Megacities in the desert: the human cost of Egypt and Saudi Arabia’s bold new projects | Nesrine Malik

In their rush to claim the future and concrete over the past, these vast rebrands are demolishing people's homes and their heritage

Spread over an area almost 7km (4 miles) long, Cairo's Necropolis is a sprawling district of tombs, mausoleums, mosques and courtyards. Also known as the City of the Dead, it is very much alive with memories of those buried there, with the different eras of history that it traces, and with the real families who live in it and have done so, in some instances, for generations. It dates back to the seventh century, and, like so much of historic Cairo, has always existed in an almost dizzying proximity with modernity. Billboards, construction and heavy traffic rub shoulders with the silent tombs of intricate mosaics, ancient wooden doors and hallowed spaces of mourning and remembrance. Buried there are not just ancient kings and dignitaries but more contemporary politicians, celebrities and Cairenes who passed in recent decades.

Their slumber is now an uneasy one. In 2020, authorities began demolishing parts of the city to make way for an expressway. In the years since, the threat of further demolition has hung over the rest of the city. Hussein Omar's mother, as well as some eight generations of his family, are buried there, and he hoped one day to lie next to them. He tells me that for years his family has been in deadlock with the state over what rights they have to visit, but that has now escalated, as the graves themselves have come under threat of removal. The Egyptian state has always wanted to control histories," he says, but in more recent times, there has been what appears to be a deliberate targeting" in which the attempts to erase history are part and parcel of attempts to overwrite people's claims to property rights over what are clearly historic plots of valuable real estate".