Between success and disillusionment, the disappointing results of Planned cities in Africa. 

Since planned cities are designed by political actors, they are often based on a logic of real estate profitability and international influence. As a result, many of them are accessible only to an elite, as shown by Al Sissi City. The future capital of Egypt was born of the ambition of the ruling general of the same name to rescue Cairo, the largest metropolis in Africa and the Middle East. With its 23 million inhabitants, to which two million more are added every year, Cairo is suffocated by abysmal urban mobility and sprawling urban development, both formal and informal [9]. To cope with this, pharaonic work began on Al Sissi’s new city in 2016, some forty kilometers from Cairo. Even before completion, Al-Sissi City has already come under fire. In addition to its infrastructure, which borders on the excessive – with its Iconic Tower on its way to becoming “Africa’s tallest building” and its future defense district destined to be “the world’s largest” ahead of the Pentagon – this city, which is supposed to accommodate six million souls, is above all unaffordable for the vast majority of Cairoites. This, at a time when Egyptian property prices “are rising by over 30% a year”, while “more than one in three people live below the poverty line” in the country [10]. Al-Sissi City is gradually being transformed into a huge housing estate for a particularly affluent clientele. Far from fulfilling a social function by enabling the most modest Cairo residents to settle there, this new city attracts only the very wealthy: “those who have already bought property are mostly foreigners who have no intention of living there” [11]. Last but not least, it would be worth pursuing the question of the intentional nature of the transfer of the capital from Cairo to Al-Sissi City, despite the fact that it was created ex-nihilo in the middle of the desert. According to political analyst Maged Mandour, this would enable the government to “create this distance between itself and the urban centers [recalling the Tahrir Square protests in Cairo that led to the fall of Mubarak in 2012 during the Arab Spring], so that if there is a revolt somewhere, it can put it down without this blocking it” [12].