Cairo 10 March 2016—Together with its Egyptian partners, General Organization for Physical Planning (GOPP), the New Urban Communities Authority and the technical consultant (Bearing Consultancy), UN-Habitat on Thursday launched the economic assessment of Al Alamein New City. The economic assessment aims to analyze financially the future revenues of planning Al Alamein New City. An analysis that requires an understanding of the value chains and supply chains, supply/demand effect and the local/regional economic development at Al Alamein New City (ANC).Furthermore, the assessment aims at providing continuous productive Urban Economy that will be proposed as a coherent strategy for Al Alamein New City development.

The launch was done employing the principles, strategies, tools developed in UN-Habitat’s Strategic Plan 2014 -2019, the Achieving Sustainable Urban Development project (ASUD). The meeting tackled the vision of the assessment, methodology, deliverables, context and approach. In addition, the participants determine the data sources and stakeholders of this assessment. The leader of the project, Dr. Sahar Attia expressed that Al-Alamein count with support from the top management of the government and it is one of the priorities of Egypt. Senior policymakers from Egypt showed their support to the study and indicated their expectations that wil shed light on the potential of Al-Alamein.

From UN-HABITAT, Bassem Fahmy, Programme Manager in Cairo indicated that the most important element of the study is to link urban planning with the productive capabilities of the new city; and Marco Kamiya, Acting Coordinator of the Urban Economy and Finance Branch emphasized that less than 10% of new cities succeed, so having scenarios with realistic financial and economic expansion will provide flexibility to the programme. The Alamein New City project component has witnessed distinctive achievements throughout utilizing an advanced town planning methodology that secures broad social inclusion for local communities as well as it critically examines the Egyptian approach to new urban communities and its development aspects.

In general, the Achieving Sustainable Urban Development (ASUD) project addresses capacity building in the field of urban planning, design, land legislation/Management, local economic development, youth employment and crosscutting issues such as mobility/energy. The Achieving Sustainable Urban Development project (ASUD) implements pilot interventions in an integrated manner, through which key stakeholders and development partners work and learn as one community of practice. These pilot interventions focus both on city extensions in secondary towns as well as new city developments as city extensions.