Once Green, Never Again
In Cairo, after years of passing along the Ring Road dozens of times. sometimes on ordinary days, other times traveling back from elsewhere in Egypt, I came to see it as a mirror of the whole country. From farmland to pyramids, from villages and informal settlements to luxury compounds and new cities surrounding Cairo, from 6th of October to New Cairo, the Ring Road revealed it all.
But with time, the green that once lined it began to fade. In its place, patches of red brick and concrete spread across the fields, until gradually, the green disappeared altogether, replaced by the gray and red of cement and brick.
The reasons are many, and responsibility lies with no single party. It is not only the people, nor only the government, but a tangled web of factors: population growth, local corruption, poor planning, and the failure to enforce the law. The outcome, however, is always the same: the green will not return. Once farmland is stripped away, it can never be restored.
Since 2011, the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics has recorded nearly two million cases of encroachment on agricultural land.
Day by day, I began to notice how we were losing agricultural land. For me, the Ring Road became a microcosm of Egypt at this moment in time. Just by travelling along it, you can see and understand the whole country: its neighbourhoods, its problems, its people, and its many colours.
2018
On my journeys from Minya to Cairo, I remember our house, built by my father after my grandmother’s was demolished. From the outside, it still looked like red brick, but inside it was fully furnished and lived in. Like so many houses in Egypt, our eyes grew accustomed to the sight until it became normal. But when a friend visiting from abroad once pointed to the red-brick buildings along the Ring Road as we drove towards the pyramids, barely visible behind the buildings, he asked me: “How are all these houses built and yet uninhabited?” At first he was shocked when I told him that every one of them was lived in. But then he started to believe it when he saw signs of life: laundry hanging from a window, children playing on a rooftop.
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"After the Ring Road, I stopped raising pigeons. Life became a bit disturbing. At first, we couldn’t bear the car noise for even fifteen minutes, but later we got used to it."
Ramadan El-Sheimi, one of the residents living by the Ring Road
Eid Sarhan is one of the farmers who spent years cultivating his land even before the ringroad exist, decided to abandon it after being surrounded by concrete and red bricks from all sides. He was no longer able to grow everything as before, and even the crops he managed to cultivate declined in quality.
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"This red brick has brought ruin to the farmer and ruin to the people's livelihood.
Eid Sarhan, a farmer
