Megacities spring up in the desert to house millions from crowded Cairo

The road west out of Cairo used to promise relief from the Egyptian capital's chaos. Past the great pyramids of Giza, the desert stretched, 100 miles north-west to the Mediterranean.

Now commuters driving from Cairo cross 20 miles of nothingness to encounter a new city springing from the sand.

So crowded, congested and polluted has Cairo become that the government has undertaken a construction project that might have given the pharaohs cause to pause: building two megacities from scratch. By 2020, planners expect the new satellites to house a quarter of Cairo's 20 million residents.

Only a country with a seemingly endless supply of open desert land - and an authoritarian government free to ignore public opposition - could contemplate such an undertaking.

Already a million people have moved to one development, 6 October City, west of Cairo, named after the 1973 war with Israel. A similar number have moved to the New Cairo scheme.

The original plans conceived of 6 October City's expanding to three million by 2020 and New Cairo to four million, primarily as havens for the working-class. So far, however, it is the rich who have bought homes there.

The state has spent millions of pounds building new utilities, sold huge tracts of land to developers as well as building some housing for the low-paid. But it has relied on private developers to put up the cities' more expensive villas as well as the malls and offices.

Some of the earliest arrivals are affluent Egyptians such as Nisrine Alkbeissi, 29. "I was torn between staying in Cairo, close to everything, or moving out here," she said on a recent weekend at Dandy Mall, a rare public space in 6 October City, a patchwork of luxury compounds and lower-income housing complexes that is a city in name only.

Other pioneers include some of the richest in Cairo, who buy villas on golf courses and gated compounds. They have been joined by some of the poorest, drawn by factory and construction jobs, or to serve the rich. Other poor are shuttled in against their will to isolated rows of terraced houses. "We're in the middle of nowhere. We can't work or live," said Saber Abdel Hady, 31, who relocated three months ago to a tiny apartment with his pregnant wife and two children. They used to inhabit a spacious but illegal dwelling in a Cairo suburb. "Cairo is hot and packed," said Noha Refaat Elfiky, 33, who moved a year ago from Heliopolis, once a leafy 19th century retreat from the city that has since swallowed it up. "There will be nothing lost and much gained as everybody moves out."

Still she spends a night or two a week in Cairo. "Sometimes," she said, "I miss the smell of pollution."