
Presently New Cairo looks like the outer-growth edge of Houston or Dallas,
with apartment buildings springing up on cul-de-sacs off wide empty highways.
Closer to the city center a typical pattern of amenities is going up, including
two water-hungry golf courses and a huge supermarket. If all goes as planned
(a big if), state planners project that 2.5 million people will live here.
In its location, shape, size, and relationship to the highway, the new campus
resembles nothing so much as an American regional shopping mall. Parking
lots will ring the new complex, with shrubbery and other landscaping to
soften their impact. Students, who in Egypt are accustomed to living at
home, will drive or be driven to school on the city's beltway. Many live
in wealthy suburbs that are actually closer to the new campus than to the
old one.
The school's planned buildings and spaces--designed by an international
team of seven firms--are imaginative and subtle, drawing on the Islamic
approach to architecture. Although the campus has few horseshoe-shaped arches
or minarets, it has a lot of courtyards, wooden screens, and pathways that
blend inside and outside space. At a time when upper-class Egyptians are
proud of their ability to air-condition spaces, the university will rely
on traditional natural cooling devices like courtyards, "wind catchers"
(open vents on upper stories that funnel cooler air into a building), and
groves of lemon, palm, and olive trees. The primary architect is a joint
venture of Sasaki Associates of Boston and Community Design Collaborative
of Cairo, led by Abdelhalim I. Abdelhalim. On a site plan by Carol R. Johnson
Associates and Cairo's SITES International, there's also a library by Hardy
Holzman Pfeiffer Associates; athletic facilities by Ellerbe Becket; and
student housing, a main auditorium, and a campus center by the Mexico City
firm Legorreta + Legorreta.
The present campus occupies a relatively tiny 7.3 acres in the heart of
an older planned city: a nineteenth-century neighborhood laid out by Khedive
Ismail after a visit to Paris during its 1860s renovation under Baron Haussmann.
The school sits at a central square where broad Parisian-style avenues merge.
It has its own stop on the city's subway system, just a block away from
the Egyptian Museum, and the medieval city is a short drive or walk away.
In þeeing all this, the university is gaining space and þexibility
but losing a richer cultural context. Its already privileged student body
will have even less contact with ordinary Egyptians.
"They did not try hard enough to get it together downtown," one
local architect says. "There are plenty of good examples of urban universities,
like the Sorbonne or Leiden. The students could even walk a half mile to
a building. They will be away from everyone and everything on the new campus.
I'll be damned if I'll go schlepping out there."
Another potential pitfall for the school is whether suburban New Cairo will
ever come together in a way that resembles what is on the planning documents.
At a luncheon in February after the official ground-breaking, at the
Katameya Heights Golf and Tennis Resort in New Cairo, school officials
and city planners began arguing over the area's future and who would pay
for what. "We try to get natural gas, and [city officials] say,
'Sure, for twenty million dollars,'" complains Hussein M. El-Sharkawy,
vice president of new-campus development at AUC. "We want a metro line;
they say, 'Okay. One-hundred and twenty million dollars.'"
One Egyptian planner has urged the school to open the campus to the public.
"Don't put up a fence," says Raouf M. K. Helmi, who has a son
and daughter studying at AUC. "Open your playground, your library.
Open your beautiful facilities to the people." In fact, the new campus
of AUC, like the old one, will be mostly closed. The public can enter the
exterior courtyard, an arts center, and the school bookstore, but the rest
of the campus will be accessible only with a pass.
But Abdelhalim, the bearded wise man of Cairo architecture who came back
to his native city after 11 years in the United States, says the new campus
will be a center for the commingling of cultures and ideas regardless of
its location. Just as the school blends Islamic architecture within an American-style
campus, he hopes it will fertilize Egypt with Western-style education, to
produce a new Islamic version of it. He says the essential question is,
"What does a liberal arts education mean in Egypt, within an Islamic
community?" |
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The American University in Cairo, an elite Western-style institution, is
leaving its current urban site for a sprawling campus outside of town (below).
The architecture takes its inspiration from traditional Islamic forms:
courtyards (above) and "wind catchers" figure prominently. |
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Courtesy the American University in Cairo |
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