Monday 01.01.18

OHK Completes the Downtown Cairo Redevelopment Master Plan

EUR 6 Billion Regeneration Strategy in Partnership with the Cairo Governorate and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development

OHK has successfully concluded the Downtown Cairo Regeneration project under contract with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). Downtown’s future has stalled under past plans developed by the Government of Egypt, Cairo Governorate, and various stakeholders, such as the Strategic Development Plan for Greater Cairo Region 2050, the Urban Plan for Downtown Cairo (2010), and the Urban Protectorate Plan under the Urban Harmonization Authority (2008). The bank hired OHK to address shortcomings in such efforts and set direction through an integrated and realistic regeneration master plan for Cairo’s one-of-a-kind historic Downtown. The project started in Q3 2016 and ran for a duration of 14 months; It was funded by the Austrian Technical Assistance Co-operation Fund, whose mandate is to help the Egyptian government bring back the glory of Downtown’s Belle Epoque’s urban and architectural legacy. In this broad and overarching assignment, OHK formulated a Downtown first. This long-term, investment-enabled urban regeneration plan recapitalized Downtown’s 3 million square meters’ historic fabric, unique characteristics, and resources. It reshapes its mix of uses, value-chain dynamics, and 1600 buildings’ asset base.

In close coordination with the bank and Cairo Governorate’s leadership, Ahmed Hassan Okelly, OHK’s Managing Partner, led the assignment with a keen focus on adapting global best practices in urban planning and regeneration and real-estate asset management to Downtown— a weighty task in one of the world’s most complex urban hubs. With OHK’s expert pool in various urban renewal areas, he oversaw a 20-person team of policy engagement and socioeconomic analysts, master planners, urban designers, architects, and infrastructure engineers in Egypt and Europe. The project was “lean-managed” to meet the complexity of Downtown’s status quo, the multiplicity of its local and national stakeholders, and a broad scope that expanded under the EBRD’s urging to finance large bankable regeneration interventions and OHK’s own ethos to go beyond strategic ideas and “dig into the details.”

Organized around a tight implementation schedule, five teams in Europe and Egypt, tasked with parallel work streams, including a national task force in the Egyptian government and a Downtown-bound field team, produced fifteen packages of deliverables and hundreds of mapping, planning, design, and investment studies and models. The project’s regeneration master plan is arguably the most detailed and largest ever undertaken in any Middle East or African urban area. By monetary value, it is Egypt’s largest, most integrative, and most realistic urban and public works project ever undertaken as a single and unified scheme. Akin in scale to Egypt’s largest redevelopment project, the Suez Canal Corridor Area Project, its finance pipeline is only 10% less.

A newly formed national committee, the Cairo Heritage Development Committee, has taken on, under a presidential mandate, seeing through two of the OHK’s project deliverables. First is implementing the Downtown Cairo Regeneration Master Plan (2017). Under this plan, OHK’s analytics of all current and past plans combined with extensive studies of Downtown’s building stock, infrastructure, and transportation, combined with extensive stakeholder consultation—more than 200 interviews with policymakers, government officials, current and potential investors, and local businesses and residents produced a plan that is exceptionally diverse and thorough in its strategy articulation, spatial coverage, implementation structure, and investment proposals.

The plan structured regeneration interventions into 46 urban districts and 230 investment packages ranging from 1m EUR to several billion in infrastructure and real-estate redevelopment, reshaped entire neighborhoods, street networks, and blocks of historic buildings and historic quarters, and introduced transportation and mobility solutions to one of the world’s most congested urban cores. Under OHK’s plan, the presidential committee has been tasked with implementing 14 guiding principles of regeneration, each customized to Downtown’s circumstances and designed to meet specific regeneration targets, and carrying out 32 implementation tracks across a 1, 3, and 5-year timeline. The Cairo Governorate has taken up five priority areas from the 46 zones for immediate implementation.  The total investment under the plan is 6b EUR or 128 b EGP.

Despite Downtown’s major and historic building boom of the 1800s and early 1900s, which gave birth to unique urbanism combining European urban design approaches and architectural influences, the 1950s and 1960s triggered a decline in urban and building conditions that persists till today due to rent control laws. OHK developed a developer toolbox that can be marketed and applied by Cairo Governorate and with property owners. First, based on infrastructure and building stock audits of more than 100 buildings and their areas, new standards for the built environment have been codified into a proposed new law and regulations. They are expected to help scale back the major deterioration of building conditions through appropriate and cost-effective technical measures and recommendations. Secondly, the toolbox combined such standards for renewing the Downtown’s fabric with various approaches to alternative uses and building redevelopment. New business models were developed that combine urban planning, real-estate models of management, new investments into destination making, and viable partnerships between the government and the private sector. This is expected to increase the returns for building stock owners by 10x and change Downtown's real-estate and urban economics.

OHK’s partner, e7, provided building efficiency auditing specialist support, and an architectural firm from Austria, Tillner & Willinger, provided architecture design support.

For more information about OHK’s urban planning and economic regeneration strategy services and capital investment advisory in the Middle East and globally, contact us.