The New Capital, Egypt
Life in the desert
It is no mirage: In the middle of the desert, around 50 kilometers from Cairo, Egypt’s new administrative capital is taking shape. It will be home to six million people.
No sooner has Ibrahim Mohamed wiped his glasses than they are covered again with a thin layer of sand dust. The urge to battle against the sand is pointless here on this massive construction site in the heart of the desert. Whipped up by passing trucks, concrete mixers and diggers, a film of dust covers everything – from the white hard hats and perspiration-covered faces of our employees to the skyscraper’s gigantic windows. “C11” is the operational name for the 160-meter tower: “C” stands for “commercial tower,” 11 denotes its position in the sequence of buildings. For Schindler Egypt, this skyscraper is a first. “C11 was the first tower in this historic project for which we won the contract to supply high-rise elevators,” explains Ibrahim Mohamed, Lead Large Projects Fulfillment.
The Egyptians already demonstrated their prowess as builders 4 500 years ago – but high-rise structures are still a relatively new phenomenon in the land of the pharaohs.
That is now changing – and rapidly. A new administrative capital is taking shape 50 kilometers from Cairo. The “New Capital” is due to be completed by 2030. The planned urban development, which will be a city of superlatives covering an area the size of Singapore, will also encompass office complexes for international corporations, hospitals, mosques, schools, universities, hotels, and apartments for six million people. There are plans for a new airport and an Olympic City, too – reflecting Egypt’s ambition to host the Olympic Games in 2036 and thereby become the first African nation to do so.
The Central Business District is one of the areas of the New Capital that is at the most advanced stage of construction. Schindler has already installed 198 elevators and 24 escalators in the office towers and the crescent-shaped hotel that are being developed. A further 900 elevators have been installed in apartment blocks such as the luxury Celia Complex being constructed by the Talaat-Mustafa Group. “We have installed more than 1 000 elevators in the space of a year,” says Walid Gad, who has worked for Schindler since 2008 and became a Managing Director in 2014. A Schindler installation team from China is assisting the Egyptian installation engineers with the high-rise work to ensure everything is completed on schedule. “Language and cultural differences created a bit of a challenge at first, but we are now working together well,” says Walid Gad of this collaboration between teams from different continents. It took three months to complete the installations that were carried out using Schindler SLIM Technology – a temporary platform that makes it possible to install the guide rails in elevator shafts without a scaffold as the building grows, reducing installation times and ensuring the highest possible safety standards. “With major projects like this, it is extremely difficult coordinating all the different firms involved. Schindler has always found technical solutions for challenges construction planning presented,” says Ibrahim Mohamed.
Egypt’s largest infrastructure project is being carried out in parallel to the development of the new administrative capital. Schindler is supplying and installing a total of 272 escalators and 136 elevators for 34 stations. In future, a monorail will connect the east and west of Greater Cairo. The New Capital will be the final station in the 54-kilometer rail system.
The monorail network will also serve another satellite city, New Cairo, built in the 2000’s to ease pressure on an overpopulated Cairo. The country’s third-largest real estate firm, Mountain View, has an office in New Cairo. It has already completed 20 000 apartments in the region – but Tamer Nabil, a partner and a member of the Board of Directors of Mountain View, aspires to more than simply building homes. “We of course give clients a roof over their head – but we are interested in more than just the hardware. We want to enable people to have a good life and we want them to be happy. We are working intensively on what we call the ‘software of life.’ Schindler is the ideal partner for our ambitions since its ideas help us move forward.”
Egypt’s history spans thousands of years but the country is in the process of building a new future. Schindler is at the forefront of these efforts.
