Cairo is today the largest city in the Arab world, the largest city on the African continent, and one of the four or five largest cities on the globe. With a population approaching (if not exceeding) 16 million, Cairo possesses more than a quarter of Egypt's total population, and is the country's center of government, financial activity, heavy industry, commerce, tourism, publishing, journalism, literary activity, and theater. It is governed as a national "governorate," and its chief executive is not an elected mayor but a governor appointed by the President. In fact, Cairo east of the Nile is part of one national "province," the Cairo Governorate, while Cairo west of the Nile is part of an entirely different province, the Giza Governorate. The modern city straddles the Nile Valley just twenty miles south of the point where the Nile River divides and begins to form its great delta. The city extends along two main axes: a thirty-kilometer long, southwest-to-northeast axis that links the Giza Pyramids with the Cairo airport, and a forty-kilometer-long, south-to-north axis joining the southern suburbs of Ma'adi and Helwan with the northern suburb of Shubra. Helwan stands in relation to Cairo as Gary, Indiana stands to Chicago: Helwan is Egypt's center of heavy industry.
The history of the Cairo urban area began as early as the Roman period. During the Pharaonic (3000-332 BC) and Greek (332-30 BC) eras of Egyptian history there was no town or city in the heart of what is now the Cairo area, although twenty miles to the southwest stood the great pharaonic capital of Memphis and its temples to the creatorgod Ptah, while to the northeast (located in what is now the Matariya section of Cairo) stood ancient Heliopolis, the great cult center to the sun-god Ra. But in the Roman period there was a powerful fortified town, Babylon, on the east bank of the Nile River opposite the southern tip of Roda. This fortress was located at the strategic heart of Egypt, the dividing line between Lower (Northern) Egypt and Upper (Southern) Egypt; it also dominated the principal ford along the length of the Nile, for most caravans and armies moving east-to-west or west-to-east across Egypt skirted the edges of the Delta and made use of Roda Island as a crossing-point. The remains of the fortress of Babylon are situated in the modern Cairo region known as "Old Cairo," and it was to this site that the Arab invaders of Egypt came when they entered the country in 640 AD. After the fall of the fortress, the Arab commander, Amr b. al-'As, chose to make the camp-city which his army had established just north of Babylon his capital. This camp-city, "al- Fustat," soon supplanted Alexandria as the demographic and economic center of Egypt, and from 700 to 1100 AD it flourished and became one of the great cities of the Mediterranean world. But in 969 AD a dynasty centered in North Africa, the Fatimids, conquered Egypt and established a new palace city for themselves along the edge of the desert two miles northeast of Fustat; the site stood a mile-and-a-half due east of the Nile and was separated from the river by a band of swamps and lakes. The new city was "al-Qahira"Cairo: the "Victorious City"and It did not take long before the population of Fustat, attracted by the patronage available in the new royal residence, abandoned the older city and settled in the new one. By 1100 Cairo had supplanted Fustat as Egypt's most important city. Indeed, from 1100 to 1500 Cairo can claim to have been the grandest and most splendid city in the Western world. Throughout this era its physical dimensions never exceeded five square kilometers (three square miles), and its population was never greater than 750,000 souls. However, such a total was as large or as that of any city in Europe before 1800.
In 1517 the Ottoman Turks conquered Egypt, and over the two centuries that followed Cairo stagnated. It was supplanted by Istanbul as the largest and greatest city in the Mediterranean world. But after 1800, its population began to grow and the city expanded physically, filling in the swamps to the west and moving towards the banks of the river. The modem downtown of Cairo around Midaan at-Tahreer began to develop only after 1870. At that time, the city's "modern" centera legitimately modern area, laid out in accordance with current Europe notions of proper city-planning and filled with European-style buildingswas concentrated about what is today Ataba Square, Azbaklyya Square, and Opera Square. This area lies about half a mile east of the banks of the Nile and was Cairo's glittering heart in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was also home to two of nineteenth century Cairo's most famous buildings: the opera house built to celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal (and for the premiere of which Verdi composed Aida), and the old Shepheard's, once one of the world s most famous hotels. Sadly, the old Shepheard's burned down in 1952, to be replaced by a pedestrian concrete tower built along the banks of the Nile in the 1950's. The old Opera House succumbed to fire in 1971, and a new opera house, built with support from the Japanese government, was constructed on Gazira Island in the 1980's.
The current "downtown" section of modem Cairo lies in an area about one-half miles square (or one kilometer square) along the east bank of the Nile opposite the northern of the two islands in the Cairo area, Gezira Island. As the history of Cairo goes, the development of the modern "Wust al-Baled" ("Center of the City") is a fairly recent phenomenon. By 1880, the city's commercial and cultural core had shifted out of the medieval core and moved west of the medieval core to what is now Ataba Square and Opera Squaretwo linked squares that now mark the eastern edge of the modem Center City. By 1900, the initial development of the modem downtown zone was underway, bounded to the north by the traditional village of Bulaq (today one of the poorest quarters of Cairo), and to the south by the Old Cairo area. These boundaries created an area about two mile long north-to-south and about one mile wide east-to-west.
Two distinct zones developed within this area: a commercial zone occupying the northern half of the area, and a residential zone occupying the remainder. The residential zone survives today in a neighborhood that stretches back east away from the Nile towards the older, more traditional parts of the city. Right along the river's edge is the residential quarter called "Garden City," once one of Cairo's most exclusive addresses and still very much an "uppermiddle-class" area. Garden City is filled with large, grand villas built early in the present century, many of which are now being torn down and replaced by modern apartments or converted in business offices (especially those providing financial services). Garden City is also the location of several foreign embassies, including the American, the British, the Japanese, and the Canadian.
The commercial zone which lies north of Garden City is bounded today by the Nile to the west; by the Sixth of October Flyover and Ramses Street to the north; by Ataba and Opera Squares to the east; and by the campus of the American University in Cairo to the south. The area thus enclosed takes the shape of a square, with a line of luxury hotels (the Shepheard's, the Intercontinental Semiramis, the Nile Hilton, and the Ramses Hilton) along its western edge. The Ramses Train Station is located at its northeastern edge, and the Abdin Palace (formerly a royal residence, and today an executive office for the President of Egypt) marks its southeastern corner. The area within this square is principally commercial and can therefore be described as the "Central Business District" (CBD), although the upper floors of buildings throughout the zone are occupied by more than 250,000 people, making it a large residential quarter as well. The "heart" of the Central Business District is "Midaan at-Tahreer" ("Liberation Square"; the word "Midaan" means "square" or "plaza"), which occupies much of the southwestern quarter of the whole downtown area. Midaan at-Tahreer is surrounded by several of the city's most important public buildings, including the Cairo Museum, the Arab League Building, the Foreign Ministry Building, the Mogamma (the heart of the Egyptian bureaucracy,) and, along its southeastern edge, the campus of the American University in Cairo (AUC). In addition, most of the city's bus lines are designed to begin and end here in several large bus stations. Beneath the square is the largest station of the Cairo Metro. The Metro line runs north-to-south beneath the Central Business District, linking up the Ramses Train Station with Old Cairo and the southern suburbs of Ma'adi and Helwan.
