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Comment by sarsway | Hacker News Reader

To be fair its not like they are moving the capitol hundreds of miles away inland. The new location is almost a suburb. Also Cairo gotta be one of the biggest craziest urban jungles in existence. Having grown organically since the beginning of time basically. Not to say this isn't political motivated, but sometimes is better to build up from scratch.

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Also, the population of Cairo is growing by about 2% a year. That means it will double in about 35 years.

Looking at https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/22812/cairo/population, that’s a slight slowdown from the 30 years it took them to go from 5 to 10 million or from 10 to 20 million, and looking at https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/EGY/egypt/population-g..., it may slow down further, but they need to build a lot of houses fast to accommodate that.

I want to echo this. I am stunned anything productive gets done in Cairo. Flip a coin whether the traffic nightmare lets you get to a meeting on time or even the office in less than 4 hours.

I, probably naively, took this as more of an efficiency move rather than political.

Brasília could have been set up at Goiania, which is not too far. But the president wanted it be be built at exactly the centre of Brazil.

This certainly made it much more expensive as it was the middle of nowhere and there wasn't any infrastructure there.

Kinda curious now, are there other examples of cities like this? Rome? Jakarta?

Funny you mention Jakarta. Indonesia is also moving its capital out of Jakarta https://www.npr.org/2019/04/29/718234878/indonesia-plans-to-...

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feart.2020.0000...

Jerusalem probably.

Jerusalem definitely has the age, but it's never struck me as a place of intense urban activity. Am I wrong?

Depends where you go. The old city maybe not, but head to the rapidly growing neighborhoods on the edges of the city, and construction doesn't stop.

They keep growing the city larger and larger. Leave for 20 years and come back, and you don't recognize the scenery anymore.

Actually that's true in the old city as well - there is a huge commercial sector and it's very dynamic and alive.

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