New Cairo examines the construction of a city at the desert edge of Cairo, extending from the expanding settlements of New Cairo towards Egypt’s New Administrative Capital. Here, urban expansion begins not with architecture but with the transformation of the ground itself.

Across an immense territory, sand and rock are excavated, displaced, levelled and inscribed with roads, infrastructures and foundations. Villas, apartment blocks, mosques, stadiums and transport systems emerge from a landscape that remains visibly under construction.

The photographs focus on this unstable threshold between desert and city: a place where the ground is continuously being dismantled and reorganised in anticipation of urban life. Rather than documenting finished architecture, New Cairo observes the physical process through which territory is prepared, repeated and eventually transformed into city.

© Manuel Álvarez Diestro (MAD)