UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Santa Barbara Egyptian Urban Exigencies: Space, Governance and Structures of Meaning in a Globalising Cairo A Thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts in Global Studies by Roberta Duffield Committee in charge: Professor Paul Amar, Chair Professor Jan Nederveen Pieterse Assistant Professor Javiera Barandiarán Associate Professor Juan Campo June 2019 The thesis of Roberta Duffield is approved. ____________________________________________ Paul Amar, Committee Chair ____________________________________________ Jan Nederveen Pieterse ____________________________________________ Javiera Barandiarán ____________________________________________ Juan Campo June 2014 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my thesis committee at the University of California, Santa Barbara whose valuable direction, comments and advice informed this work: Professor Paul Amar, Professor Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Professor Javiera Barandiarán and Professor Juan Campo, alongside the rest of the faculty and staff of UCSB’s Global Studies Department. Without their tireless work to promote the field of Global Studies and committed support for their students I would not have been able to complete this degree. I am also eternally grateful for the intellectual camaraderie and unending solidarity of my UCSB colleagues who helped me navigate Californian graduate school and come out the other side: Brett Aho, Amy Fallas, Tina Guirguis, Taylor Horton, Miguel Fuentes Carreño, Lena Köpell, Ashkon Molaei, Asutay Ozmen, Jonas Richter, Eugene Riordan, Luka Šterić, Heather Snay and Leila Zonouzi. I would especially also like to thank my friends in Cairo whose infinite humour, loyalty and love created the best dysfunctional family away from home I could ever ask for and encouraged me to enroll in graduate studies and complete this thesis: Miriam Afifiy, Eman El-Sherbiny, Felix Fallon, Peter Holslin, Emily Hudson, Raïs Jamodien and Thomas Pinney. Your friendships over the years have passed the test of time and distance ten times over. I would also like to thank the following for their invaluable advice and expertise that has informed my learning process during my research in Cairo: Rehab Ahmed, Bahaa Ed-Din Osama, Omar Nagati, Nouran Salah, David Sims, David Wood, Ahmed Zaazaa, and my colleagues at CEDEJ. I am eternally grateful for my family for their unconditional support and patience, particularly during the last four years: Clara, Mark, Rupert and Elliot Heston; Joyce Drewery; and Jean and Mark Duffield. I am especially indebted to my father Mark’s academic wisdom and moral tenacity which has challenged and inspired me more anything. Lastly, to Cairo, for whom I am eternally grateful for its formative experiences and the warmth, generosity and fortitude of its citizens. iii ABSTRACT Egyptian Urban Exigencies: Space, Governance and Structures of Meaning in a Globalising Cairo by Roberta Duffield Greater Cairo’s claim as amongst the world’s largest urban conglomerates demands discussion of its spatial organisation and governance. The challenges of pollution, overcrowding and poverty are unavoidable when 22.8 million citizens aspire to cohabit one space, historically lacking robust mechanisms for formal civic engagement and enforcing the social accountability of successive national governments. These issues of urban inequality and le droit à la ville became drivers of social anger during the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. A period of reduced governmental oversight on spatial ownership and a newly galvanised civil society following these protests opened a brief window for a new mode of urban citizenship that demanded a more equitable urban existence for Cairo’s inhabitants. This moment, however, appears to have ended. The installation of the Abd al-Fatah al-Sisi administration in 2014 proposes a new period of state-led politicised urban development for Cairo’s future, adjourned during the years of regime change following the revolution. The current governmental vision for the Egyptian capital coalesces around notions of a global city that demonstrates the urban trappings of a locus of international flows of capital, business and tourism. This includes the construction of high-end commercial and residential areas, mass iv slum clearances and the reimagination of the city’s multiple architectural heritages as ‘open- air museums’. Inspiration is drawn from the economic prosperity of rising eastern metropoles particularly Dubai, appropriated as an emulative model for Arab success. The apex of these ambitions is arguably the New Administrative Capital, currently under construction 45- kilometres away from Cairo which proposes a ‘smart’, green, connected city as the new seat of Egyptian national prestige in the twenty-first century. The findings of this thesis are based upon research from a five-month period of participant observation in Cairo that informed a familiarity with area and populations of enquiry, informal interviews with knowledge stakeholders involved in urban issues, and a range of primary and secondary written sources. They reveal a paradox at the heart of current hegemonic planning logics which proclaim a better Cairo through de-densification and development, but with little introspection on its inhabitants’ immediate needs or learning from previous urban development in the city. Globality as intimated through the built environment manifests as a hollow visuality of cosmopolitan modernity orientated around elite consumer practices, informed by neoliberal subjectivities and private-sector economics. Practical considerations of infrastructural investment and adequate social housing projects are side-lined by a myopic commitment to the aesthetics of stature as a short-cut to success. This is upheld by the Egyptian Armed Forces reasserted role as a prominent economic beneficiary in Egypt’s speculative elite real estate and development sectors. The spectre of 2011’s mass uprising runs throughout Cairo’s urban development, consciously rationalised in the securitisation of symbolic sites of revolution, or indirectly perpetuated through projects that promote a class- based usability that corresponds to politicised and moralised narratives of risk and identity v regarding visibility in public spaces. Without a comprehensive long-term solution to complex urban needs and a mounting public debt incurred through poorly-conceived megaprojects, the future appears set to engender further civil dispossession from Cairo’s urban environment. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS I. Introduction ........................................................................................................ 2 A. Key Investigation ............................................................................ 2 B. Thesis Organisation ......................................................................... 2 C. Defining the Investigation: What is Cairo? ..................................... 5 1. Cairo as the Primate Metropolis ................................................ 6 2. Cairo's Urban Climacteric.......................................................... 8 3. Cairo as a Global City .............................................................. 12 D. A Genealogy of Politicised Urbanism: A Conversation with the Global Modern ................................................................................... 14 E. 2011: A New Mode of Urban Citizenship .................................... 18 II. Remaking the Old: Downtown Cairo .............................................................. 23 A. Chapter Introduction: Downtown Cairo in the Post-Revolution Moment .............................................................................................. 23 1. New Military Urbanism ........................................................... 24 2. Sisi’s War on Terror ................................................................ 26 3. Al-Ḥamla al-’Amniyya: The Scourge of Street Vending ......... 28 4. Coffee Shops and Revolution .................................................. 30 5. Cultural Constriction ............................................................... 32 6. Museum for Ghosts? ................................................................ 33 B. Downtown Historic: Bohemia and the Belle Époque ................... 34 1. Downtown in Decline .............................................................. 36 vii C. The Heritisation of Khedival Cairo ............................................... 40 1. Nostalgia as Utopia .................................................................. 43 2. The Golden Age, Revisited ...................................................... 45 D. Inscribing Heritage into Law ........................................................ 50 1. Foundations for Downtown's Future ....................................... 53 E. Al Ismaelia for Real Estate Investment ......................................... 55 1. A Cultural Vision for Development ........................................ 57 2. Gentrification, Interrupted ....................................................... 59 3. Identity Formation ................................................................... 63 F. Chapter Conclusion ....................................................................... 66 III. Making the New: Visions for a Global City .................................................. 68 A. Chapter Introduction: New City Rising ........................................ 68 1. Militarised Capitalism, Infitāḥ and Beyond ............................