Cairo's suburbs offer life American-style

CAIRO -- It's sandstorm season in Cairo, when the desert wind known as the Khamaseen seems determined to reclaim the city.

A hot, mustard-colored haze engulfs the capital. Residents seal up their windows, and those who venture outside don surgical masks or clutch tissues to their faces against the tide of sand, flying garbage, and urban grit.

The same sandstorm blows outside Tarek Atia's suburban dream home. But here, about 25 miles east of Cairo, the wind, even the light, feels different.

"The air is cleaner, isn't it?" Atia says, stepping out of the unfinished villa in a gated community called Katameya Residence. "It's not mixing with the car fumes and other stuff."

Atia is one of the pioneers of a new suburbia cropping up on the edges of Egypt's gridlocked and deteriorating capital. Their dream: a little peace, fresh air, and a yard of their own.

With luxury developments sporting names like Golden Heights, Swan Lake, and Royal Meadows, Cairo's new suburbs promise an idealized vision of an appealingly alien lifestyle.

"It has to have a Western feel," said architect Hisham Bahgat, who helped to design several developments, including Katameya Residence. "They're selling an image of a life."

They are also, at times, pushing the boundaries of aesthetics and provoking a debate over whether these fringe cities will destroy Cairo's appeal.

Houses in some new communities combine red Mediterranean tile roofs, splashes of pastel colors, Roman columns, and sheets of shimmering glass, like grafts taken from random pages of Architectural Digest. Future University, one of dozens of new private schools dotting the suburbs, looks like a spaceship meshed with a half-scale model of the Roman Colosseum.

After a fitful start, suburban construction is progressing nonstop, as is the debate over whether these new communities will help Cairo or finish it off.

Critics argue that the building boom sets the stage for unprecedented social divisions. "You can live in these areas and be totally detached from Egypt," said Manar Shorbagy, former director of the American Studies Center at American University in Cairo. "It's going to work like it did in the US -- wealthy suburbs and deprived and abandoned inner cities."

But even American University, which educates the children of Egypt's richest and most powerful, is about to move to the suburbs.

Egypt has always been a place of rigid class divisions, but until now the wealthy often lived in or near the same neighborhoods where they grew up, sometimes turning modest apartments of their youth into lavish palaces.

Dozens of suburban housing developments east and southwest of the city are up and running; the complex where Atia lives is a boomtown.

But most look like the Lakeview: one section lushly landscaped and most of the rest a cluster of unfinished villas and acres of raw desert, surrounded by an ornate wall.

Cairo's shift toward suburbia has been in the works for decades. President Anwar Sadat launched a plan in the 1970s to create autonomous satellite cities and draw people away from Cairo.

Many of the developments never became more than factory towns. The only one regarded as a success is October 6 City, about 25 miles southwest of the capital and home to more than 200,000.

The government changed strategy in the mid-1990s, turning over suburban development to the private sector and selling vast tracts of state-owned land to investors at sweetheart rates.

"The idea was to help empty out Cairo," Fahim said. "But now the picture's been turned upside down."

Luxury communities with names like Beverly Hills and Greenland popped up around October 6 City, but that boom stalled in the late 1990s, a victim of economic stagnation and the reluctance of naturally tightknit Egyptians to forsake family bonds in the city.

In 2003 a new construction push started, this time centered on a patch of desert known as New Cairo, east of the capital.

The Atias -- Tarek, wife Inas, and sons Omar, 8, and Ali, 6 -- moved to New Cairo in 2003, in part to help Ali's chronic asthma. Home for the past four years has been a rented two-story house in a complex called Rehab.

"We joked that we were going into rehab from all the pollution and problems of Cairo," said Atia, a former journalist now working as a media development specialist. "We didn't mind the extra drive in exchange for the piece of mind," said Atia, who still marvels that his house is surrounded by "an actual white picket fence!"

Atia sees a bright future for the suburbs: acres of office parks, shopping, culture, and a commuter railroad to Cairo. His goal is to help create community newsletters and local radio stations.