Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 12 - 18 October 2000 Issue No. 503
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

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Laughing all the way to the bank

By Nigel Ryan

Attempts to upgrade the banks of the Nile as a public amenity may be sporadic, but they are no less welcome for that. Cairo, after all, is not over-endowed with public spaces. And what spaces there are manage increasingly to be public in only the most nominal of ways.

If it is heartening to see the refurbishment of existing public parks and gardens it is less heartening to watch as the newly refurbished spaces are then closed to the public. The implication, of course, is that the newly manicured oases of green can only remain so as long as the general public is kept firmly on the other side of the fence. They are less a civic amenity than a piece of civic window dressing -- perfectly nice to look at as you pass in your car but certainly not places in which anyone is going to be invited to dawdle. All of which makes of the Nile, as it flows through the heart of Cairo, a unique facility, in as much as there appears to be at least some official determination to maintain a modicum of public access.

The first visible sign of the latest scheme to improve the river side view was the replacement, on the eastern side, of the railings that separate the actual bank from the pavement. The railings themselves are reassuringly simple, even elegant -- a series of overlapping cast iron circles, geometric rather than serpentine, and determinedly unfussy. What is more -- and one should never underestimate such quotidian concerns -- they actual fit the spaces they are intended to fit, which is no small achievement given the appalling standards that have all too often accompanied major public works.

Next came the pavements, resurfaced in a scheme much less successful than the railings. Diagonal lines of pink and yellow paving blocks lend more than a hint of the suburban patio, of the crazy golf course, to what is actually a major urban vista. The one consolation here is that the thousands of miles of dust that surround Cairo will soon reduce the pavements to that faintly bleached ochre that is so peculiar to the city, and perfectly suited to its quality of light.

Then came benches, well-spaced, with natural wood slats on a slightly raised cast iron base. Perfectly inoffensive and quite possibly comfortable, though I have yet to sit on one and so cannot vouch for this aspect of their design.

The most recent addition to the scheme, though, harks back to the suburban patio aesthetic of the pavements. Hybrid pergola/bandstand/pagoda structures now dot the pavement between the Nile Hilton and the Meridian hotels. Open at the front, where they face the river, and containing more seats, at the moment they are a natural wood colour though it is perfectly possible that at some later stage they will be painted.

And that, up until now, is as far as it goes, at least for that prestige stretch of the Corniche that begins by the 26th July Bridge and continues, past the new Foreign Ministry building, the television centre, the NDP party headquarters, the Nile Hilton, the Arab League building, the Semiramis and up to the Meridian. It will, in the near future, also contain a vast, new, Four Seasons hotel, currently under construction. A thoroughly five star conglomeration on one side of the road, then, and beneath the banyan trees, which have mercifully been preserved, a less exclusive space for those who probably wouldn't get past the doormen standing in various uniforms on the other side of the road. The view commanded by the occupants of hotel rooms facing the river, NDP bigwigs and broadcasters, is also shared by more humble pedestrians, which approximates, one can argue, to a democracy of sorts.

The scheme to improve the facilities along the Corniche is as admirable as it is ambitious. It continues apace, and looks set to encompass the entire urban stretch of the east bank.

On the opposite shore -- the view commanded by the strategically placed benches -- a similarly ambitious, if less extensive scheme, was undertaken several years ago. It involved carving out a large space from the land that lay immediately north of the Qasr El-Nil Bridge. The raggle-taggle vegetation of the bank was replaced by a wide, new embankment, sadly bereft of any vegetation of its own, but with ample seating areas. And for a time it was enormously popular, attracting large crowds keen to catch the breeze on the summer evenings after it opened. But alas no more. For even though there is no manicured lawn to protect, the embankment, designed initially to provide a public amenity, and constructed at public expense, has been inexplicably closed to the public.

This closure, sadly, is simply the most glaring aspect of a pattern that has been repeated along practically the whole Zamalek bank, between the Qasr El-Nil and 26th July bridges, where slowly but surely every available piece of land has been colonised by restaurant boats, operating the same kind of door policies as the hotels they face on the opposite bank. And several of these boats front gardens that are maintained at public expense, though once again, they are areas from which the public has now been excluded.

This particular piece of Nile bank has become an all too predictable example of privatisation by stealth, the co-opting of a once public space by restaurant complexes that cater to an extremely narrow section of Cairene society. A space that less than a decade ago operated as a de facto public amenity has now, without any consultation, been redesignated a private space, access to which has been effectively restricted to those in possession of the means to pay.

It is hard to conceive of a similar process occurring along the newly revamped Corniche, if only because the road itself is a major thoroughfare. And big, busy roads need pavements. Without them pedestrians have a terrible habit of getting in the way of the cars.

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