Cairo’s rooftop bloom

DPA

Mohammed Taha says he has the only “green mosque” in the whole of Egypt, and he looks around the flowerbeds where he grows spinach and Italian basil. Behind the caretaker with a prayer bump on his forehead, a yellow minaret rises up into the evening sky above Cairo.
Taha’s rooftop garden in this place of worship is the only patch of green in the sea of concrete, red brick and plastic waste that is a trademark of this city of 20 million. Planting a roof is not just a matter of living well under the smog, explains Ehab Kamel, of the NGO Schaduf, which caters to rooftop gardens and their owners. “In the summer, the flowerbeds provide natural
insulation against the heat,” Kamel explains.
Further, the plants — even if there are only a few of them — to some extent clean the polluted air in the overcrowded Egyptian capital. And Schaduf sells the produce to provide an additional source of income in poor neighbourhoods.
Currently, just under 55
per cent of the world’s population lives in cities, and that portion is expected to rise to 70 per cent by 2030, according to UN data. CO2 emissions, smog, traffic and supply issues are only a few of the major challenges associated with
this trend.
There are no perfect solutions, but projects like the one in Cairo show that even small steps help. In the Esbet al-Nasser neighbourhood, near the intersection between two freeways, the streets are full of sand and they smell of sheep. Street dogs rummage in the waste. And locals get suspicious when foreigners venture through the narrow alleys amid illegally built housing.
“At first, people didn’t believe us when we presented the city garden project to them,” Kamel says. Residents wondered what it could possibly mean for them, and why they should take on so much work for a few greens. However, it has meant a lot, at least for Mohammed Taha, who planted seeds in the damp soil with his son. It is actually fun, he adds.
“I work hard, yes, but I love it,” he says. The German Society for International Cooperation (GIZ), which receives funds from the German government and the European Union, started to back the Cairo city garden project in 2014. As elsewhere in the world, they rely on local NGOs for their expertise.
In a huge city like Cairo, where the infrastructure is in bad shape and the authorities are overextended, such projects can only be the start of a long process. Changing conditions and poor organization in
the official bureaucracy make implementation difficult, as
does the corruption that is rampant in Egypt.
With such projects, the traditional foreign aid model, which focused on the poor countryside, is now moving on to urban projects like Cairo’s rooftop gardens.