Cairo Ring Road
Cairo, Egypt, 2009 - 2014
Between 2009 and 2014, Anthony Hamboussi carried out an extensive photographic survey of the Cairo Ring Road, the highway encircling Greater Cairo and connecting many of its major arteries. Built to relieve congestion and link the city’s expanding edges, the Ring Road instead became a portrait of Cairo’s rapid, uneven, and unregulated urban growth. Hamboussi photographed the city from the road itself—its shoulders, interchanges, bridges, and surrounding terrain—recording the built environment that had developed along this vast infrastructural loop.
The series documents the full spectrum of the city’s expansion. Along the Ring Road, Hamboussi captures dense informal settlements, middle-income housing blocks, government-built social housing, vacant desert areas awaiting development, and the rise of gated upscale compounds on former agricultural and desert land. His photographs also reveal the state of the infrastructure: unfinished ramps, exposed embankments, eroded edges, monumental construction sites, and large sections of unmaintained roadway.
By focusing on the Ring Road and the highways and overpasses that branch from it, Hamboussi shows how this system shapes Cairo’s daily life and spatial structure. The road both connects and divides—linking distant districts while reinforcing the separation between formal and informal development. From its elevated vantage points, Hamboussi observes how the city spreads into the desert and grows around the infrastructure meant to contain it.
Made in the years leading up to and beyond the January 25 Revolution, the photographs form an archive of a city undergoing social, economic, and environmental strain. They reveal a landscape where rapid urbanization outpaces planning, where housing needs push development into the margins, and where infrastructure becomes a witness to inequality as well as expansion.
Cairo Ring Road is not simply a survey of a highway, but a record of the forces shaping one of the world’s largest cities. Through hundreds of images, Hamboussi presents the Ring Road as a shifting border, a mirror of Cairo’s growth, and a vantage point from which the city’s complexities—its contradictions, ambitions, and failures—come into view.