Indeed, many of the most famous planned cities were new capitals – Brasilia, Canberra, Abuja, Canberra, Ottawa, New Delhi – that, whatever their other shortcomings, benefited from the employment opportunities and economic uplift of being a national administrative hub. Herbert Girardet, author of Creating Sustainable Cities, argues that Egypt’s planned new capital has a better chance of success than other purpose-built Egyptian cities, mainly because the vast government will be relocated there. If your city is to be economically sustainable, it needs jobs. But he needs more: which is why he invited kings, presidents, 30 visiting emirs and hundreds of would-be investors to the March launch at Sharm el-Sheikh. He told Guardian Cities that he already has the money to build at least 100 sq km of the new capital, including a new parliament. In Egypt, the nameless 700 sq km city that is set to replace Cairo as the country’s capital will be partly funded by Emirati businessman Mostafa Madbouly, who recently unveiled the £30bn project’s plans. Meanwhile, according to the International Business Times, “ the people are starving”. Equatorial Guinea is the third largest sub-Saharan oil producer, and much of that money is being lavished on the new capital, which will have a championship golf course, the Library of Central Africa (which looks like a spaceship docked in a jungle clearing), a luxury hotel and a presidential villa. Oyala has been described as “ a multibillion-dollar plaything for Africa’s longest-serving dictator” and is funded chiefly by oil, timber and gas revenues. Rawabi, denounced by some Palestinians for normalising Israeli occupation and by some Israelis for the possibility of providing a base for terrorists, has drawn a third of its $1bn (£640m) investment from the private Palestinian conglomerate Massar International, and the rest from Qatar. There are various options available to you when it comes to securing the cash. But, until as recently as this spring, apartments stood empty because negotiations failed with Israeli authorities over connecting the city to the country’s water grid.Įgypt’s as-yet-unnamed new capital is set to be built in the desert – a popular choice for planned cities Step 3: Ensure a reliable money supplyĪgain this may sound elementary, but you don’t want to run out of liquidity halfway through building the high-speed train link to the financial quarter. Work started in 2011 and, when complete, it will have homes for 40,000 residents, as well as cinemas, shopping malls, schools, landscaped walkways, office blocks, a conference centre, restaurants and cafes. Today, Rawabi – the first Israeli city built for Palestinians – has a similar problem. Shortly after completion, however, Akbar abandoned Fatehpur … in part because of inadequate water supplies. Over the next 15 years, he and his lackeys built royal palaces, harems, courts, mosques and private quarters, all from locally available red sandstone. The Mughal emperor Akbar commenced the construction of this walled city in 1569, to serve as the Mughal capital. This may sound elementary, but consider what happened to the city of Fatehpur Sikri. In the early 1960s, Buckminster Fuller dreamed up a giant floating pyramid in Tokyo Bay which would have housed 1 million people – in part as a response to the problem of acquiring building land in Japan. Songdo, the new city near Seoul in South Korea, is built on land reclaimed from the Yellow Sea. If you don’t have a desert or uninhabited island to hand, build one. Crystal Island was to be built on a river island near Moscow. Meanwhile, President Teodoro Obiang is currently overseeing the creation of Oyala as his new capital deep in the jungle of Equatorial Guinea, remote from the seaborne assaults that have menaced the dictator and his government in the existing capital. Egypt’s new capital, too, is going to be built on sand – to the east of Cairo, its functionally inadequate predecessor. When complete, it will have 19 residential districts, 50 schools, 40 sports centres, shopping centres and bazaars – and, my favourite design feature, 7,000 hectares (17,290 acres) of orchards blooming in the former desert. Tajikistan’s president, Emomali Rahmon, recently laid the foundation stone for Saihoon, a new city for 250,000 people on a 14,000-hectare (34,580-acre) desert site. Plus, very few camels attend planning meetings, still less are they capable of forming coherent objections to your masterplan for a desert metropolis. Deserts, undeveloped jungles and uninhabited islands are popular: you don’t want to sink your budget into detoxifying brownfield sites, bulldozing slums or fighting legal battles over ancestral land rights. Part 1: steps one to five Step 1: Choose a locationīefore you begin, you need a spot.