There's A Swingin' Town I Know Called... Capital City

Looking back at some of my old posts, I came across one from 2015 about how Egypt was planning to build a new capital to replace Cairo. Well, to replace it as capital: I mean, Cairo would still be there, it just wouldn't be capital anymore. I was curious what became of that idea; the whole thing had seemed like a pipe dream, so I was kind of assuming that I'd find the project had been canceled years ago, or pushed to the back burner.

Nope, it's still happening. In fact, it's under construction as we speak. You can even see it on Google Earth.  It still doesn't have a name yet, so it's just the New Administrative Capital. It's also not really far from Cairo. When combined with some other new developments going on, they're going to end up with a really big continuous urban area. Egypt already looks pretty unusual from the aerial perspective, with the contrast between the desert and the irrigated area around the Nile, and now it’s also going to have a huge urban smear across it.

The other surprising thing I learned is that it's not even the only replacement capital under construction. Both Indonesia and South Korea have new capitals on the go.

South Korea has been moving government institutions from Seoul to the planned city of Sejong for years. It was only founded in 2007, but already has 350,000 people. It seems the idea of officially moving the capital is still controversial and may never completely happen, but even as it is, they've put a lot of work into it. 

Indonesia is building Nusantara to replace Jakarta. It's still early in the process, having only started last year. But they're being bolder, building it on a totally different island from current capital and largest city, Jakarta. 

So what's the reason behind these new capitals? In my previous post, I assumed that if a country is going to build an entirely new city to be the capital, it must be a case of vanity, or some kind of national mid-life-crisis. There may be some of that, but in each of these cases, there is a practical purpose too: a very large and over-crowded capital. Moving the government out will drag some of the people out and into another part of the country. I - the resident of a country where the capital is not the largest city - didn't think of that. Oh, and Jakarta is slowly sinking. And Seoul is uncomfortably close to North Korea. 

So maybe we'll see more of them in the future. There are plenty of over-stuffed capital cities in the world; starting over on cheap land somewhere else must be pretty tempting. Even if it does make geography quizzes harder worldwide.

Fire In The As-Yet-Unnamed New Capital Of Egypt

A few weeks ago, the Egyptian government announced plans to build a new city to serve as it's capital. That's ambitious, but not unusual, since a number of countries have planned, purpose-built capitals. Brasilia, Brazil is perhaps the most famous, since it was only built in the 50's. But history buffs may know that both Washington, D.C. and Canberra, Australia were originally planned to be capitals. There's also New Delhi, India and Islamabad, Pakistan, though they were both extensions of existing cities. And the new country of South Sudan proposed using its new oil wealth to rebuild its capital, Juba, in the shape of a giraffe.

It's easy to see why a country (particularly a new or growing one) might want a new capital: you can avoid the rivalry between existing cities and regions when choosing who gets to be capital. And since the capital is a sort of global face of the country, it's impressive if you have a nice shiny new one. Though it does reflect poorly on your country if you look at your existing cities, then decide you'd rather just start from scratch.

And that's the big downside of a planned capital: it costs a fortune. They're talking about $45 billion for the new Egyptian capital. And their economy isn't doing too well. No one wants to invest in a country that pauses every couple of years to change dictators. And the usually-lucrative tourism industry has been hurt because no one feels comfortable visiting the country where the religious party seems like the voice of reason. So people are taking a believe-it-when-we-see-it attitude.

But this issue does raise an interesting question: it’s hard enough to design a city from scratch, but if it’s going to be a national capital, how would that affect the design? You’d want it to be impressive and awe-inspiring, and you’d have to leave plenty of room for government offices and international embassies. You’d also want lots of nice, friendly places for photo-ops. But I don’t think the planners could put in all that work without yielding to the temptation to make sarcastic little touches, like having all the bureaucrats’ buildings be featureless grey cubes. It would also be nice if you could arrange it so that the poorest neighbourhood is between the nicest neighbourhood and the government offices, forcing the politicians to have an educational commute everyday.

We Hate It When Our Democracies Become Successful

First up, yes, the title is yet another Morsi/Morrissey joke.  Admittedly, they're getting old.  I mean, I like bad indie rock puns as much as anyone, and even I'm tired of them.  I guess I'm just saying, that joke isn't funny anymore.  Damn! I did it again!

Anyway, the reason I'm thinking about Morsi is this article I read in the Waterloo Record, titled "Morsi Is The Arab World's Mandela" by Tawakkol Karman, winner of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize. 

Now, that just doesn't sound right. She praises Morsi for not resorting to violence.  That's high praise considering she had been one of the many calling for Morsi's resignation (just not his forcible removal.)  Though her claim that "not a single one of his political opponents were jailed" is a bit of an exaggeration; he merely threatened to arrest them.

In the wake of the Arab Spring, and the fall of Communism, we're starting to come to terms with the fact that there is more to Democracy than free and fair elections.  There has to be a respect for the system on all sides too.  This is one of the surprising things I got out of political science classes in university: every country has some sort of shocking but never-exploited loophole in their government.  I knew Canada's Governor General theoretically has dictatorial powers.  But did you know the members of America's Electoral College don't have to vote for the candidate their state elected?  For a democracy to work, there has to be a common belief that the system works well enough that hijacking it isn't worth it.  And there has to be trust on all sides that no one will try to fix the system in their favour, or else everyone will try to pre-emptively fix it for themselves.

And that's where Mandela stands above Morsi: given the chance to rebuild his country, he encouraged reconciliation and the building of a fair, workable country.  In doing so, he vaulted South Africa past decades of pseudo-democratic retribution.  Morsi used his government to build a country in the Muslim Brotherhood's image, which would have led to vengeance by their opponents in the years to come.  He's better than Mubarak, but not nearly the leader Karman thinks he is.