From "Nasr City" to "Madinet Masr": one name that sums up Egyptian urban history
Few companies can say they built an entire neighbourhood from the capital's first drawings. Madinet Masr for Housing & Development is one of them.
The company was founded in 1959 by presidential decree as a government entity tasked with developing Nasr City — then Egypt's largest urban project — and over decades planned its streets and executed tens of thousands of units there, alongside Abbasiya and east Cairo. In 1996 its shares were listed on the Egyptian Exchange (ticker MASR.CA), and it later became fully private.
In 2022 the company announced its new strategy, and at the start of 2023 launched the updated "Madinet Masr" brand — a shift from "Nasr", the neighbourhood where it began, to "Masr", the whole country it now serves. The change was more than a name: within three years it launched the giant Sarai and Taj City, entered Upper Egypt with Zahw in Assiut, and in 2025 moved beyond Egypt itself through the Saudi "Citydom" partnership and a Dubai subsidiary.
Today the company is led by engineer Mohamed Hazem Barakat as Chairman and engineer Abdullah Salam as CEO, from its historic headquarters at 4 Youssef Abbas Street, Nasr City — under its official English slogan "Proudly Building for Egypt".
