EXCEPT THAT TRUE AMERICANIZATION...:

Egyptian dream takes shape in alien suburbs: Idealized housing rises on the sand, an escape from crowded Cairo. (Ashraf Khalil, May 22, 2007, Los Angeles Times)

[H]ere, about 25 miles east of Cairo, the wind, even the light, feels different.

"The air is cleaner, isn't it?" Atia says, stepping out of the unfinished villa in a gated community called Katameya Residence. "It's not mixing with the car fumes and other stuff."

Atia is one of the pioneers of a new suburbia cropping up on the edges of Egypt's gridlocked and deteriorating capital. Their dream: a little peace, fresh air and a yard to call their own.

With luxury developments sporting names like Golden Heights, Swan Lake and Royal Meadows, Cairo's new suburbs promise an idealized vision of an appealingly alien lifestyle.

"It has to have a Western feel," says architect Hisham Bahgat, who helped design several of the developments, including Katameya Residence.

"They're selling an image of a life."

They're also, at times, pushing the boundaries of aesthetics, and provoking a debate over whether these ersatz and elite fringe cities will destroy Cairo's appeal.

Homes in some of the new communities combine red Mediterranean tile roofs, splashes of pastel colors, Roman columns and sheets of shimmering glass, like grafts taken from random pages of Architectural Digest.

Future University, one of dozens of new private schools dotting the suburbs, looks like a spaceship meshed with a half-scale model of Rome's Colosseum.

Bahgat's architectural firm partner, Ahmed Fahim, describes the aesthetic using an Egyptian colloquialism: "Fish, milk and tamarind." A huge mess.

After a fitful start, suburban construction is progressing nonstop, as is the debate over whether these new communities will help Cairo or finish it off. Critics argue that the building boom sets the stage for unprecedented social divisions.

"You can live in these areas and be totally detached from Egypt," said Manar Shorbagy, former director of the American Studies Center at American University in Cairo. "It's going to work like it did in the U.S. — wealthy suburbs and deprived and abandoned inner cities."

But even American University, which educates the children of Egypt's richest and most powerful, is about to move to the suburbs.

Egypt has always been a place of rigid class divisions, but until now the wealthy often lived in or near the same neighborhoods where they grew up, sometimes turning modest apartments of their youth into lavish palaces.

"We have never seen this kind of division," Shorbagy said.

"It's the Americanization of Egypt."

...requires that you provide opportunities such that everyone can move out of the godforsaken cities if they're willing to work.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 22, 2007 7:29 AM