Heliopolis, Cairo

Heliopolis (Arabic: مصر الجديدة, romanized: Miṣr al-Jadīda, Egyptian Arabic pronunciation: [ˈmɑsˤɾ el ɡɪˈdiːdæ, -eɡ-], lit. "New Egypt") was an early 20th-century suburb outside Cairo, Egypt, which has since merged with Cairo and is administratively divided into the districts of Masr El Gedida and El Nozha in the Eastern Area.

Named after the ancient Egyptian city of Heliopolis, whose ruins have been found in nearby Ain Shams, modern Heliopolis was established in 1905 by the Heliopolis Oasis Company headed by the Belgian industrialist Édouard Empain and by Boghos Nubar, son of the Egyptian Prime Minister Nubar Pasha.

The population in January 2022 of Masr El Gedida was estimated to be 142,017 and in El-Nozha was 244,869 people.

Édouard Louis Joseph, 1st Baron Empain visited Egypt in January 1904 to rescue one of the projects of his company S.A. des Chemins de Fer de la Basse-Egypte; the construction of a railway line linking Mansourah (on the Nile river) to Matariya (on the far side of Lake Manzala from Port Said).

In 1906, Empain established the Cairo Electric Railways and Heliopolis Oases Company, which bought 2,500 hectares (6,200 acres) of desert around 10 kilometres (6.2 mi) to the northeast of Cairo to build a semi-autonomous garden city of Heliopolis.

The new town represented the first large-scale attempt to promote its own architecture, known now as the Heliopolis style. It was designed as a "city of luxury and leisure", with broad avenues and equipped with all conveniences and infrastructure: water, drains, electricity, hotel facilities, such as the Heliopolis Palace Hotel and Heliopolis House, and recreational amenities including a golf course, racetrack and park. Additionally, there was housing for rent, offered in a range of innovative designs targeting specific social classes with detached and terraced villas, apartment buildings, tenement blocks with balcony access and workers' bungalows.

While Heliopolis had features that were fundamentally different from the colonial planning in other African and Asian countries, it was an undertaking that could not have been more colonial. The project was the expression of a dream of one man, the Belgian Edouard Empain, and the buildings were designed by Belgian, French and British architects and, in the beginning, built with materials brought from these countries. Although there is no 'cordon sanitaire', there are some more implicit structures that made a more subtle segregation in the city possible.

Baron Empain's palace was designed by Alexandre Marcel, a French architect and a member of the French Institute, according to a Neo Hindu style modelled on Angkor Wat in Cambodia and the Hindu temples of Orissa. The neighborhood had some of the wealthiest Egyptian residences; on the left facing Avenue Baron was the Arabesque palace of Boghos and Marie Nubar Pasha, now a military headquarters, and diagonally opposite stands the former residence of Sultan Hussein Kamel, who reigned over Egypt between 1914 and 1917, and today, it is a presidential guest house.