Megacities in the desert: the human cost of Egypt and Saudi Arabia's bold new projects | Nesrine Malik | German builders are on the brink of collapse | Italy's vacation hotspot wants to ban new Airbnbs | CNN

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Megacities in the desert: the human cost of Egypt and Saudi Arabia's bold new projects | Nesrine Malik - The Guardian

In their rush to claim the future and concrete over the past, these vast rebrands are demolishing people's homes and their heritage

Spread over an area almost 7km (4 miles) long, Cairo's Necropolis is a sprawling district of tombs, mausoleums, mosques and courtyards. Also known as the City of the Dead, it is very much alive with memories of those buried there, with the different eras of history that it traces, and with the real families who live in it and have done so, in some instances, for generations. It dates back to the seventh century, and, like so much of historic Cairo, has always existed in an almost dizzying proximity with modernity. Billboards, construction and heavy traffic rub shoulders with the silent tombs of intricate mosaics, ancient wooden doors and hallowed spaces of mourning and remembrance. Buried there are not just ancient kings and dignitaries but more contemporary politicians, celebrities and Cairenes who passed in recent decades.

Their slumber is now an uneasy one. In 2020, authorities began demolishing parts of the city to make way for an expressway. In the years since, the threat of further demolition has hung over the rest of the city. Hussein Omar's mother, as well as some eight generations of his family, are buried there, and he hoped one day to lie next to them. He tells me that for years his family has been in deadlock with the state over what rights they have to visit, but that has now escalated, as the graves themselves have come under threat of removal. "The Egyptian state has always wanted to control histories," he says, but in more recent times, there has been what appears to be a "deliberate targeting" in which "the attempts to erase history are part and parcel of attempts to overwrite people's claims to property rights over what are clearly historic plots of valuable real estate".

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German builders are on the brink of collapse - The Economist

“We are sending our construction industry into the abyss,” warns Rolf Buch, boss of Vonovia, Germany’s biggest landlord. The crisis afflicting German builders is far from the country’s only economic problem. But it is particularly acute, and concerns a sector that makes up 12% of GDP and employs 1m construction workers. That makes it important for the health of the German economy and of its society.

The government promised to build 400,000 flats a year when it came to power in 2021. Industry groups reckon that something more like 700,000 a year are needed, not least to house the more than 1m Ukrainians who have fled their war-torn country. Whatever the true figure, everyone agrees that the 295,000 built last year did not cut it. Mr Buch calls the resulting shortage of affordable flats in parts of the country a “societal tinderbox”.

This year the number is likely to be lower still. The prices of materials and energy have shot up as a result of supply-chain disruptions, some of them war-related. Higher interest rates, meanwhile, have increased the cost of debt that many German builders rely on to get projects off the ground. As a result, construction firms and property developers are going bust in droves. In the first four months of this year 437 building companies filed for insolvency, an increase of 20% compared with the same period in 2022. Last month Gerch and Development Partner, two developers from Düsseldorf, Project Immobilien from Nürnberg and Euroboden from Munich went belly up.

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Italy's vacation hotspot wants to ban new Airbnbs | CNN - CNN

As Europe continues to be squeezed by overtourism and short-term rentals mushroom to accommodate visitors, cities across the continent are noting more and more that residents are being squeezed out.

Now, one of Europe's biggest tourist destinations is taking action. The city of Florence has announced plans to ban new short-term rentals such as Airbnbs.

The new legislation, which will be voted on next Wednesday and is expected to be active by November, will ban any further properties in the historic center of the city being registered as short-term rentals.

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