Cairo cool: the renaissance of Downtown

When the Egyptian writer Alaa Al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building was published in 2002, it almost instantly entered the canon of modern Arab literature. Set at the turn of the century, the novel reflects back on the demise of a privileged Egyptian way of life in the decades after the 1952 revolution, via the intersecting stories of multiple protagonists: an ageing aristocratic playboy, a young policeman, a closeted newspaper editor, a shop girl.

But the most compelling protagonist might be the one in its title, where it all plays out: the Yacoubian Building. Built in 1937, designed by an Italian architect, it sits at the intersection of Talaat Harb and Abd El Khalik Tharwat streets in the heart of Downtown Cairo — a bricks-and-mortar semaphore for a golden era in the city’s history.

Particularly between the world wars, Cairo was the Arab world’s cosmopolitan capital, and Downtown its nexus of culture and society. The fruit of an ambitious Haussmann-inspired modernisation plan conceived by Egypt’s late 19th-century ruler Khedive Isma’il Pasha, its avenues are lined with the Belle Époque buildings that earned Cairo its “Paris along the Nile” reputation. In their heyday they bustled with cafés, jazz bars and elegant shops at street level, while in the apartments above them worldly Egyptians and their expatriate counterparts hosted salons and conducted business.

But Gamal Abdel Nasser’s 1952 military coup augured the beginning of that era’s end. Downtown’s denizens began to trickle away, across the Nile to the leafy island enclave of Zamalek, or east to Heliopolis, or out into new suburbs; the fine shops and cafés slowly followed. New rent-reduction and control reforms (counterintuitively called the Old Rental Law) and the nationalisation of private properties gutted landlording prospects — as recently as last year, there were Downtown flats going for as little as E£10 (about 16p) a month — and entire buildings were converted into shops by their owners for the more lucrative commercial rents they commanded. Pollution and neglect dulled and degraded the patrician facades.

Seven decades later, and 14 years after a second revolution upended the country, a handful of divergent forces are working to put Downtown Cairo’s star back in the ascendant. Which isn’t necessarily an expected development. While Greater Cairo’s current population of around 22mn is triple what it was in 1984, much of the newer real estate development is concentrated in and around New Cairo, Sheikh Zayed City and 6th of October, all areas along the outskirts of Cairo proper. Many are gated compounds, combining mixed-use development (malls, sports facilities) with low-rise apartment blocks and villas. Downtown represents something entirely different: atmosphere, heritage buildings, creative stimulations and the buzz — some might say the cacophony — of genuine urban life, in one of the few neighbourhoods in the city where diverse socio-demographic groups interact on a daily basis. 

And while the neighbourhood manifests sentimental value for many Egyptians, its development potential hasn’t been lost on the state. In an effort to generate foreign direct investment, the government of president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi entrusted a portfolio of state-owned Downtown monuments, including the monolith Mogamma building on Tahrir Square, to TSFE, a sovereign wealth fund set up in 2018. The Mogamma is currently being developed into an Autograph hotel, one of the Marriott Collection’s luxury brands, in a $200mn project.

Walk along Downtown’s main thoroughfares — Talaat Harb, Qasr El Nil, Sherif Basha, Mahmoud Bassiouny — and the signs of renovation shine out from between gritty facades: new paint, polished glass in ornate French doors, balconies reconstructed from archival photos. The old French consulate has become a sleek four-storey co-working complex. The iconic Cinema Radio, a once nearly-defunct landmark, now houses an espresso bar, an excellent Levantine bistro and an outpost of Diwan, Cairo’s female-founded booksellers. Its main theatre has been partially restored and regularly hosts events tied to the city’s burgeoning culture calendar.

For some Egyptians of a certain generation, a putative Downtown renaissance isn’t easy to get one’s head around, much less invest in. “[Well-to-do] people born in the 1980s live in the compounds and suburbs, and they go out to restaurants and bars and cafés there,” says Omniya Abdel Barr, an architect and the development director of the Egyptian Heritage Rescue Foundation. But “these [developers] are engaged people,” she continues. “They’re encouraging others to come, spend and invest, to own and patronise businesses here.

“What Karim is doing is actually bringing that kind of traffic back here again. It’s not just the restorations, but the activities [he supports], the tenants, like Diwan, that he is bringing in. And he has contributed to the cultural calendar, by helping to make the venues it requires.”

Karim is Karim Shafei, chair of real estate investment fund Al Ismaelia. Founded in 2008, today it owns 25 properties across Downtown: besides the Cinema Radio complex, these include buildings housing high-spec serviced apartments, boutique office spaces, and studios and showrooms for artists and designers, some of them partially subsidised. In the small back streets behind Cinema Radio, amid metal workshops and shisha bars, Al Ismaelia has renovated a second theatre, two hangar-like warehouses for events and exhibitions, and a row of small shopfronts among whose tenants are a vintage-clothing seller and a young textile designer.

Al Ismaelia’s backers include Samih Sawiris, former chair of Goliath construction-development conglomerate Orascom (who counts properties in Andermatt, Lustica Bay in Montenegro, and El Gouna on Egypt’s Red Sea Coast in his portfolio) and a handful of Saudi investors. (Recent investment co-operation with Saudi Arabia has seen billions flow into the country, much of it directed into tourism and real estate.) Shafei says his fund’s mission is a revival of Downtown’s fortunes, making it a place that reflects a contemporary version of Egypt. He’ll happily celebrate the dusty but enduring appeal of its old-school addresses as much as the next Cairene: on a long walk through the neighbourhood, we duck into Estoril (opened 1962; the paintings on the walls are for sale) and Le Grillon (a former beer garden and famous boîte for 1950s Egyptian cinema stars), and speculate about the fate of Groppi, the 100-year-old café-pâtisserie on Talaat Harb Square.

But “what we do is not about nostalgia; it’s not folkloric,” says Shafei, who was born and raised in Dokki, across the Nile, and for whom Downtown has exerted a near-mythical pull since he attended an arts festival there in 2000. “We want Downtown to be a place where all the city’s socio-economic segments can congregate, where artists can afford to live and work.” 

There have been obstacles along the route. For a few years in the wake of the 2011 revolution, Downtown was largely abandoned by police, allowing street sellers to proliferate and create impassable traffic situations. Then came Covid. Throughout, acquisitions often involved multiple tenants on minuscule commercial leases, which required diplomatically negotiating out of one by one, an exercise that sometimes took years. “You might see a grand, fabulous building full of grand apartments, and only two or three of them were actually lived in,” says Abdel Barr.

It is not about nostalgia; it’s not folkloric. We want Downtown to be a place where all the city’s socio-economic segments can congregate, where artists can afford to live and work

“I think we [Cairenes] occasionally wondered, ‘How will it happen?’” she continues. “It has not been at all easy for them, juggling the bureaucracy and the many layers of ownership . . . But somehow just in the last, let’s say, three years, we’ve seen some things really coming to fruition. And it’s a much broader vision than [many people] had realised.”

Part of the broader vision is meaningful contributions to Cairo’s cultural scene, which has also flourished in the past few years. Art Cairo celebrated its sixth edition two weeks ago, drawing collectors from across Egypt and overseas. Other events, from Cairo Design Week to D-CAF (the Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival, now in its 12th year) and Art D’Égypte, all host exhibitions, panels and parties Downtown.

“Cairo in general is growing at a rate that’s unbelievable,” says Mai Eldib. The former senior director for the Middle East at Sotheby’s, now an independent art adviser, Eldib moved home to Egypt from London last summer. She lives on Zamalek, but is heartened to see Downtown on the upswing. “I would love a really renewed, vibrant Downtown; I’d love to be able to sit at a café on the street here.

“Until then I’ll take a rooftop,” she says with a grin. We’re at Mazeej Balad, a boutique hotel which opened last month on the top two floors of the Al Ismaelia-owned, 1896 La Viennoise building, two blocks from Tahrir Square. It has five art-filled suites and a rooftop restaurant, which is where we’re drinking tea under scalloped umbrellas. A few feet away is a marble-lined bar with a retracting roof; lanterns dot the colourful tiled pavement between potted palms. Across the street, laundry hangs from a balcony; rooftops bristle with satellite dishes. 

Eldib reckons Downtown’s potential lies with those “who want a real city life. Someone who has lived abroad for a while — an artist, a creative. It’s cheap. It’s highly authentic,” she says. “So I don’t see why you wouldn’t come.” 

Mazeej Balad is managed by GnK Group, an Egyptian events company. “We really wanted to be part of bringing back Downtown,” says co-founder Kareem Nabil, who himself recently closed on a flat not far from the hotel. “This is one of the only places in Cairo with this density of great architecture. It’s really the only one besides Zamalek where you can walk almost anywhere you want to go. And you can’t recreate this sense of history in New Cairo or 6th of October.”

The pace, the energy and the creativity of Downtown remind me of that moment decades ago when Marrakech sat on the cusp of change. It’s got the same visceral excitement about it, but on steroids

Inevitably, some locals question whether “revival” is assuming the contours of gentrification; whether, however lofty the rhetoric — Al Ismaelia’s in particular — the reality risks pricing out or erasing some of what imbues the neighbourhood with its particular appeal. “This is one of the most socially diverse parts of the entire city,” says Tarek Shamma, an architect who practises here and in Paris. He’s in the process of renovating a flat overlooking the Egyptian Museum — the same building his office is in. I ask if he’s working on any other projects locally for clients. “No,” says the 42-year old, laughing. “My friends find my choice exotic, and are going to family-friendly compounds out in 6th October or the [New Cairo] settlements.”

But not long ago he was contacted by Coterie, an Alexandria-based developer that has recently entered the Downtown Cairo market with two “adaptive-use” heritage properties. The more intriguing is the 14-storey Ouzounian building, which will have eight floors of studio apartments, all with access to concierge, fitness and wellness facilities, as well as retail outlets and flexible workspaces in the building’s lower floors.

“Downtown is one of the only places where there can still be sensitive pricing, because rents are still so accessible,” Shamma notes. The E£100 — about £1.60 — I spend on a cappuccino at the Cinema Radio is, he points out, a huge amount in a city where the average salary is around £300 a month. 

Another local designer, commenting on the “Soho House-circa-2010” feel of Mazeej Balad, suggests that hewing to contemporary design trends and hyper-patination imposes an aesthetic version of that same problem on the built environment. Shamma, while he praises Al Ismaelia’s and Coterie’s initiatives, doesn’t disagree: “Above street level, most of these facades are beautifully rusticated; I’m not sure they need that hardcore layer of render, that super-new newness. I’m not sure they need much more than soap and water, actually.”

Full residency is not required to buy a home in Egypt, but there are limits on the number of properties a foreign owner can acquire. Renovation costs are significantly lower than in the UK and Europe (labour here as across Egypt is cheap, and its artisanal restorers are, in the main, highly skilled).  

Finding a fixer-upper isn’t easy for the punter. But there are ways to dip a toe into the living experience. Al Ismaelia’s Lemon Spaces, serviced rental apartments in a grand block on Adly Street, offer high ceilings, lots of space and haute-boilerplate design schemes (they also offer doormen and strong WiFi, a bedevilled issue across Cairo). Abdel Barr also notes a recent proliferation of Downtown flats on Airbnb.

The Immobilia Apartments are a more rarefied proposition — four meticulously refurbished flats in the building of the same name, constructed in 1939 and often cited as Cairo’s first luxury high-rise; film star Omar Sharif was among its many celebrated tenants. Ranging from one to three bedrooms, they are full of Egyptian and European antiques sourced from dealers in Cairo and Alexandria, with beautiful cook’s kitchens and landscaped terraces. There are staff to service them, and drivers available.

Elsewhere in the building, which commands half a city block, a large space is currently being remade as Immobilia Club, where residents can relax, entertain guests and work. Three additional suites, smaller than the apartments but still self-catering, will be located off its entrance. At present, the rates are per night with full service, starting at $400; but longer stays can be negotiated. 

Owned by Florian Amereller, a Cairo- and Florence-based lawyer who also owns the Hotel Al Moudira in Luxor, the Immobilia proposition casts things resolutely in the late-day golden light of nostalgia. That’s upstairs in the flats, anyway; down in the building’s cavernous, Blade Runner-esque entrance, where the fluorescent lights occasionally flicker and a little gang of harmless but very vocal stray cats congregates, it’s unmistakably the Downtown of 2025.

But it’s precisely this intersection of grit and momentum that feels, to some, like a Moment. Alice Daunt, founder of London-based Daunt Travel, has been staying in an Immobilia flat regularly since 2023, and is now considering buying in the building: “The pace, the energy and the creativity of Downtown remind me of that moment decades ago when Marrakech sat on the cusp of change. It’s got the same visceral excitement about it, but on steroids.”  

Maria Shollenbarger is travel editor of HTSI

This article has been amended since publication

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