The two Cairos
In a pattern that is repeated in megacities–and not so megacities–everywhere, Cairo’s rich are opting “for the private gated enclaves, while the poor live in illegally built suburbs reclaimed from the surrounding countryside.”
What are the growth patterns within the city?
“It is only a slight exaggeration to say that informality is the defining characteristic of the modern Egyptian built landscape,” says David Sims, an American housing expert who worked extensively in Egypt. He cites studies which found that the population of the informal areas of Cairo has been growing at more than three times the rate of the formal districts of the city. The city is now ringed by vast areas of informal housing. These are overcrowded forests of unrendered blocks crammed so close together that their balconies almost touch above streets that are too narrow for cars to pass.
Experts estimate that well over half of Cairo’s 16m people live in unplanned districts that have sprouted in breach of laws banning construction on farm land.
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“São Paulo is a great city, but not a beautiful city.”
I post often about São Paulo, mostly about how it’s a city portending the worst of urban trends. It turns out there’s a bright side.
Norman Gall gets optimistic in The Wilson Quarterly:
São Paulo is a great city, but not a beautiful city. The soot-darkened buildings of its old business center resist all claims of glamour or novelty. Its periphery is an oceanic sprawl, bursting with gaudy commerce and neighborhoods where many thousands of shacks have become, within a generation, sturdy but nondescript houses of brick and concrete. Its residents are regularly shocked by corruption, prison revolts, failing public education, truck hijackings, armed robberies, and murders at traffic lights. The author-journalist Roberto Pompeu de Toledo described São Paulo as “frightening, giddy, tentacular. São Paulo does not inspire admiration in a benign or gentle way. It provokes amazement in a way that admiration becomes fear, a consequence of its enormity, its omnipresent sense of urgency, its disturbing awareness of being in an urban labyrinth that reaches toward the infinite.”
Yet for all that, São Paulo is a complicated, qualified success. Because of the dynamism and diversity of its economy, and despite its many contradictions, it now may be the most successful “megacity” in the developing world.