CAIRO: It is not true that sidewalks are for public use and should not be sold. Now you can officially own the sidewalk in front of your home in return for a small “tip to the district council of your area of residence. This way, the sidewalk will become your possession and you can prevent pedestrians from using it on the grounds that the streets are wide enough to pass an infantry unit and that sidewalks should not remain confined to pedestrians.
This is not new. The ingenious district council staff has no dearth of ideas when it comes to invent new ways of making life easier for citizens and boosting their own income. In the past it was done with some embarrassment and therefore it did not deserve our due appreciation.
Maadi, for example, used to belong to Cairo governorate, and was subject to the rigid control of governor Abdel-Azim Wazir. Now the district is far better off than it ever was in the past. Residents can now do as they please, simply by reaching an understanding with the district council staff without disturbing it, exiled as it is all the way in Helwan, under whose authority Maadi now belongs.
The examples of such transgressions are many. On 216 Street, one resident illegally attached a new kitchen to his apartment, adjacent to his neighbor’s bedroom window. When the neighbor complained to the district council, they immediately noted the case and filed a memo about the violation, but they did not remove the encroachment.
The district council staff has come up with a new reform program that does not stop at these modest achievements, leaving afflicted residents like those on 216 Street to suffer the whiff of onion and tomato sauce and the thick barbecue smoke sneaking into the bedroom.
On 17 Street, the wife of an ambassador complained to me that she no longer opens her bedroom window because of the stench of accumulated garbage on the pavement. When she complained she was told that the garbage collection is now the responsibility of a new private company not the district council.
But it seems that there was an agreement between the garbage collection company and the district council according to which the former would leave garbage on sidewalks and the latter would offer the sidewalks for the residents in return for a sum of money that will not end up in the coffers of Minister of Finance Youssef Boutros Ghali.
I personally saw a sidewalk in 85 Street and another in 13 Street, where the system has been applied successfully and the sidewalks disappeared completely. In the past, you couldn’t see them because of the piles of garbage, but now they have been transformed into gardens attached to the lucky landlords on the street. But the pedestrians now compete with the cars for the limited space. All the while, the governorate remains in a deep slumber.
One of the most important achievements of this new program is that it can be applied to other districts, thanks to the proven success and accelerated implementation rate of the sidewalk sale project, in addition to the efficiency of building fences to attach sidewalks to houses. Thus, you may see a sidewalk by night but in the morning you may find it attached to a house.
When the British designed the district they were inspired by the London design, where pedestrians walk only on sidewalks and cars only in the streets.
Along with my admiration at the speed and efficiency of the implementation of the new program, I was also impressed by the beauty of those fences that hide the old, ugly pavements. But I learnt that the people in charge of the designs of these fences are the homeowners who bought the sidewalk, not the district council, whose facilities lack the most basic principles of aesthetics.
Evidence of this is the old pavements, which have thankfully disappeared with their broken tiles. I suggested to the district of Maadi to accelerate the completion of the one-thousand-pavement project by publishing a newspaper advertisement titled “A Sidewalk for Sale in Maadi. But the district staff told me they are afraid that the sidewalk funds may go, in this case, to the State treasury, which competes with them in seizing funds.
Mohamed Salmawy is President of the Arab Writers’ Union and Editor-in-Chief of Al-Ahram Hebdo.
