Cairo Metropolis 2010/2011 Working Trip December 13Th to 18Th 2010 I Cairo – Working Trip 2010 a Week in Cairo
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Governing the Large Cairo Metropolis 2010/2011 Working trip December 13th to 18th 2010 i Cairo – Working trip 2010 A week in Cairo Founded in 1872, Sciences Po is one of the leading political and social sciences Universities in the world, with nine research centers, and twenty different master’s degree programs. The master’s program “Governing the large metropolis” aims at training young professionals specialized in governance and urban policies. This year twenty students from all over the world are studying economics, geography, political science and sociology, and training with international professionals and top-level academic scholars. During the first semester, an urban field trip is organized. The aim of the study trip is not to organize seminars or participate in conferences, but to promote small meetings and revealing encounters. Before the Revolt In December 2010 we visited Cairo. With its 18.000.000 inhabitants, Cairo is one of the largest metropolises in the world. Everything was quiet. Currently, in February 2011, all the Middle East is in upheaval, and it is not so simple to predict future evolutions. We carried out this study trip to Cairo taking some precautions, but with no idea of the imminent revolution. When we started organizing the study trip we sought to collect the best recent literature on Cairo, looking at urban issues, local policies, and governance architecture. We talked and discussed with colleagues with expertise on the city, and with politicians and journalists who travelled frequently to Egypt. No one was worried about our trip, and no one informed us of the mobilizations taking shape and gaining momentum in Cairo. We visited Cairo in the second week of December 2010. No tensions, no official discourse about protests and claims making. We found a shared debate about a city trying to cope with its main problems in a consensual way. A peaceful picture made of incremental change and no hard line claims making. At the same time we felt the tension in the air, observed a lot of self-organization at the grassroots level, and an intense desire to discuss with the government and talk about the city’s main contradictions. We cannot say we returned from Cairo with any idea of the large revolution to come. But we saw an urban society pushing for change. Our main question A study trip is a complex game, a dish that requires lots of different Dr. Tommaso Vitale ingredients, a puzzle quite difficult to solve. There are many dimensions Academic Director of the Governing the Large Metropolis Master, to articulate, and many details to consider. It is a challenge at the Sciences Po Paris organizational, pedagogical and intellectual levels. We decided to focus Professor of Urban Sociology at Sciences Po Paris on one main question, relative to the governance of the city. We took [email protected] part in meetings, visits and encounters to try to answer this question. It was a true question, not a fictitious one. In fact we did not know how the Dr. Brigitte Fouilland city was governed. We searched and the literature thoroughly without Head of the Regional and Urban Strategies and Governing the Large finding a satisfactory account of the governance mode used in the Cairo Metropolis Master Programmes, Sciences Po Paris City Region. So, we decided to structure the study trip as a small Associate Lecturer at Sciences Po Paris research field trip, to go looking for data, information and hints that could [email protected] suggest how to answer our main question. The study trip was prepared collaboratively with the students, with preliminary lectures focusing on the urban history of Cairo, its main spatial development, and on its recent ii Cairo – Working trip 2010 reforms and privatization. We talked about the puzzle of governance in The study trip the city, and decided to take this large question seriously when selecting During the 5 day trip we had 16 encounters, with opportunities to talk and taking decisions on how to structure the trip. It is difficult to with people in charge of governing activities, with local officers, understand the enigma of Cairo City governance: it is the mystery of a administrative executives, private development managers, grassroots complex architecture, with some overlapping institutions, and activists, community leaders, social policy leaders, but also to travel sophisticated forms of coordination. around the city, seeing its assets and contradictions. In this report the reader can find some very insightful details on the governance of this large metropolis. It is not a report about what we did, but about what we Readings and contacts learned. After the downfall of the Mubarak’s regime, many things are To better prepare the journey we collected readings and some good changing, and we are witnessing the emergence of new political parties. papers. The more the students read the more they raised queries, But at the same time, the most relevant metropolitan problems remain. debates, uncertainty, dubiousness, and reservations. To better grasp the The demographic trend, the lack of public transport, the regulation of governance of Cairo City, we went ahead with queries on (1) the water between the city and the farmlands, the safety of the slums, all relationships between the city and the State, and how the National remain issues of current importance. However the institutional form of government governed the city; (2) on how the city deals with informal the state will be changed, and whoever will govern the Cairo City Region, neighborhoods, and if and how economic local development instruments the major puzzles of institutional coordination, of regulation and the are negotiated with private actors to address issues of urban poverty; (3) mobilization of resources to confront the main urban difficulties will on how the master plan to develop the city and reduce its high urban remain urgent for the political agenda. density was implemented. Step by step we worked to refine and specify In this report you will find some of the data and evaluations we collected our questions to try to collect information on the issues and the sectors during the study trip. Some of this information may be well known by on which the government activities focused. Then, the inquiry started and some specialists, but some is quite unknown, and can help us we decided to look deeper: what sort of framework was constructed understand this fascinating, enormous metropolis a little better: how it through governance to promote the marketing of Cairo and attract worked, how it was governed, its geopolitical and economic role in the tourism? Was the development of the cinema industrial sector a priority, Mediterranean area as well as in the whole Arabic region. We decided and how was it promoted? What are the main governance problems in against writing a compound synthesis and interpretation of the mode of supporting and providing for schools and education in the city’s governance in Cairo. We prefer to share the richness of the information neighborhoods? Did the City center business district require continuous and the variety of points of view we collected with our readers. This was government investments, or was it largely autonomous? What was the the first study trip of this new Sciences Po master’s program, and we relationship between the government and grassroots social organizations hope to communicate the freshness and dynamism of this learning in dealing with issues of urban poverty? Lots of questions that we used as experience. a compass not to lose our bearing. We clustered them to select and define our interlocutors in Cairo. iii Cairo – Working trip 2010 Table of Contents Day 1 ......................................................................................... 1 Understanding today’s Cairo. Understanding today’s Egypt (Hugo Christy) ......... 1 A walk through Darb el Labbana’s history and future (Audrey Noeltner) ............ 3 The geopolitical role of the Cairo city region (Kathrine Faggerlund Brekke) ....... 5 Day 2 ......................................................................................... 7 Urban planning and Cairo 2050 (Elsa Desmaison) ....................................................... 7 Cairo 2050: a work in progress (Clément Boisseuil) ................................................ 10 The Aga Khan Trust for Culture Foundation in Cairo (Ines Weill-Rochant) ...... 13 Archplan: planning 6th of October City (Hugo Christy) ............................................ 17 Day 3 ........................................................................................ 19 The Zabaleen District (Nicola da Schio & Olivier Woeffray) ................................. 19 6th of October City (Marwa Belghazi & Xuan Liu) ..................................................... 21 Day 4 ........................................................................................ 24 Dar es Salam: the formal, the informal and the squatter areas. What regulation? (Louisa Zhang) .................................................................................................................................. 24 Living with the dead: a tacit way for survival (Jérémie Meyer) ................................ 26 Make Old Cairo a new city (Gabriel Odin) ................................................................. 28 Day 5 ........................................................................................ 30 Visit of the Studios MASR (Karim Goessinger) .........................................................