Scholars of African cities have long struggled to articulate Egypt's urban African identity. Recent work on postcolonial African urbanism has focused on other sub-Saharan African cities that feature marginalized urban majorities segregated along lines of class, race or ethnicity, or cities whose governmental regimes physically relocated human and industrial resources to match state ideology and establish legibility and control within urban environments. If these are the requirements for a postcolonial African urban environment, the recent history of Cairo, Egypt should be considered. In 1969, facing exponential population growth and a struggling post-1967 war economy, Gamal 'Abd al-Nasir formally announced his New-Town program, which established satellite cities in the arid desert around Cairo, and attempted to move displaced Bedouin farmers and middle class Cairean residents and industry in an effort to control the alarming population growth rate and jumpstart the agricultural economic sector. However, the program's legacy has been marked by its logistical failures rather than its economic and social successes. Since 1969, fourteen satellite communities have suffered from lack of resources, public transportation, and permanent residents. Like in other African nations, the Egyptian government borrowed advice and plans from a variety of international firms and donors in an attempt to transform the New-Town Program into a sustainable urban development project. In addition, Cairo's New-Town Program failed to consider existing social patterns in favor of a nationalist ideology. In this paper, I track the history of the New-Town Program in light of recent works on "unique" African cities by asking two questions: in what ways did the Egyptian government mirror actions taken by other nations on the African continent when designing the New-Town Program, and in which ways did it differi And, given the existence of these trends, can a case be made for Cairo as not only an African city, but as one that its distinguishable in possessing characteristics of social formation that are endemic only to its metropolitan areap I assert that the New-Town program is similar to other African urban modernist projects in terms of its scale, financial cost, and stated commitment to urban improvement, but suffered the same fate as similar African modernist urban programs as it attempted to socially engineer environments that were incompatible for sustained economic growth and social interaction due to flaws in design, resource distribution, and individual-level support.