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1.The Nile Valley starts in Aswan and ends in Cairo. It is about 900 km long.

1. The “Nile City” is a series of settlements located in the Nile Valley. At the moment, this system can only be called a “city” by analogy; to call it a “city” is already a project, even if – at the same time – it is just a matter of fact.
   
   1. So far, the Nile City has developed in the Nile Valley by following the rules established for it in the Neolithic. The Nile City is now at the point of changing the Nile Valley.
      
   2. There was a revolution in Egypt last year. The political situation is still very uncertain, however now is probably the best – and maybe only – moment in the last fifty years (since the previous revolution) for imagining a project for the Nile City.
      
   3. A design for the Nile City needs to be radical and yet realistic. It is necessary to look at the current situation with optimism, but without illusions. We assume: no big technological leap forward, no sudden introduction of bureaucratic efficiency, no change of in the valley’s property structure, no demolition of villages, no massive relocation of peasants into the desert. At the same time, we will not use tradition as an excuse: the Nile City needs to change in order to survive, and this transformation cannot but impact the economy and, most importantly, the Egyptian family structure.
      
   4. The population of the Nile City is expected to grow in the coming decades by 1.8% per year. This increase in population will produce a concomitant expansion of the existing villages and, consequently, will further reduce the amount of agricultural land. In the years to come, the Nile Valley will likely need to feed a larger population with less cultivable terrain.
      
   5. The Nile Valley has the clarity of a scientific experiment. The variables are reduced to a minimum: there is only fertile land or desert, with very little in between. Though somehow primitive, the Nile Valley is entirely artificial. Water comes only from the Nile. Agriculture is possible only because of irrigation. Apart from agricultural expansions into the desert (which is possible but problematic), an increasing population means expanding settlements and shrinking fields.
      
   6. The Nile Valley is a laboratory of the future, with all its dramatic challenges didactically on display in their simplest form.
      
   7. Given that the water of the Nile is limited, there is a possible ‘saturation point’ of the equation represented by four interconnected variables: water, agriculture, population and buildings. The limit to how much these variables can vary is complete urbanization, which would immediately lead to extinction.
      
   8. Linked to this equation is a group of opportunities: mobility, education, energy optimization, economic diversification. All of these opportunities can help to progressively unlock the Nile City’s current condition of stagnation. The key, of course, is education.
      
   9. In the Nile Valley, the alternatives are not architecture or revolution, but action or exhaustion, planning or extinction.
      

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12.The population of the Nile City is about 26,000,000. The density of the Nile City is 2,100 inhabitants/km2. Such density allows this otherwise rural environment to be considered a city.

1. The Nile City has an astonishingly simple layout that is clearly defined by its geographical limits. In the middle, there is the Nile, an approximately 0.5-km-wide river that is controlled by the Aswan Dams, several Nile barriers and man-made riverbanks. On both sides of the Nile there is a small strip of land that is irrigated by an ingenious network of channels – a very fertile linear oasis. On average, the valley is no wider than 12 km, and it ends abruptly when it reaches the two mountain chains flanking it, which soar as high as 300 m or so and form the edges of the desert.
   14.The Nile City is densely populated. Indeed, with 2,100 inhabitants/km2, the Nile City has a density similar to that of the Los Angeles, Tokyo–Yokohama and Milan metropolitan regions. Among regions of a similar size, only the Greater Tokyo Area (15,000 km2) is more densely populated (with 2,600 inhabitants/km2) than the Nile City. The Nile City is also more than twice as populated as the Rhine–Ruhr or L. A. County, 4 times more populated than Flanders and 5 times more populated than the Po Valley. These numbers sound promising, but when it comes to providing a metropolitan life for its inhabitants, the Nile City simply cannot deliver. Entering the Nile City is a disillusioning experience at first, yet is also astonishing at the same time, for there is no city.
   15.The Nile City is very rich in population but poor in physical substance. The average area of housing per person is not much more than 10 m2/inhabitant (the Western standard is around 45); there are hardly any built public facilities or offices or factories, and the street network is very modest, because with 30 cars for every 1,000 inhabitants (the Western/European standard is around 500), mobility is still very limited.

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16.The Nile Valley is the most abstract of countries. The landscape is entirely artificial, with minimal variations. The valley is almost always visible in its entire width. The border – an enormous barrier of sand – can always be seen in the background. The crops are the same throughout the valley: wheat, corn, cotton, clover, onion, sugar cane. Fields are organized according to a roughly orthogonal grid. The dimensions of the plots are incredibly small. The result is a territory that is at once very abstract and incredibly dense. This produces a landscape that is very rough and very intense at the same time.

1. Green is incredibly bright. The Nile Valley is as primitive and artificial as the ATARI video games of the early 1980s.
   
2. So far, the growth of the Nile City has not dramatically changed the landscape of the Nile Valley. The valley’s flatness remains, and the agricultural technology employed in it has changed very little. There are still the same fields, the same crops, the same endless horizontality, the same endless artificiality.

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19.The Nile City is based neither on any particular industry nor on rural exodus. It is a new city type that was formed simply by rapid population growth produced by the introduction of Western medical standards, the guaranteed availability of foodstuffs due to foreign importation and the absence of family planning. The Nile City is in its essence a city of population density.

1. In the Nile City, there is no working class – just a limited middle class of shopkeepers, bureaucrats, doctors and policemen. Everyone else is an underemployed peasant.
   
2. In the Nile City people do not move around much. Travelling a distance of 15 km already seems uncomfortably far; 15 km away from home, people already feel lost. The Nile City is 900 km long and yet its scale is Lilliputian. Asking a kid about the Nile or the desert (each of which is never more than 10 km away from any given location), he might respond that he has never seen either the one or the other (?).
3. The Nile City is made up of an endless repetition of the same local conditions – the house with the field next to the house with the field, one village next to another village. The accumulation of enormous quantities of built mass in the Nile City has not yet resulted in a quantum leap. The Nile City is still a city in a pre-urban condition, a megalopolis that lacks an urban consciousness. In the Nile City people still live a Neolithic life, so there are no factories, theatres or museums, or even cinemas or nightclubs.
4. In contrast to all urban development based on industrial growth, there was no immigration when the Nile City began to take shape. In the Nile City there is hardly any movement at all. In the Nile City, people stay where they are. Growth occurs through repetition, not change. Like single-cell organisms, the Nile City grows by gemmation. Its logic is: the same, and then the same, and then the same . . . Thus: A village grows. The small town next to it grows. The capital of the governorate next to this one grows. Villages remain villages, they just become bigger. Small towns remain small towns, only bigger. The Nile City grows without reaching a new level of organization; it grows without establishing a new hierarchy. The peasant becomes a metropolitan inhabitant of a city created through the endless repetition of the same village, a 900-km-long rag rug of housing and fields. There is no countryside anymore, and yet at the same time it is all still countryside.
   
5. The Nile City is an unprecedented city, something very different from the Western Großstadt or the Asian megacity; a city based not on industry but on agriculture; a city based not on capitalist accumulation, but simply on rapid population growth.
   
6. In imagining the future Nile City, we are operating in an intellectual vacuum. The Nile City is not understandable through the application of 19th- and 20th-century urban theory. Maybe this is because, according to strict Darwinian rules, the Nile City should be extinct given that it is not self-sustaining.
   
7. The Nile City is an accident. There was never the will or the wish to create it; it just happened. There is also no consciousness of it as a perceivable object because it is a biotope for 26,000,000 people – a zone whose residents hardly leave it and therefore cannot see it. The Nile City is a city without a name.
   
8. Inhabitants of the Nile City have no idea of the Nile City’s existence. They are not citizens of the Nile City. To introduce this revolutionary notion, a project is required.
   
9. It will be possible to produce difference within the valley only by beginning with a new awareness of its present homogeneity.

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29.The Nile City is a 900-km-long continuous urban corridor. Because of its exceptional geographical character as a river-based oasis in a desert, the Nile City is a linear city without planning – a linear city formed by chance.

1. Because of the gradual introduction of infrastructure like railways, highways, bridges and airports, the nearly natural growth process of the valley is becoming more and more influenced by planning. In the absence of proper industrialization, infrastructure is becoming the main tool for urban development. The natural linear city is slowly turning into a planned one.
   31.The railway line, which was built by the British in the 19th century, runs along the middle of the valley from Cairo to Aswan, forming a kind of subway for the Nile City, with stops every 20 km or so. A highway runs along the western desert edge, connecting the Nile City to Cairo. Every 120 km there is the capital of a governorate, usually with its own bridge crossing the river and a small airport nearby.
   32.Today the Nile City seems like the intersection of two urban systems: a modern infrastructural city comprising highways, railways, airports, bridges, train stations and regional towns, and an incredibly dense, informal, rural one consisting of large villages, fields and canals. The modern infrastructural city is defined – in a strictly top-down fashion – entirely through planning initiatives decided upon by the central government. As much as this process is questionable, it is important to underline that this part of the Nile City is actually designed and therefore it is possible to design the Nile City.
   
2. The Nile City is Neolithic villages + Fordist infrastructure. You are left to wonder which of these is the more outdated of the two.
   
3. The complete disjunction between the official strategies and the reality of the Nile Valley has gone so far as to produce a double reality in which the official Nile City and the real Nile City simply do not respond to one another any more. These two entirely distinct methods for the production of the built environment coincide only at the end, in the landscape, often creating nonsensical situations in which totally disconnected things are simply placed next to one another.
   
4. The revolution provides an opportunity to reconnect these two realities.
5. Roads are relatively efficient in the Nile Valley; at least, roads in the valley have fewer problems than any other public infrastructure. Still, with 188.4 road fatalities for every 100,000 motor vehicles (compared to 7.2 in Germany), driving in Egypt is one of the most dangerous activities in the world.
   
6. The Nile City cannot afford to have more private cars. A rapid growth in the use of private automobiles would mean a dramatic increase in streets and parking surfaces, which would very rapidly consume large portions of the remaining farmland. The Nile City should therefore invest in public transportation and limit private car use through taxation. The percentage of taxis and minibuses with respect to the number of cars should not decrease. The relatively efficient system of tuk-tuks, micro-buses, long-distance buses, trains and airplanes needs to be understood in its intricate totality and consequently implemented (rather than abandoned in homage to the Western standards of 30 years ago). Modernity as it was experienced in the West in the 1950s (when buying a car was the rite of passage for farmers wanting to make the leap into modernity) cannot work in contemporary Egypt. No matter how many Egyptian peasants would love to have a car, the Nile City simply cannot afford for them to get their wish.
   
7. The water system in Egypt suffers due to its overextension and a lack of control along its hundreds of thousands of kilometres of length. The Central Directorate of Water Distribution determines water allocation quotas along each segment of the Nile River at the barrages. These predetermined amounts of water are then released into the main canals on a continuous basis, and from there the water is routed into the secondary canals on a rotational basis by district engineers. This is the final point of quantity control within the system. From this point on, water in the tertiary system (the mesqas and merwas) is self-allocated by the peasants through the use of mobile diesel pumps (which in turn consume a lot of petrol). This self-allocation leads to water inequalities along the length of the canals as some take more than they require and thus cause unnecessary water shortages in some zones. It is estimated that up to 8,000,000,000 m3 of water could be saved annually if greater control were exercised over water use. A detailed evaluation of the appropriate type of water suitable for different uses is also necessary.

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39.In the Nile City houses are the same everywhere. A Maison Domino–like concrete skeleton is filled with brickwork. The building materials are taken from the fields. Temporary illegal brickyards turn out bricks made of the Nile’s fertile mud. Due to climatic and cultural reasons windows are rare, and this ends up generating a hermetic architecture of rough brick surfaces.

1. Since agricultural land is very valuable and directly related to a family’s income, the houses try to occupy as little land as possible. Houses are designed in such a way as to be expandable. A small peasant family usually starts out with an (illegal) one-storey structure and then gradually adds additional storeys according to the growing family’s needs. This results in housing that extends vertically to five or six storeys in height, even in small villages. The same technology is used for the design of commercial small-scale apartment buildings in the local centres, thereby producing mini-towers of up to fifteen storeys. Because architecture is the result of this rational and objective process, nearly all houses in the Nile City look the same. As a consequence, an astonishingly hermetic homogeneity is produced: continuous brown building masses nestled between vibrantly coloured green fields.
   41.The official governmental strategy since the 1980s has been to resettle 25% of the population along the edges of the Nile Valley. Although this policy depends on the reasonable objective of protecting the valley’s arable land, it seems schematic and – once again – incredibly unrealistic. Over the same period, 80% of the dwellings have been constructed without official approval.
   42.The realization of urban settlements in the desert is certainly a possible solution to overpopulation, but this cannot be perceived as the only and absolute alternative to the expansion within the valley the way current Egyptian planning strategies do. The villages in the valley will grow just the same: currently about 20,000 ha are lost to urban encroachment each year.
   

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43.Agriculture employs 32% of the labour force and contributes 13% of Egypt’s annual GDP. And yet, Egypt is not self-sufficient when it comes to food: 40% of Egypt’s food and 60% of its wheat are imported. The agricultural properties are extremely fragmented (on average, less than 2 ha per family, with more than 3,000,000 owners) and provide only a modest (and subsidized) source of income. In the future, this modest income will likely be shared by more and more people. Indeed, the inheritance system, according to which land property is divided among all children, leads to a downscaling of plots over the generations.

44.The Egyptian government has currently proposed massive reclamation schemes, as can be witnessed in the Toshka area and the Sinai Desert, while losing interest in the valley. Expanding the edges of the valley through smart and sustainable initiatives could contribute much more to the security of the country, allowing it to focus on improvements of the existing mainline infrastructures and allowing settlers to remain closer to their birthplaces. Furthermore, the waters of the Nile would not need to be diverted far into the Western Desert, which would cause further water loss through evaporation and drainage, and nonrenewable water sources from deep-level aquifers could remain largely untouched.

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45.Only by recognizing the specific beauty of the Nile Valley will it be possible to design its future.

1. A project is necessary to imagine the future of the Nile City. And a project must be provided quickly, because in the Nile Valley there are too many people, too little water and arable land and even less time.
   
2. Further growth will prove deadly for the Nile City. From this point of view, the Nile City can be seen as a model for the whole world with its rapidly growing population. Is it possible to invent other models of prosperity? Is a happy Existenzminimum even thinkable?
   
3. The only possibility for the Nile Valley’s survival is to accept its unavoidable transformation into a Nile City and to begin planning this transformation – to accept reality and to try to control it.
   
4. We propose consciously turning the Nile Valley into a Nile City while reducing the footprint of new construction in order to preserve as much agricultural land as possible.
   
5. In becoming a true city, the Nile Valley will become more differentiated. A new hierarchy will appear. Difference can be introduced by intervening in the valley’s infrastructure (beginning with processes that are already underway).
   
6. We propose starting from the (apparently anachronistic but actually unexpectedly contextual) official understanding of the Nile City as a modern linear city and trying to see how this centralized project can be used to help activate numerous corresponding local projects.
   
7. A project for the Nile City should connect the national/governmental with the local/informal without blurring the two different levels and without losing an awareness of the different subjects involved in the different transformations. The project needs to be eclectic enough to understand when this difference can be a useful resource.
   
8. National strategies will need to be explained to and negotiated with local parties; informal mechanisms of growth will need to be understood and not simply rejected by officials. Once again, education will be fundamental.
   
9. A design for the Nile City needs to operate on three – coordinated – levels: the national, the regional and the local. The national level will define the allocation of major investments (infrastructures, power plants, industries). The regional level will coordinate governmental strategies with local (and usually informal) territorial transformations to anticipate predictable urban processes by using infrastructure as an activator. At the local level, peasants will be provided with a simple toolbox of prototypes that operate in standard situations. A series of small new machines will activate micro-processes at the local level. The toolbox will be a pretext for teaching and initiating a cooperation between official and informal transformations of the territory.
   
10. The interventions at the different levels should be coordinated but, to a certain extent, independent; they should also be capable of surviving even if their implementation is only partial (particularly the small-scale ones). Also, the interventions should have an impact on all different scales (e.g., major infrastructure must allow local movement as well; small interventions repeated over and over again will have an influence on the whole).
    
11. Our project operates on three scales: large (Nile Valley), medium (for example, Markaz El Monshah) and small (a toolbox for small-scale interventions that can be put to use throughout the entire valley).
    
12. Our project considers a period of 20 years (ending in 2033) and imagines how to distribute a potential growth of 25% of the built surface of the valley (within the valley and in new settlements along the desert’s borders). We propose developing an urban system for the Nile City that is capable of accommodating further growth of both population and urban mass without completely destroying the landscape. With this growth, the Nile Valley could be changed entirely. However, while such growth is unavoidable, planning can shape and direct this transformation, which would be disastrous otherwise.
    
13. A series of new corridors that are perpendicular to the valley and connect the main infrastructural hubs (airports, highway exits, governorate capitals, railway stations, bridges) will appear and attract urban growth, thereby relieving pressure from rural areas. A new difference in metropolitan intensity will appear.
    
14. Our project is not afraid to be banal.
    

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60.The new Nile City is the combination of two systems. On the one hand, there is the old system of villages and farmland; this system will not grow very much in the future because farmland is limited. On the other hand, we can detect traces of a relatively new system of urban centres and corridors; this system is rapidly expanding because the city (as vaguely defined as it may be) is the only alternative for the many out-of-work peasants.

1. We propose a double strategy for planning the Nile City. We propose the preservation of large portions of farmland, in order to protect the landscape of the valley and contribute to the security of the availability of food. At the same time we want to provide space for explicitly urban development.
   
2. The Nile City will be developed by connecting the two main infrastructural systems: railways and highways. We propose completing the highway in the western desert, in order to provide access to the entire valley, and realizing new solar power plants, industries and infrastructure in the desert. We also propose building a fast new bus system with hubs in the western desert (in the future, if this initial project proves successful, this infrastructure might be substituted with a high-speed railway) and transforming the existing railway into a metro train.
   
3. We propose continuing with the official strategy that for every urban centre of around 100,000 inhabitants a satellite city of the same size be built just outside the valley along the desert’s edge. The old centre will remain connected to the metro train station, while the new centre will be directly related to the highway. Both cities will be connected by a preferential bus lane. By limiting commuting time between the two cities to less than 10 minutes, a true double city will be produced.
   
4. Like the current Nile City, the new double city is linear too, but it will be shorter and run perpendicular to the main one.
   
5. The double city tries to deal with the enormous growth of population and built mass. The design of a fast link allows the desert cities to really work as an integrated part of the system.
   
6. The double city permits the control of the growth of the villages, and by creating a fast east–west connection, it provides the possibility of moving space-consuming public programmes out of the valley. All of the programmes that cannot find room in the historic cities and the valley will be moved into the desert cities. Universities, institutions of higher education, government institutes, military camps, industrial complexes, prisons, solar power plants, greenhouse farming, etc., will thus colonize the desert.
   
7. The double city will strengthen existing axes and produce an intensely used urban corridor connecting the highway with the railway station and the bridge over the Nile. This corridor cuts from west to east through the valley. The corridor will consist of a high-speed, elevated, four-lane highway with several entrances and exits complemented by a slower parallel road along which commercial activities and urban growth can occur.
   
8. A grey zone of informal urban development will naturally grow along the corridor. Villages within the urban corridor will expand faster than others, and they will gradually grow together to form larger urban entities. Illegal construction will occur along the local parallel roads and at their junctions. Informal private houses, craft workshops, garages, fruit markets, little shops for building materials, etc., will be built here and form a blanket of urban plankton between the two centres of the double city.
   
9. The double cities will define a set of urban territories (with different intensities according to their respective assets) and attract growth, leaving other areas of the valley relatively free from urban pressure. Double cities will appear in correspondence with the main cities and the major infrastructural hubs (which will occur every 30–50 km) and will cut through the landscape of farmland and villages. The perfect continuity of the Nile Valley will disappear.
   

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70.We have selected the Markaz El Monshah as a test case. Here we propose the realization of a corridor including, from west to east, New Sohag, the Sohag airport, El Monshah, the (already planned) new Nile bridge and the junction to the highway leading to the Red Sea.

1. The restructuring of this territory needs to involve the urban fabric of the local centres (in this case El Monshah) directly and in an immediately visible way. The interventions carried out in these mega-villages (each having around 70,000 inhabitants) can be very traditional ones. We propose making some Haussmannian cuts in El Monshah, in order to modify the existing structure of the small town, and creating some larger public spaces without making the entire city accessible by car. We simply propose producing a little bit of urban difference within the otherwise homogeneous village, or turning the hypertrophic village into a (modest) city.
   
2. New cities like “New Sohag”, which has been largely abandoned to the quasi-desert, can be restored by accepting the existing infrastructure and introducing new housing types (which are less removed from the general state of the valley), using contemporary technologies and maintaining a link with agricultural production. We propose erasing the – unsustainable – exception and making the mirage of the Desert Cities part of the reality of the Nile Valley again.
   
3. In the desert, new cities and new large-scale agricultural complexes are currently developed separately. Official government planning strategies consider villages and agriculture as opponents in both the valley and the desert. On the contrary, however, villages and fields need to be understood as elements of an equilibrium in which there can be no settlement without agriculture and no agriculture without settlements. Also, the new settlements along the desert’s borders need to start with the creation of new agricultural land, like at Versailles: first the park, then the palace.
   
4. We have designed the city of New El Monshah as a model village at the edge of the desert. With a population of 15,000, New El Monshah is organized in regular city blocks of standard housing types built by peasants with modern technology. The layout is extremely simple and it can easily be adapted to different locations and needs. Indeed, New El Monshah is created by the repetition of the same urban block (measuring 40 x 160 m) filled with row houses. The city blocks include walled gardens and greenhouses behind the row houses. The new village is as dense as the old ones. However, in contrast to the old villages, where there are no public facilities and no public spaces except mosques and schools, New El Monshah contains a limited but not irrelevant provision of public facilities along the main traffic axes. A commercial axis is located in front of the public facilities. Cemeteries and walled orchards occupy the row of blocks along the desert’s edge, thus protecting the village from desert winds.
   
   1. New large-scale productive activities (stone quarries, solar energy collection) will be developed mainly at the edges of the desert, while at same time improvements in agriculture and the development of a cellular economy in the villages and cities will be fostered through innovative forms of micro-credit. New kinds of relatively low-tech industrial products specifically designed for the Nile City (bicycles, electro-bicycles, motorbikes, pumps?) could be manufactured on site, thereby contributing to the technical education of the labour force and generating the necessary conditions for further industrial production. Waste management and recycling could also contribute to the economy of the valley.
      

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76.A series of repeatable small-scale interventions will be distributed throughout the villages and the fields in order to enact a multitude of micro-events. Transformation in the Nile City will be both hyper-rigid (top-down governmental investments in infrastructure) and hyper-flexible (a thousand bottom-up innovations). There are no contradictions here, just an eclectic strategy.

77.These days every landscape innovation being introduced in the West seems to belong to a bygone era: urban farming, re-naturing rivers, minimizing footprints, etc. In contrast, the solutions being proposed by Egyptian planners are thoroughly modern (biotech, desert farming, hyper-specialization) and are based on the belief that technological progress is the only means to a better future. Both positions seem somehow naïve. However, the Nile City certainly needs more articulated combinations of traditional and innovative technologies – a new set of eclectic machines capable of learning from whatever they can.

1. We propose implementing nine machines that contain the genes of soft change. These machines will be implemented in several different places and will transform the villages from within. These machines are anticipatory devices defining new local uses that will modify the equilibrium of the valley.
   
2. There have always been machines in Egypt: little ones like the sakias (former pumping system) or, more recently, the tuk-tuks (small vehicles), and big ones like the Aswan Dam. The new machines we are proposing will generate small-scale consequences for their immediate environment, but also produce larger effects that belie their size.
   
3. The new machines are very light; they are small or large (but always light) gizmos designed to support and complete the inflexible, large-scale solutions. The machines are inexpensive and easy to build. Some machines might not last long if they prove to be not intelligent enough, but others will last longer and gradually evolve. A certain degree of failure is to be accepted. In the cases in which the machines do not work, they will be abandoned. No matter what, however, they will stimulate transformation in the Nile City.
   
4. No one machine can solve everything or try to “make a city” on its own, but as a group the machines contribute to an accumulative strategy influencing the elements comprised in the equation of life in the valley.
   
5. Collective pump: a new system to replace individualized irrigation. The collective pump does not particularly increase efficiency, but it certainly does increase proper water allocation thanks to improved monitoring and equal distribution (the first in line no longer gets more water than the last). Collective pumps will operate as small-scale devices that are part of an overarching reform of water management. Indeed, apart from the monitoring of the Nile River, the Aswan Dam and the main canal quotas that is carried out today, the government should establish regional Water Boards to survey each branch canal. At the local level Water User Associations could develop a collective pumping house, raise and line all mesqas (to reduce water loss and pumping requirements) and prevent the unfair distribution of water at the lowest level.
   83.Local train/school station: a new combination of education and mobility. The proposed new local train service has stations designed specifically for pupils going to elementary school in bigger cities. Complementary educational activities can take place at the stations.
   
6. Trash boats: the essential component of a new waste-collection infrastructure. A new type of metallic boat uses the existing network of canals as a ready-made, diffused infrastructure for garbage collection. A garbage collection point is established in each village, somewhere at a main intersection or close to the canals where trash is currently dumped. The trash boat leaves the village every morning and returns in the late afternoon to remain there overnight. These trash boats are combined with a new waste collection system that is realistic about the lack of infrastructure and machinery and consequently relies on the local abundance of labour. The idea of the trash boat opposes the current official policy of covering the canals in order to prevent the abandonment of trash along them. Indeed, continuing to cover canals would mean that the people in the Nile City would become ever less conscious of the fact that the Nile is their primary water source. Hiding the water from sight, while perhaps reducing pollution, also reduces public open space, city greenery and the opportunities for improving local attitudes toward water consumption and waste.
   
7. Biogas plant: small village infrastructure. Low-tech biogas plants trigger a domestic economy reducing the amount of rubbish in the streets. A combined biogas and water treatment plant for 2,500 people can be built for $10,500 USD in rural villages. In Egypt, 30,000,000 metric tons of agricultural biomass, including agricultural waste and animal manure, is produced each year, and this could be put to use for, inter alia, generating bioenergy. Unfortunately, this resource is terribly underutilized.
   86.Greenhouses: an individual element contributing to climate modification. Agriculture in places near the desert should abandon the traditional irrigation process. Highly productive greenhouses employing efficient irrigation devices are implemented in desert areas and desert cities. Greenhouses with drip irrigation have 90% water efficiency compared to the 40–60% efficiency of a normal surface irrigated in a traditional manner. Greenhouses can help restore vegetation on the surrounding arid land by ventilating humidity to create a cooler, more humid microclimate downwind of the greenhouse. In the desert cities and villages of the Nile Valley, a regular combination of houses and greenhouses could be a way to create and control advantageous microclimates.
   
8. Water playground: a didactic device. If water is used as a pleasurable amenity, avoiding the loss of even a drop of water is important. A playground with water games communicates this to the children of the Nile City.
   
9. Concrete roof: a generic public space. A concrete roof gathers roadside programmes beneath it: a local bus station, a gas station and a market. It creates a new forum for social interaction and an open and generous collective space in the valley.
   
10. Bus terminal: a multifunctional infrastructural hub. A bus terminal connects the metropolitan high-speed bus service with the local one at strategic nodes. With regard to its dimensions, it anticipates the construction of the high-speed desert railway. It hosts a mixed programme and operates like Brazilian rodoviarios.
    
11. Water square: a place to meet. A natural filtering process cleans water diverted from canals while creating a public square in the villages.
    

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