It is only a few kilometres wide and more than 900 km long. It has many more inhabitants than the capital city of its country and still looks like the countryside. It has a population density similar to the most congested global megacities, and it is nothing but a linear strip of rururban development. The field along the River Nile is an endless corridor of agricultural land turned into housing blocks, but lacking the necessary infrastructure for such an agglomeration: the ultimate metropolitan village. The Nile City is a research project led by Pier Paolo Tamburelli and Oliver Thill at the Berlage Institute in 2009/2010. The 900-kilometres city has recently been featured in the highly recommendable second issue of San Rocco Magazine, around the topic of the Even Covering of the Field. Additionally, the project shows stunning photos by Bas Princen of the housing developments of the area, consisting of completely walled buildings; they literally reflect the optimal shift from agriculture to real estate as well as harsh climate conditions. Concrete structures filled with brickwork are scattered all over as vertical extrusions of plots, but always leaving a piece of valuable arable land available. This new housing typology – almost like a cuboid version of the Pyramids – has no windows; it is too hot outside to let any breeze of air or sunlight inside. The dull homogeneity of the landscape is enhanced through these monolithic dwellings repeated ad infinitum. As Thill puts it: The quality of the individual building is also that of the whole megalopolis, and so there is no difference between architecture and urbanism. [...] the buildings are so neutral that the landscape becomes the dominant element [...]. According to the principle of isotropic field, their research concludes with a proposal using updated hieroglyphs to map this contemporary vibrating landscape: land-reclamation, exclusive clubs, garbage dumps, unused plots…

<But these agglomerations are cities only according to statistics. Nothing about them is metropolitan except their density. To understand these systems as cities is a mistake. They are merely denser rural areas crowded with restless masses of (underemployed) farmers. Finally, after the modern infatuation with cities, we are going to have to consider villages once again.> [San Rocco#2, Editorial]

[1> Informal Settlement by Bas Princen, 2009 at San Rocco Magazine#2] [2> The 900-km Nile City, fragment]