4 - 10 October 2001
Issue No.554
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 4 - 10 October 2001 Issue No.554 |
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Collateral damage
What of the people caught between urban progress and making a living, asks Alaa Shahine
It was approaching midnight last Friday, but Mohamed Abdel- Aziz, a merchant in the neighbourhood of Al-Hussein, was still busy. "Look right behind you," he demanded, pointing towards Al- Azhar Street. "Can you imagine this street without cars?"
Abdel-Aziz, like all his colleagues interviewed by Al-Ahram Weekly, fears for the future of his livelihood. "Business is going quite fine now, but I don't know what the impact of such a decision will be. I can tell you, however, that nobody here is optimistic about it."
Fears are compounded by the fact that the inhabitants have been kept in the dark with regard to the government's plans for the area. Abdel-Aziz has heard that people who want to get to the neighbourhoods of Al-Azhar and Al- Hussein will have to park their cars at the garage on Opera Square, or at El-Darrasa, and walk the remaining distance -- a 10- to 15-minute walk. "Al-Azhar Street is not just about tourism, as the officials say," Abdel-Aziz remarked, exasperated. "This place is a market for everything you can imagine." He pointed towards a narrow alley across the street. "Do you see that alley? Cairo's most famous stationery stores are there."
Merchants are still waiting for concrete information as to how they will transport their goods to their stores. "We heard that they will allow us use carts to carry the products we buy," said Mohamed Hassan, a lawyer and owner of a silver shop. "But that would make our lives so much harder and take up so much more time. Anyway, I doubt that we will still get the same number of customers as we get now. I don't know why the government is doing this to us."
People living in the area have their own worries. "Suppose that somebody is seriously ill and needs to be moved to the hospital immediately. How will the ambulance get in?" wondered Hassan Abdel- Aal, a member of Cairo's Popular Local Council. "[The government] has not revealed anything about matters like this. It seems like we will have to use longer and convoluted ways to get around. It does not look like the future will be comfortable at all."
As we sat in a local coffee shop, Khaled Youssef, a journalist who was working in Hungary and Czechoslovakia in the late 1980s, recounted that in Budapest, people who own cars and live in pedestrian areas have special passes to use their cars in the neighbourhoods. But what of Al- Azhar?
Trust among the inhabitants of Al-Azhar in the decision-making process is not boosted by the fact that the government has now announced plans to level the Al- Azhar flyover. "Levelling the bridge is squandering public funds," Abdel-Aal said angrily. "The bridge was built in 1990. How they could come in after only 11 years and simply level it? What guarantee is there that they won't come here after a short while and do the same thing to the tunnel or other projects that have cost the country a lot of money?"
Traffic-wise, people are not optimistic. A group of taxi drivers clustered nearby share resident doubts as to the viability of the tunnel as a solution to traffic problems. "They will realise that the tunnel is not going achieve their aims, and then they won't bring the bridge down," said Fouad, a taxi driver who tested the tunnel when it was open for experimentation. "From my experience, I can easily tell you that it won't work as they want. It is narrow and all it would take is a big bus stopping for any technical problem -- that would be it."
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