Category: ALEXANDRIA

News concerning all sort of activities in Alexandria

  • Alexandria Aligned to the Rising Sun

    Alexandria Aligned to the Rising Sun

    According to a new research, the ancient city of Alexandria may have been built around a solar event occurring during Alexander the Great’s lifetime. Researchers used simulation software to plot the rise of the sun for the day he was born. They found that the “King’s Star” Regulus, located in the head of the constellation Leo, rose in a similar alignment. The researchers note that it was a common practice in ancient times to base architectural designs on astronomical events, pointing out that the Great Pyramid in Giza has been found to be aligned along compass points.

    The Macedonian empire builder, who conquered a swathe of territory stretching from Greece to Egypt in the west, to as far as the Indus River in the east, founded the city on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast in 331 BC. This research shows that on Alexander’s birthday the main east-west thoroughfare of the ancient city was in almost perfect alignment with the rising sun of the fourth century.

    Giulio Magli, an archaeoastronomer at the Politecnico of Milan, hopes his results could help researchers in the hunt for Alexander’s tomb, the location of which still remains unknown. Historians and archaeologists have been studying Alexandria in an attempt to locate the Macedonian king’s tomb, which is believed to be in the city in a gold casket inside of a glass sarcophagus. This new research, they believe may help find it.

    Today a modern city home to four million people, Alexandria was in ancient times hugely prosperous and home to the Lighthouse of Alexandria and the Library of Alexandria -two of the seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

    (world.greekreporter.com)

  • Egypt Pours €360 Million into Renewing Alexandria’s Tram Network

    Egypt Pours €360 Million into Renewing Alexandria’s Tram Network

    Egypt is set to start the renovation and modernization of the prominent Al-Raml Tram network in Alexandria in a project that will cost €360 million.

    Egypt’s Ministry of Investment and International Cooperation signed a €100 million loan agreement with the French Development Agency (AFD), which will partially finance the project.

    The upgrading process of the 13.7 kilometers tramline will take up to three years. It aims at increasing the capacity of the tram from 100,000 passengers per day to 230,000. The renovations will also help cut the time needed for the tram to take a complete round from one hour to half an hour, also the facilities will be improved.

    Al-Raml tram network is the oldest tram line in Africa, it connects Alexandria’s western and eastern areas. It is also one of the oldest lines in the world.

    According to a statement released by the Ministry of Investments and International Cooperation, the European Investment Bank expressed its interest to co-finance the new project.

    Minister of Investments and International Cooperation Sahar Nasr said in press statements that Egypt is keen on improving the transportation sector, be it subways or railways. She further added that the presence of an insightful strategy to improve the transportation sector eased up the negotiations with sponsors.

    (egyptianstreets.com)

  • Dr. Mustafa Al Faqi, Director of BA

    Dr. Mustafa Al Faqi, Director of BA

    The Board of Trustees of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA) chose on 11/5/2017 Dr. Mustafa Al Faqi as Director of BA. President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi approved the selection of Al Faqi for the post. He is successor to Ismail Serag Eddin, who has been the director of the library since its opening in October 2002.

    CV of Dr. Mustafa Al Faqi

    Dr. Mustafa Al Faqi is a prominent politician was born on November 14, 1944 in Beheira Governorate.

    Education History:

    PH.D in Political Science, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (SOAS), 1977 – BA in Political Science, Faculty of Economic and Political Science, Cairo University, 1966.

    Executive Posts:

    – President of the British University in Egypt (February 2005- April 2008).

    – Member of Parliament (Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee of The Egyptian People’s Assembly) 2001.

    – Member of the Middle East Committee of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (2005).

    – Vice president of freedom and human rights (Inter-Parliamentary Union (2010).

    – Member of The Consultative Committee of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, sole representative of the Arab States (2008).

    – Deputy Chairman of the Arab Parliament (2005).

    – Member of the Supreme Council for Policies of the National Democratic Party, Chairman of the Committee (Egypt and the World) 2002-2004, In charge of communication between the Party and both Arab and Foreign Parties (2004-2005).

    Previously:

    – First Assistant Foreign Minister, 2000.

    – Assistant Foreign Minister for Arab and Middle East Affairs, Permanent Representative of Egypt to the League of Arab States, (1999).

    – Ambassador of Egypt to Austria and Permanent Representative to the International Organizations in Vienna (IAEA, CTBTO, UNIDO, UNOV, OSCE).

    – Governor of Egypt at IAEA (1995 – 1997) – (1998 – 1999).

    – Chairman of African Group, Vienna, (1995 – 1999).

    – Ambassador – non-resident – to the Republics of Slovakia, Slovenia and Croatia 1995-1999.

    – Director of the Institute for Diplomatic Studies, The Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs ( 1993 – 1995).

    – Secretary General of the Advisory Council for Foreign Affairs, the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs ( 1992 –1993).

    – Secretary of Information and Follow-up to the President of Egypt and Head of the Bureau of Information and Follow-up, Egyptian Presidency (July 1985 – October 1992).

    Awards and Decorations:

     – “Silver Cross High Honor” from the Republic of Austria 2001.

     – “First Class Science & Arts Honor” from Republic of Austria in 1998.

    –  “Second Class Republic Honor” from Republic of Tunisia in 1990.

     – “Commander Degree National Honor of Merit” from Republic of France in 1989.

     – “National Order of Merit” from Republic of Cyprus in 1989.

    –  “Second Class Republic Order” from Sudan Republic in 1988.

    –  “Knight Degree Order of Merit” from Kingdom of Sweden in 1987.

    –  “Knight Degree Order of Merit” from Kingdom of Denmark in 1986.

    –  “Civil Service Order of Merit” from Kingdom of Spain in 1985.

    –  “Third Class Order of Merit” from Arab Republic of Egypt in 1983.

    –  “Fourth Class Order of Merit” from Arab Republic of Egypt in 1975.

    Prizes:

    – State Merit Prize in Social Sciences, 2003.

    – “Personality of the Year”, American University in Cairo (Adham Center for Television Journalism), 1995.

    – State Incentive Prize in Political Science, 1994.

    – First Award for Best Political Article, the Supreme Council for Science, Literature and Arts, 1966.

    – Egyptian Universities Cup for Best Public Speaker, 1965.

    Publications:

    – Arabs From The Dogma of Conspiracy to The Thought of Freedoms, Dar El Shorouk- Cairo 2009.

    – The Egyptian State and Contemporary Vision: Dar El Shorouk 2005.

    – Harvest of A Century: Al Haiaa Al Amma Lel Ketab, Cairo 2004 – English Edition.

    Dilemma of a Nation: Dar El Shorouk 2003, winner of state prize for best book from the Cairo International Book Fair – January 2004.

    – Horse and Donkey, The choice: Dar El Shorouk, 2002 Revolution and Reform, Methods and Thoughts: Dar El Shorouk 2002, Arabs, Origin and Image : Dar El Shorouk 2002.

    – Intellectual Nights in Vienna: Dar El Shorouk, Cairo, 1998 (several editions).

    – The Absent Vision : Dar El Shorouk, Cairo, 1996 (several editions).

    – Dialogue of Generation : Dar El Shorouk, Cairo, 1994 (several editions).

    Revival of Arab Nationalist Thought : Dar El Shorouk, Cairo, 1993- (several editions) (Winner of incentive state prize and best book prize from the Cairo International Book Fair for the same publishing year).

    – Islam in a Changing World: Al Haiaa Al Amma Lel Ketab, Cairo, 1993 (Arabic Edition) – Dar El Shorouk, Cairo, 1999 (English Edition).

    – Intellectual Exchange : Al Haiaa Al Amma Lel Ketab, Cairo, 1993.

    – Copts in Egyptian Political Life: PH.D. Dissertation, London University (SOAS), 1977: Dar El Shorouk and Al Hilal, several Arabic Editions,Cairo 1985 English Edition Al Haiaa Al Amma Lel Kitab, Cairo, 1989.

    – One People, One Nation: Co-Authored Volume Introduced by Dr. Boutros Boutros Ghali, Al- Ahram Press, Cairo, 1981.

    – American – Soviet Détente and the Middle East Conflict: Nasser Academy Press, Cairo, 1970.

    (www.sis.gov.eg)

  • 16 Killed in Bombing at St Mark’s Cathedral in Alexandria

    16 Killed in Bombing at St Mark’s Cathedral in Alexandria

    A bomb has exploded near St. Mark Coptic Cathedral in Alexandria, just hours after another bombing at St George’s in Tanta.

    According to initial reports, the bomb struck outside the Cathedral, killing 16 people and injuring 41 others.

    Al-Ahram reports that a high-ranking police officer was killed when he intercepted a suicide bomber outside the Cathedral. The police officer has been identified as Emad Al-Rekaiby.

    Coptic Pope Tawadros II, the head of the Coptic Church, was inside the Cathedral at the time of the explosion. Initial reports indicate the Pope is safe. Pope Tawadros II was inside the church presiding over Palm Sunday celebrations.

    According to state media Al-Ahram, security forces have dismantled two bombs near St Mark’s Cathedral in Alexandria.

    The story is still developing

    (egyptianstreets.com)

  • Searching for Life Quality? Cairo, Alexandria Just Made It to Africa’s Top 10 Cities

    Searching for Life Quality? Cairo, Alexandria Just Made It to Africa’s Top 10 Cities

    According to a Swiss study published Tuesday, Egypt’s Mediterranean city of Alexandria comes third while the capital Cairo ranks seventh when it comes to quality of life in Africa.

    Surveying 100 capitals and major urban centres in Africa, the research body Communaute d’Etudes pour l’Amenagement du Territoire at the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) looked at seven categories: society, housing, spatial development, infrastructure, environment, governance and economy.

    “I wish this was true, but it’s difficult to understand how Cairo that has been, for example, reputed for its toxic air and chronic noise pollution in numerous global studies in the past comes at seven,” said Amro Ali, an Alexandrian researcher who currently lives in Cairo.

    “Also were they able to access data and independent studies on the informal settlements and housing crisis faced by the poor that plagues Cairo and Alexandria? As official statistics provided by the authorities would often give a skewed picture,” Ali added, wondering what the methodology was for measuring the seven categories.

    Swiss urban sociologist, Jerome Chenal, told Afrique Mediterranee Business, the Paris-based magazine that commissioned the study that “until now, rankings for Africa were done for investors and expatriates”.

    “We never asked how people lived, whether young or old, rich or poor,” Chental told AFP.

    Morocco’s Marrakesh held first place, and three of its other cities also made it to the top 10 on the list, while South Africa’s economic capital Johannesburg came second.

    (egyptianstreets.com)

  • Mostafa el-Abbadi, Champion of Alexandria’s Resurrected Library, Dies at 88

    Mostafa el-Abbadi, Champion of Alexandria’s Resurrected Library, Dies at 88

    Mostafa A. H. el-Abbadi, a Cambridge-educated historian of Greco-Roman antiquity and the soft-spoken visionary behind the revival of the Great Library of Alexandria in Egypt, died on Feb. 13 in Alexandria. He was 88.

    His daughter, Dr. Mohga el-Abbadi, said the cause was heart failure.

    Professor Abbadi’s dream of a new library — a modern version of the magnificent center of learning of ancient times — could be traced to 1972, when, as a scholar at the University of Alexandria, he concluded a lecture with an impassioned challenge.

    “At the end, I said, ‘It is sad to see the new University of Alexandria without a library, without a proper library,’” he recalled in 2010. “‘And if we want to justify our claim to be connected spiritually with the ancient tradition, we must follow the ancient example by starting a great universal library.’”

    It was President Richard M. Nixon who blew wind into the sails of Professor Abbadi’s ambitious proposal. When Nixon visited Egypt in 1974, he and President Anwar el-Sadat rode by train to Alexandria’s ancient ruins to observe their faded grandeur. When Nixon asked about the ancient library’s location and history, no one in the Egyptian entourage had an answer.

    That night, the rector of the University of Alexandria called the professor and asked him to prepare a memo about the Great Library’s rise and fall.

    The task, he said later, made him realize how deeply the ancient library resonated, not only with Egyptians but also with many around the world who shared his scholarly thirst.

    Backed by the university, Professor Abbadi began developing plans for a new research institution and ultimately persuaded the governor of Alexandria, the Egyptian government and Unesco, the United Nations educational and cultural organization, to lend their support.

    In 1988, President Hosni Mubarak laid the foundation stone for what would become the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, a $220 million seaside cylindrical complex. Designed by the Norwegian firm Snohetta, it comprises a 220,000-square-foot reading room, four museums, several galleries, a conference center, a planetarium and gift shops.

    It opened in 2002, hailed as a revitalization of intellectual culture in Egypt’s former ancient capital, which is now its often neglected second-largest city.

    “With the founding of the new Bibliotheca Alexandrina,” Professor Abbadi wrote in 2004, “the ancient experiment has come full circle.”

    The professor did not share fully in the glory. He, like other scholars, had been critical of some aspects of the finished library and maintained that the builders had been careless during the excavation, unmindful of the site’s archaeological value.

    When the library was officially opened, in a ceremony attended by heads of state, royalty and other luminaries, he was nowhere to be seen. He had not been invited.

    Mostafa Abdel Hamid el-Abbadi was born on Oct. 10, 1928, in Cairo. His father, Abdel-Hamid el-Abbadi, was a founder of the College of Letters and Arts of the University of Alexandria in 1942 and its first dean.

    Mostafa el-Abbadi earned a bachelor’s degree with honors there in 1951. A year later, he enrolled at the University of Cambridge on an Egyptian government scholarship. He studied at Jesus College under A. H. M. Jones, the pre-eminent historian of the Roman Empire, and earned a doctorate in ancient history there in 1960.

    Two years before, in Britain, he had married Azza Kararah, a professor of English literature at the University of Alexandria, who had earned her doctorate at Cambridge in 1955. She died in 2015.

    Besides his daughter, Professor el-Abbadi is survived by a son, Amr, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara; a sister, Saneya el-Abbadi; three brothers — Hassan, a former Egyptian ambassador to Thailand and Cuba; Hani, a former Egyptian ambassador to Sri Lanka; and Hisham — and five grandchildren.

    Professor Abbadi and Professor Kararah returned to Egypt in the 1960s to be lecturers at the University of Alexandria. They held many visiting fellowships and appointments throughout their careers. From 1966 to 1969, they taught at Beirut Arab University in Lebanon.

    (mobile.nytimes.com)

  • Alexandria: locals adapt to floods as coastal waters inch closer

    Alexandria: locals adapt to floods as coastal waters inch closer

    “Before we were flooded a couple of years ago, we didn’t imagine the water could reach this level,” said cafe manager Samir Gaber, gesturing at a cluster of tables overlooking the Mediterranean. 

    Gaber has managed the Latino cafe in Alexandria for six years, during which time the business has had to adapt to increasingly dramatic winter storms. With the storms come the floods, crashing waves engulfing large chunks of the many cafes nestled on the coastline. 

    “There was another wall here before the flooding, but the steel bars [supporting it] were destroyed,” explained Gaber. “Now we’ve constructed a drain to absorb floodwater,” he said, gesturing below the new stone wall running along the outside edge of the cafe.

    Many of the cafes and businesses on the Alexandria coast have begun adjusting to extreme weather without making the link to climate change.

    On the southern tip of the Mediterranean, the coastal waters are inching closer to buildings and flooded ancient structures, including the Greco-Roman tombs at Anfushi. Seawater seeping into the groundwater has also made the fragile ground more unstable, resulting in the alarming collapse of some of the city’s buildings. 

    The UN estimates that global sea levels will rise between 13cm and 68cm by 2050, and say that the Mediterranean is particularly vulnerable – by 2080, up to 120,000 people living near the sea could be affected by rising waters if no action is taken to protect them. 

    Rising sea levels and seawater temperatures will also increase the salinity of the Nile, Egypt’s primary water source, and increasingly salty water sources could destroy farmland across the Nile Delta. In 2007, the World Bank estimated that 10.5% of Egypt’s population could be displaced by rising waters caused by climate change.

    An hour to the east from Alexandria, the quiet of the town of Rosetta ignores the urgency of the lapping waters. Life in the town, famed for the discovery of the Rosetta stone, is at one with the sea. 

    “You have to do what you have to do, and don’t think about the bad weather – the good weather comes from God,” said fisherman Ahmed Mohamed Gowayed, reciting a local saying. 

    Storms annually disrupt the calm of this low-lying town where houses sit at sea level, many only separated from the coast by a winding coast road. But in recent years the weather has been more violent.

    “Last year the storm destroyed palm trees, buildings, cars – older people in their seventies said they’d never seen anything like it in their lives,” said Gowayed. The storm also destroyed barges and kiosks that local fishermen rely on for their livelihoods. 

    “If the weather continues like this I will build a stronger kiosk,” smiled Gowayed, undeterred by the prospect of the next storm.

    Mohamed El Raey, professor of environmental studies at Alexandria University, believes that climate change is contributing to an increase in “extreme events”, across Egypt. “The government needs to increase awareness among the population,” he said.

    They also need to be more stringent about urban planning, he added. “If people don’t find places to live that they like, they build houses wherever they find an area.” 

    In 2011, the government released a report detailing how the country must adapt to climate change, estimating that about 13% of Egypt’s northern coastline was at risk. 

    Political and economic upheavals have since diverted their attention elsewhere, but in Alexandria and Rosetta the impact of climate change is becoming increasingly hard to ignore.

    (www.theguardian.com)

  • Alexandria studies importing 15 new trams to join its tramway network

    Alexandria studies importing 15 new trams to join its tramway network

    AlexandriaA total of 15 new trams are expected to join the Alexandria tramway network that serves the Mediterranean city, according to statements by the head of the General Authority for Passenger Transport in Alexandria, Khaled Elewa.

    The authority has finalized the technical terms of the project, but still studying four offers from Ukraine, Italy, China and Belarus, Elewa told Youm7.

    Began operating in 1863, the tramway network in Alexandria consists of 20 lines and serves 140 stops.

    The price of single tram ride differs according to the carriage used, and it usually varies between 0.50 EGP to 5 EGP.

    (thecairopost.youm7.com)

  • The story of cities: how Alexandria laid foundations for the modern world

    The story of cities: how Alexandria laid foundations for the modern world

    ΙστορίαThe secret to Alexandria, if classical historians are to be believed, lies in a golden casket. Studded with jewels and small enough to hold in one’s hands, the casket was a war trophy found in the lodgings of vanquished Persian king Darius III more than 2,300 years ago. The man who defeated Darius, Alexander the Great, locked his most treasured possession – the works of Homer – inside it.

    Soon after conquering Egypt, Alexander had a dream in which Homer visited him and spoke lines from The Odyssey. Among them was a reference to the Egyptian island of Pharos in the Mediterranean, and so the next morning Alexander travelled to Pharos and stood upon its rocks, clutching the golden casket and staring out at a scrappy, forgotten stretch of coastline. After a long silence, he nodded. From these shores, the most remarkable city the ancient world had ever seen was about to rise.

    Today, the original Alexandria lies buried beneath two millennia of urban evolution; the building blocks of its oldest temples and monuments have been carried as far afield as Cairo, London and New York, or else shattered by earthquakes and military invasions, or submerged under the sea. To understand the ancient city, archaeologists have had to peel back the modern one – along with deep and often contradictory layers of myth and folklore. Few metropolises are as steeped in legend as Alexandria, not least because few metropolises have ever attempted to gather together the world’s stories in one place as Alexandria once did, writing a new chapter of urban history in the process.

    “Alexandria was the greatest mental crucible the world has ever known,” claim Justin Pollard and Howard Reid, authors of a book on the city’s origins. “In these halls the true foundations of the modern world were laid – not in stone, but in ideas.”

    Although it is ancient Alexandria’s individual showstoppers – the lighthouse, library and museum – that are best remembered and celebrated in our own time, the city’s influence on contemporary life truly begins with its overall design. Alexander’s chief architect, Dinocrates, envisaged an epic gridiron that would knit together public space and private, spectacle and function, as well as land and sea. EM Forster, who became one of Alexandria’s most famous chroniclers in the 1920s, called it “all that was best in Hellenism”. Yet Dinocrates’ masterpiece very nearly sank without a trace before the first slab had ever been placed within the sand.

    In the absence of chalk to mark out the shape of the new city’s future roads, houses and water channels, Dinocrates used barley flour instead. But as quick as his surveyors could calculate the relevant angles and his labourers could scatter the requisite lines of grain, flocks of sea birds swooped down and snaffled this life-size blueprint for themselves. Many on the ground considered it a terrible omen for the settlement which was to bear Alexander’s name, but the general’s personal soothsayer took a different view: the birds’ feeding frenzy, he explained, was a sign that Alexandria would one day provide sustenance for the whole planet.

    ΙστορίαAnd so work continued, and before long those sea birds were gazing down at a frenzy of construction. Sites were allocated for Alexander’s royal palace, temples for both Greek and Egyptian gods, a traditional agora – both a commercial marketplace and a centre for communal gathering – as well as residential dwellings and fortification walls. Canals were cut from the Nile, with rivulets diverted under the main streets to supply the homes of the rich with a steady provision of fresh water.

    On one level, Dinocrates’ plan for Alexandria was a cut and paste job, following the typical pattern of many of the Greek cities he was familiar with. Dinocrates was a student of Hippodamus, the man responsible for building the great Athenian harbour at Piraeus and often referred to as the father of urban planning. According to Aristotle, Hippodamus was the man who “contrived the art of laying out towns”, though the compliments ended there; the old philosopher went on to accuse Hippodamus of living in ‘a very affected manner’, and cited his ‘flowing locks’ and ‘expensive ornaments’ with disdain.

    Hippodamus and his school believed that designing cities meant more than just sketching out the boundaries of the relevant site; planners had to think about how the town was going to function, not only logistically but politically and culturally as well. In the eyes of Hippodamus, streets were not just by-products of houses and shops but centre-points in their own right: a showpiece of efficient urban governance. But whereas Hippodamus was largely confined to piecemeal projects, transforming small sections of older cities from within, at Alexandria Dinocrates was offered a blank canvas – and a chance to put his master’s innovations into practice on an unprecedented scale.

    Dinocrates’ genius was to extend the lines of his gridiron right out over the water, building a 600ft wide land bridge – known as the heptastadion, because it was seven times the length of a Greek stadium – out from the mainland to the island of Pharos and creating two immense harbours either side of the causeway. The level of integration between all the city’s various elements was profound. “You have the heptastadion forming the harbours, the harbours protected by the lighthouse, and the line to the lighthouse running back into the city’s main grid-plan on the same orientation,” says Dr Judith McKenzie, of Oxford University’s School of Archaeology and author of The Architecture of Alexandria. “It was a package deal, and it worked.”

    Vitally, Alexandria’s success lay not only in its Grecian roots but also in its Egyptian influences. The tale of Alexander’s golden casket has been passed down the generations, but in reality the selection of the city’s location must have relied on local knowledge and expertise just as much as it did Homer. Not only did the new city form a perfect nexus between the relatively insular Egyptian pharaonic kingdom inland and the maritime trade empire of Greece and the Mediterranean beyond, but its roads were angled to maximise circulation of the sea’s cooling winds, and its buildings soon melded the best in western and eastern architecture. The famous octagonal walls of the ancient lighthouse are replicated today on countless minarets throughout the rest of Egypt, and on many of Christopher Wren’s church spires in Britain.

    In whose image was the city created?

    In the years to come, as Alexandria’s riches and reputation spiralled, its most famous institutions took shape: a musaeum (literally, a ‘temple of the muses’) which brought together the leading scholars in every academic discipline, and within it a library, believed to be largest on earth and sustained by the royally mandated appropriation of any books found on ships which came into the city’s port.

    But Alexander himself would never live to see these marvels, or indeed the city which he founded. Soon after Dinocrates began laying out his lines of barley flour, the general travelled on to consult the oracle at Siwa, deep within Egypt’s western desert, and then headed east to new colonial campaigns in Persia and India. Within a decade, he had died in Babylon; his successor in Egypt, Ptolemy I, orchestrated an audacious kidnap of the body as it was en route to burial in Alexander’s native Macedon (modern-day northern Greece) and brought it instead to Alexandria where it was ensconced in a colossal tomb.

    The fate of Alexander’s corpse is a window on to a darker side of Alexandria, one that was less about intellectual endeavour and urban modernism, and more focused on harnessing the city as a vehicle for autocratic power and the entrenchment of divine rule. Ptolemy wanted Alexander in death because it helped legitimise his own authority in life. Whereas the original Hellenistic town was intended as a polis in which autonomous citizens enjoyed an equal say in decision-making (unless, of course, they were female, foreign or enslaved), Alexandria became a template of urban absolutism – its regimented layout and carefully-demarcated quarters a display of control from above, not democracy from below.

    “What was left of the old urban drama was a mere spectacle,” argues urban historian Lewis Mumford in his seminal The City in History. “In the old polisevery citizen had an active part to play: in the new municipality, the citizen took orders and did what he was told.” In Mumford’s eyes, the formal order and beauty so perfectly embodied by Alexandria on the outside reflected the disintegration of the real, messy freedom once promised by cities deep within.

    ΙστορίαThat tension, over whether the design of our cities best serves its residents or its rulers, has persisted down the centuries and continues to colour Alexandria today. Now home to nearly 5 million people, and the second largest metropolitan area in a country racked by mass rebellion and urban revolt in recent years, Alexandria remains on the frontline of competing visions of what thoughtful urban planning should really look like.

    Last year a scheme was unveiled to rebuild the long-lost ancient lighthouse in its original location – part of a grand redevelopment project involving major new shopping malls and a high-end hotel. Critics insisted that the proposals failed to take into account the modern city’s complex informal economy and fragile architectural history, and pointed out that the decision was being taken without the input or agreement of residents. “The reality is not about amplifying Alexandria’s rich cultural history,” argued Amro Ali, an analyst of urban politics in Egypt, “as much as it is about which aspects of its history can be vulgarly commercialised at the expense of the public good.”

    As Ali has noted, Alexandria’s contemporary power-brokers would be wise to read up on the details of the ancient lighthouse, which was finally completed a few decades after Alexander first stood on the shores of Pharos and decided his great metropolis would be built here. As was customary, the lighthouse’s architect, Sostratus, officially dedicated its construction to Egypt’s royal family on a plaster plaque near the entranceway.

    But underneath the plaque, Sostratus secretly carved a second inscription into the stone: on behalf of “all those who sailed the seas”. The question of whose interests our urban spaces are really planned for has remained a live one ever since.

    (www.theguardian.com)