We just got back from a 2 week vacation where we spent the majority of time in Egypt. We hired a tour guide and a driver for the trip and it was really wonderful, but one thing that our tour guide claimed seemed suspicious in our minds and I’m hoping we can get this resolved.
Throughout Cairo, and to a lesser extent Luxor and Aswan, we saw a lot of unfinished apartment buildings. The rebar and pillars struck upwards from the top of these tenements with the occassional large pile of bricks laying strewn at its base. Cairo is a city of 20 million people and so it seemed possible that we’d see a couple of these, but they seemed to be so very frequent that we had to ask if there was a reason for this.
Our tour guide explained that there were two reasons why these were uncompleted…
The first reason, the more plausible, was that in Cairo, the owner of the building doesn’t have to pay taxes until the building is complete. Since the motivation to complete a building seems to weigh more on the aesthetic than the financial, this kind of made sense.
The second reason she went on to say was when a father marries off his child, the father adds an additional story to the building. Then the children produce more kids and more stories are added to the building. All very ad hoc it seemed.
A third reason, not mentioned but assumed by us United Statesians was the Okkam’s razor: the builder simply ran out of money or labor.
Maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle, so what’s the sd on this?
I’ve noticed the same thing in Croatia, and was given the tax reason. Did you notice that the buildings were fully functional and that the unfinished bit was a bedroom that wasn’t really needed?
I saw the same thing, and heard the exact same reasons (tax, and additional storeys for family members), about the dozens of unfinished buildings I saw in Cyprus and Crete.
Not the running-out-of-money one though, and in Mr O’s razor terms, I don’t think this would explain the vast number of them.
Well, it’s hard to shake my western standards of functional and apply them to Egypt. En route back from Alexandria at night time, we passed by these buildings and saw that some of them had electricity but sometimes lacked windows. I’m not sure if plumbing was available either. Unfortunately, I didn’t take any pictures of the majority of this buildings, but I do have one that shows the rebar on the top.
Just another nit: since William of Ockham was born several centuries ago, long before English spelling was standardized, there are about fifteen different ways you can spell it, all equally valid.
Same thing in inland Greece. I think it’s a theme. There it wasn’t necessarily apartment buildings, but just houses built of concrete block. They built and lived in the first (and sometimes second) floor, and then the “roof” just had half-finished columns on the corners.
You can see the same thing in cities in South America. Odds are they just ran out of money before the building got as high as was originaly intended. Sometimes you can find stairways that just go up into the roof.
I think #2 is the best explanation. You can find the same thing in Yemen and Saudi Arabia. In Yemen there are buildings that have a base that’s centuries old with tops that might only be a few decades old. They have the rebar on top and it looks incomplete because, well, they expect to build another level at some point in the future.
Back to the OP, the same phenomenon, and explanations, are give in just about every Mediterranean country. The tax reason seems to be the most commonly given.
More trivia: Ockham is the home of the OCK navigational beacon which is one of the main guides for planes coming into Heathrow.
I’ve seen the same thing in Tanzania. Talking to the owner of a house like this (he is also a construction contractor) it’s money for materials. They buy materials as they can, and finish things piecemeal. This month it’s a load of bricks, next month they buy some wiring…
In Lebanon, we got the same explanation: taxes and room for multi-generational dwelling.
ETA–BTW, I was hoping you would follow up to this thread. How was your trip? Did you get St. Pauli Girl to tone down the wardrobe? Above all, did you have fun?
Damn! I was hoping there would be a pub there called ‘Occam’s Razor’ that I could go and visit. After all, there’s one in Piltdown called ‘The Piltdown Man’
