When the Egyptian writer Alaa Al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building was published in 2002, it almost instantly entered the canon of modern Arab literature. Set at the turn of the century, the novel reflects back on the demise of a privileged Egyptian way of life in the decades after the 1952 revolution, via the intersecting stories of multiple protagonists: an ageing aristocratic playboy, a young policeman, a closeted newspaper editor, a shop girl.
But the most compelling protagonist might be the one in its title, where it all plays out: the Yacoubian Building. Built in 1937, designed by an Italian architect, it sits at the intersection of Talaat Harb and Abd El Khalik Tharwat streets in the heart of Downtown Cairo — a bricks-and-mortar semaphore for a golden era in the city’s history.
Particularly between the world wars, Cairo was the Arab world’s cosmopolitan capital, and Downtown its nexus of culture and society. The fruit of an ambitious Haussmann-inspired modernisation plan conceived by Egypt’s late 19th-century ruler Khedive Isma’il Pasha, its avenues are lined with the Belle Époque buildings that earned Cairo its “Paris along the Nile” reputation. In their heyday they bustled with cafés, jazz bars and elegant shops at street level, while in the apartments above them worldly Egyptians and their expatriate counterparts hosted salons and conducted business.
But Gamal Abdel Nasser’s 1952 military coup augured the beginning of that era’s end. Downtown’s denizens began to trickle away, across the Nile to the leafy island enclave of Zamalek, or east to Heliopolis, or out into new suburbs; the fine shops and cafés slowly followed. New rent-reduction and control reforms (counterintuitively called the Old Rental Law) and the nationalisation of private properties gutted landlording prospects — as recently as last year, there were Downtown flats going for as little as E£10 (about 16p) a month — and entire buildings were converted into shops by their owners for the more lucrative commercial rents they commanded. Pollution and neglect dulled and degraded the patrician facades.
Seven decades later, and 14 years after a second revolution upended the country, a handful of divergent forces are working to put Downtown Cairo’s star back in the ascendant. Which isn’t necessarily an expected development. While Greater Cairo’s current population of around 22mn is triple what it was in 1984, much of the newer real estate development is concentrated in and around New Cairo, Sheikh Zayed City and 6th of October, all areas along the outskirts of Cairo proper. Many are gated compounds, combining mixed-use development (malls, sports facilities) with low-rise apartment blocks and villas. Downtown represents something entirely different: atmosphere, heritage buildings, creative stimulations and the buzz — some might say the cacophony — of genuine urban life, in one of the few neighbourhoods in the city where diverse socio-demographic groups interact on a daily basis.
And while the neighbourhood manifests sentimental value for many Egyptians, its development potential hasn’t been lost on the state. In an effort to generate foreign direct investment, the government of president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi entrusted a portfolio of state-owned Downtown monuments, including the monolith Mogamma building on Tahrir Square, to TSFE, a sovereign wealth fund set up in 2018. The Mogamma is currently being developed into an Autograph hotel, one of the Marriott Collection’s luxury brands, in a $200mn project.
Walk along Downtown’s main thoroughfares — Talaat Harb, Qasr El Nil, Sherif Basha, Mahmoud Bassiouny — and the signs of renovation shine out from between gritty facades: new paint, polished glass in ornate French doors, balconies reconstructed from archival photos. The old French consulate has become a sleek four-storey co-working complex. The iconic Cinema Radio, a once nearly-defunct landmark, now houses an espresso bar, an excellent Levantine bistro and an outpost of Diwan, Cairo’s female-founded booksellers. Its main theatre has been partially restored and regularly hosts events tied to the city’s burgeoning culture calendar.
For some Egyptians of a certain generation, a putative Downtown renaissance isn’t easy to get one’s head around, much less invest in. “[Well-to-do] people born in the 1980s live in the compounds and suburbs, and they go out to restaurants and bars and cafés there,” says Omniya Abdel Barr, an architect and the development director of the Egyptian Heritage Rescue Foundation. But “these [developers] are engaged people,” she continues. “They’re encouraging others to come, spend and invest, to own and patronise businesses here.
“What Karim is doing is actually bringing that kind of traffic back here again. It’s not just the restorations, but the activities [he supports], the tenants, like Diwan, that he is bringing in. And he has contributed to the cultural calendar, by helping to make the venues it requires.”
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Karim is Karim Shafei, chair of real estate investment fund Al Ismaelia. Founded in 2008, today it owns 25 properties across Downtown: besides the Cinema Radio complex, these include buildings housing high-spec serviced apartments, boutique office spaces, and studios and showrooms for artists and designers, some of them partially subsidised. In the small back streets behind Cinema Radio, amid metal workshops and shisha bars, Al Ismaelia has renovated a second theatre, two hangar-like warehouses for events and exhibitions, and a row of small shopfronts among whose tenants are a vintage-clothing seller and a young textile designer.
Al Ismaelia’s backers include Samih Sawiris, former chair of Goliath construction-development conglomerate Orascom (who counts properties in Andermatt, Lustica Bay in Montenegro, and El Gouna on Egypt’s Red Sea Coast in his portfolio) and a handful of Saudi investors. (Recent investment co-operation with Saudi Arabia has seen billions flow into the country, much of it directed into tourism and real estate.) Shafei says his fund’s mission is a revival of Downtown’s fortunes, making it a place that reflects a contemporary version of Egypt. He’ll happily celebrate the dusty but enduring appeal of its old-school addresses as much as the next Cairene: on a long walk through the neighbourhood, we duck into Estoril (opened 1962; the paintings on the walls are for sale) and Le Grillon (a former beer garden and famous boîte for 1950s Egyptian cinema stars), and speculate about the fate of Groppi, the 100-year-old café-pâtisserie on Talaat Harb Square.
But “what we do is not about nostalgia; it’s not folkloric,” says Shafei, who was born and raised in Dokki, across the Nile, and for whom Downtown has exerted a near-mythical pull since he attended an arts festival there in 2000. “We want Downtown to be a place where all the city’s socio-economic segments can congregate, where artists can afford to live and work.”
There have been obstacles along the route. For a few years in the wake of the 2011 revolution, Downtown was largely abandoned by police, allowing street sellers to proliferate and create impassable traffic situations. Then came Covid. Throughout, acquisitions often involved multiple tenants on minuscule commercial leases, which required diplomatically negotiating out of one by one, an exercise that sometimes took years. “You might see a grand, fabulous building full of grand apartments, and only two or three of them were actually lived in,” says Abdel Barr.
“I think we [Cairenes] occasionally wondered, ‘How will it happen?’” she continues. “It has not been at all easy for them, juggling the bureaucracy and the many layers of ownership . . . But somehow just in the last, let’s say, three years, we’ve seen some things really coming to fruition. And it’s a much broader vision than [many people] had realised.”
Part of the broader vision is meaningful contributions to Cairo’s cultural scene, which has also flourished in the past few years. Art Cairo celebrated its sixth edition two weeks ago, drawing collectors from across Egypt and overseas. Other events, from Cairo Design Week to D-CAF (the Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival, now in its 12th year) and Art D’Égypte, all host exhibitions, panels and parties Downtown.
“Cairo in general is growing at a rate that’s unbelievable,” says Mai Eldib. The former senior director for the Middle East at Sotheby’s, now an independent art adviser, Eldib moved home to Egypt from London last summer. She lives on Zamalek, but is heartened to see Downtown on the upswing. “I would love a really renewed, vibrant Downtown; I’d love to be able to sit at a café on the street here.
“Until then I’ll take a rooftop,” she says with a grin. We’re at Mazeej Balad, a boutique hotel which opened last month on the top two floors of the Al Ismaelia-owned, 1896 La Viennoise building, two blocks from Tahrir Square. It has five art-filled suites and a rooftop restaurant, which is where we’re drinking tea under scalloped umbrellas. A few feet away is a marble-lined bar with a retracting roof; lanterns dot the colourful tiled pavement between potted palms. Across the street, laundry hangs from a balcony; rooftops bristle with satellite dishes.
Eldib reckons Downtown’s potential lies with those “who…
