Discovering Maadi: Modern-Day Development
Ezz Al-Turkey
Maadi had an Indian summer in the years before the War of 1948, but many of its foreign residents, especially the British, were leaving, and prominent figures in Maadi society were passing on, including Faris Nimr Pasha, the founder of the Al-Muqattam newspaper, who was born in Syria, and Henriette Devonshire, who led tours of Islamic Cairo well into her eighties.
The Egyptian Delta Light Railways Company gave up on its first cahier des charges when new neighborhoods like Hada’iq al-Maadi and Maadi Digla were established in the 1940s and 1950s. Many Maadi citizens initially cheered the 1952 Revolution and the fall of the ancien régime in Egypt, but these events also brought about new developments, such as the new government's resolve to push for the Egyptianization of the economy and force private companies to consider the interests of the whole.
In response to these developments, the Maadi company constructed apartment complexes in Hada’iq al-Maadi and Maadi Digla. This was done to meet the growing demand for contemporary housing among the newly formed class of managers and other individuals brought about by the new regime’s development plans.
The Tripartite Aggression of 1956, however, forced the remaining French and British citizens to evacuate, and French and British interests were sequestered. This, together with the government's policies growing socialist bent, meant that the company, whose hold over Maadi was already threatened, had to have realized what was coming.
As waves of mass migration altered not only Maadi but the whole Egyptian capital, the socioeconomic divides that had made Maadi feasible also proved to be the community's downfall. Maadi's approach, needing a great deal of private wealth to support, was unable to address broader societal requirements and could never be expanded to include accommodation for more than a small fraction of people.
This was presumably quite similar to the English garden cities movement, which served as a model for Maadi and advocated for the construction of low-density dwellings on greenfield land in an effort to rid the city of slums. This case also posed a scale issue because the initially suggested dwellings would have been unaffordable and would have created additional urban sprawl areas.