El Shorouk | |
Native Name: | الشروق |
Settlement Type: | City |
Pushpin Map: | Egypt |
Pushpin Mapsize: | 300 |
Pushpin Map Caption: | Location in Egypt |
Subdivision Type: | Country |
Subdivision Name: | Egypt |
Subdivision Type1: | Governorate |
Subdivision Name1: | Cairo |
Utc Offset: | +2 |
Coordinates: | 30.145°N 31.6399°W |
El-Shorouk (Arabic: الشروق pronounced as /eʃʃʊˈɾuːʔ, eʃʃɪˈɾuːʔ/, "the Sunrise") is a satellite city in the Eastern Area of Cairo, Egypt, also spelt Elshorouk.[1] [2] As a "new city" it is administered by the New Urban Communities Authority (NUCA).[3] Shorouk is one of the so-called third generation new cities, established by presidential decree 325/1995, allocating of public land to NUCA, in addition to further allocations totalling by 2017.
The establishment of the city highlights the efforts of the Egyptian state in managing urban expansion to achieve several development goals. One prominent goal being to absorb the expanding population of Egypt and to ease population pressures currently placed on the aging capital. Other major themes of this project are to redistribute the population of the Greater Cairo area and to raise the standard of living in the region through the provision of new job opportunities from industrial projects in the city. By 2030, 35 years after its inception, Shorouk was planned to have 500,000 people.
However, according to the 2017 census, it had only 87,285 residents.[4] This underachievement is not just in Shorouk, but across the new city programme where cities are planned according to wholly unrealistic population growth rates, and where they are inequitably distributed (by land area) to capture population growth.[5] [6]
The Köppen-Geiger climate classification system classifies El Shorouk as a hot desert (BWh),[7] [8] as is the rest of Egypt. The climate is generally extremely dry around the capital. In addition to scarce rain, extreme heat during summer months is a general climate feature of El Shorouk. Though, daytime temperatures are milder during autumn and winter.