A MACROSCOPIC VIEW OF WATER MANAGEMENT OF THE NEW ADMINISTRATIVE CAPITAL CITY OF EGYPT Assessing the capability of the urban structure to face various states of flood risk

Egypt is well known for establishing new cities in the desert to extend urban areas out of its congested valleys, mostly in the Greater Cairo region. Some of these new cities face strong challenges when potential flooding is not considered as a vital aspect in the master planning development phases. A new administrative capital (NAC) city is currently under construction in the eastern desert region of Greater Cairo. Topographically a slope runs from east (the Suez and Red Sea governorates) to west (the Nile valley, Greater Cairo). Between the NAC and Cairo is another recent city development, named New Cairo city, which faced flooding in 2018. The cause of this problem was not disregard for potential floods in the initial masterplan, but rather it was the construction of buildings within the flood area resulting from the Minister of Housing selling off building plots between 2003 and 2009. This caused a massive flooding impact on buildings, interruptions to the street network and traffic flow, and splits in the urban structure to create various isolated entities. This paper proposes a methodological approach that combines different layers of analysis to investigate the impact of flood risks on the urban structure of new cities and highlight the importance of considering that risk while the masterplan is in the development process. It overlays flood simulation models, syntactic analysis, topographical and flood studies and compares the results in two different scenarios: under average rainfall versus full flooding. The case study is based on the NAC. Combining different analytical methods helps to identify urban zones under flood risk precisely and to propose solutions. The resulting remedy to solve the problem in the NAC would be to: (1) identify the essential locations for placing necessary reservoirs and catchments, and (2) widen the green valley (green belt). These proposed solutions can be directed to the municipalities and planners to consider flood risks while developing the masterplan in its initial phases or during ongoing construction phases when remedies can still be included in the project’s phasing. Hence there are two targets for further research: (1) how feasible amendments to the masterplan may be made during the construction phases, and (2) how regulations can be developed for flood risk zones to protect buildings from massive loss.