egypt.
SJ—485
34–94–28
34–94–28
In The Last Days of the City
a retroactive manifesto for cairo
karim fouad
- Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
“With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse a fear. Cities, like dreams are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else…take delight not in a city’s wonders…but in the answers a city can give to questions we pose or in the questions it asks us in return”
-Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
“Our bodies are never safe from the people who rule this place. Not in life, not even in death. What about our memories? Will they too be slowly erased along with the city?”
Cairo is complicated, its history old, grand and convoluted. Its architecture layered so deeply the rubble is hard to differentiate from the sediment above. Its piecemeal and fragmented; far from perfect. Here I offer one reading of the city, a subjective, fragmented, and incomplete reading based on observations both up close and far away. Crude and schematic. Rough and far reaching. At times paradoxical, in many ways, it mirrors its subject.
Dichotomic Cairo
Cities are intricate manifestations of desire and fear. Cairo embodies the desires of its governing powers—colonial extraction, revolutionary aspirations, and relentless modernization—while simultaneously harboring the fears of systemic neglect, disenfranchisement, and socio-political instability. Here the built environment serves as an archive of collective sentiment—a repository of unresolved contradictions.
Cairo, then, is a city marked by dichotomies: past and present, chaos and order, abundance and neglect. Its streets narrate stories of colonial exploitation, revolution, and relentless transformation. Cairo’s history is that of extraction, of struggle and survival. At every turn the governing bodies who inscribe themselves onto the city have sliced, extracted, and moved resources away from Cairo, leaving those millions of Cairenes pushed through the cracks left in their wake.
Cairo, a 5000-year-old urban palimpsest of 25 million inhabitants, dry oppressive heat, seemingly infinite expansion, violent intersection, and everlasting disorientation: the impossible city. How do you make sense of an impossible city?
What follows is a brief introduction of Cairo’s historical architectural production. This broad context serves as backdrop for the present-day exploration.
Red Land—Black Land
The geography of Egypt is one primordially divided. Egypt has always been understood by its earliest inhabitants in relation to the river, its flow, and the conditions it births. Early Egyptians divided the land longitudinally and laterally into Red and Black, Upper and Lower. Longitudinal division was that of the river. Red understood what was out of reach of the rivers influence: the desert synonymous with death, famine and pestilence. Black understood the fertile edge hugging the river, the same sliver 95% of Egyptians cling to today. Upper and Lower denoted lateral division. That of the rivers flow, Upper Egypt, the south, was higher on the water table, Lower Egypt, the north, where the Nile emptied into the Mediterranean Sea.
The Nile is the common way in the middle. It is a carrier of things, a bringer of life, a keeper of time, driver of technological innovation, framework for geographical understanding, spatial organizer, political unifier, national identity, and at times religion.
The Nile dictated both the practical and symbolic dimensions of social life and material construction. Its annual inundation defined the cycles of labor, resource availability, and spiritual meaning that underpin early Egyptian architectural forms. The Nile was a bridge between the terrestrial and the divine, its flow mirrored in the axial alignments of temples and the positioning of tombs in the cosmic landscape of life and death.
This is not to offer an indigenous framework as binary against contemporary architectural production rather to evidence the profound relationship Egyptians have with the land and river. Egyptians still speak today of upper and lower, red and black. The Nile is ever present in contemporary urban life. Today it is most visible as a social organizer. What little public space exists in Cairo is situated on the corniche of the Nile. Boats ferry people along the riverbank servicing the cities social life as it has since the beginning. Less visible today is the fact that the Nile is still Egypt’s only fresh water supply and services all its agriculture. Today the Nile also fulfills contemporary functions of energy production at the Aswan High Dam and plays a significant role in the tourism industry.
However the way this land is used today; the way it is architecturally transformed has fundamentally changed. Its no longer a matter of harmonic mirroring of the river rather aggressive terraforming. The Egyptian president has stated the goal of new developmental projects is to turn “the dirt of the desert into money.” The red land long synonymous with death and famine has now become synonymous with speculative development. The effort is to turn Red land to grey and grey to money. Resultingly these exploitative resource practices have left the Nile polluted. This present-day movement away from the Nile signals a paradigm shift in resource management as it relates to Egypt’s contemporary architectural production.
El Qahira: Vanquisher—Victorious
Cairo is a place of incident and anecdote. It’s a place of binary. The Arabic word for Cairo, El-Qahira, means victorious (after the battle won to establish it), it can also mean oppressor.
Part of the difficulty in making sense of Cairo has to do with its age. The earliest human settlement in the area dates 5000 years back, its current urban agglomeration started roughly 1000 years ago. 5000 years of connection and disconnection have typified the land of Cairo. 5000 years of layering and overlaying. 5000 years of infilling and backfilling.
Each new regime has sought to legitimize its authority through the establishment of new urban centers and administrative capitals. The geographic location Cairo sits on today was first formally settled in 3100 BCE by the newly unified Upper and Lower kingdoms of Egypt for a capital city known as Memphis. In the 1st century CE, during the Roman colonial project, a fortress named Babylon was established near the remnants of Memphis. In 641 CE Fustat became a satellite settlement for the Islamic rulers situated around the old fortress. Fustat gave way to El-Qahira in 969 CE as a satellite for the Fatimid dynasty. Heliopolis, 6th of October, Shiek Zayed all built as satellites of Cairo in the 1950’s and 60’s.
The practice of relocating administrative centers has persisted, culminating in the present-day construction of the New Administrative Capital 45 km from Cairo’s bustling core. With every new regime there’s an attempt to legitimize power and control. The administrative center is moved and reconnected then moved and reconnected once more. These moves signify not only attempts at political legitimization but also a recurring pattern of disconnection and neglect for the cities lived social fabric.
Cairo’s architecture has always reflected a synthesis of internal innovations and external impositions, offering valuable insights into how architectural forms encode complex histories.
Additionally, by recognizing that Cairo has always been shaped by external influences and internal resilience, this historical analysis challenges the notion of a singular "authentic" architectural identity. Instead, it frames Cairo’s current architectural paradoxes as part of a long continuum of negotiations between competing ideologies, economic forces, and cultural expressions.
illuminating the enduring tensions between power, inequality, and identity
A New Republic: Desert Cities—Informal Settlements
The paradox of Cairo is not merely one of disparity but of a city grappling with its own impossibility its architecture an unfinished negotiation between what is and what might have been.
In the 60’s Egyptians took to the streets to overthrow the British backed monarchy to gain independence. The Arab Republic of Egypt was the result of that revolution, four autocratic regimes has been its legacy.
Cairo’s first contemporary satellite was built by Egypt’s first president, Gamel Abdel Nasser, to solve the issue of congestion. The model as set up then was build a city in the desert, connect it with a highway regardless of where that road geographically lands and hope congestion decreases. Nasser’s socialist policies attempted to frame the satellite as an egalitarian means of redistribution. Utilizing open land and newly acquired resources to build housing for the countless internal migrants coming to Cairo in search of work. However this approach was quickly soured under Anwar Sadat’s Infitah policy which sought to build satellites as a means of attracting foreign investment to solve the issue of Egypt’s economy. Neither administration aspirations for the satellites were realized. The satellites never solved the issue of congestion nor the issue of economics. The Satellites are in essence a form of architectural economic sequestering. They are buildings, architectures, spaces, that do not complete their intended function or program. While they were designed to redistribute the city's population and alleviate overcrowding, their inaccessibility to the working and middle classes rendered them ineffective. The lack of public transit, affordable housing, and employment opportunities meant that the majority of Cairenes could not migrate to these new developments. Instead, the satellites became enclaves for elites, often dominated by gated communities and underutilized industrial zones, reinforcing the very inequalities they were meant to address.
Conceptually it’s an interesting condition a few kilometers back the highway are informal settlements that operate on an entirely different model. Bottom up, without government intervention, entirely used for their intended purpose. These spaces represent a raw form of urbanism, driven by necessity and shaped by the agency of their inhabitants. This duality underscores Cairo’s broader paradox: a city where the most “modern” spaces are the least utilized, and the least planned are the most vital. The satellites and the informal settlements are not just spatial opposites; they are ideological opposites, embodying two competing visions of what urbanism can be.
The nationalistic fervor which inspired the first two administrations of Nasser and Sadat eventually gave way to the autocratic gang of Hosni Mubarak. Mubarak’s regime funneled Egypt’s economic resources into its own bank accounts. The self-interested regime left openings for other government bodies. The military became powerful, heavily involved in the economy and most importantly autonomous from Mubarak’s regime. When the 2011 Tahrir Revolution broke out the Military complex feigned alignment with the people to further their own economic interests. Toppling Mubarak’s regime and the Muslim Brotherhood allowed the army free and unbridled access to Egypt’s economy at all levels of government and society.
Speculative Futures—Exploitative Histories: Development and the Surveillance State
Revolution doesn’t seem to take hold in Cairo. The deep-rooted corruption seems to preside in the underbelly of the city’s memory. Any attempt at ridding Cairo of its exploiters has historically birthed new agents to take their place.
Cairo is under constant surveillance.
The architectural production of modern-day Cairo is predominantly defined by the surveillance state of authoritarian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. The construction of the New Administrative Capital and “revitalization” of public space and infrastructure like Tahrir Square represent the latest chapter in Cairo’s history of urban fragmentation. The streets, once spaces of revolution and resistance, are now under constant watch, their flow interrupted by barriers, cameras, and walls. Urban space has become an extension of state power, its architecture serving as both a physical and symbolic mechanism of discipline and exclusion.
Sisi’s Cairo is one of Architectural Mutations and Utopian Fragments. The new Grand Egyptian Museum and American University Campus are architecturally opulent projects designed to fulfill a vision of a Cairo which doesn’t exist. Deeper out of Cairo into the desert one finds the New Administrative capital, the satellite this regime has constructed as its own.
Meanwhile the apparatus demolishes and redevelops informality, what it calls a “sickness” plaguing the city, further deepening divisions. Informal housing, home to millions of Cairenes, is systematically erased under the pretext of modernization, its residents displaced into inadequately designed housing projects that surveil rather than serve them. These architectural acts are calculated measures of control, designed to strip communities of their autonomy and reconfigure urban space in ways that prioritize surveillance and exclusion over habitation
Architectures of Neglect
Today there is a greater sensitivity towards architectures innate political nature. Its deeply rooted influence on daily life in the city. The conditions described earlier are not all unique to Cairo and are the predominant urban form many post-post-colonial cities have taken on.
[If postcolonialism can be understood as a cultural phenomenon concerned with the fallout of colonialism; late stage postcolonialism can be understood as a cultural phenomenon which examines the lived realities of urban environments post postcolonial projects. Characteristic of this post-post-colonialism is authoritarian government serving neoliberal interest, a general malaise and dissociated constituent population.]
What’s being traced in Cairo is the colonial architectural project and its manifestations through time. This, I argue, is a direct result of the post-post-colonial condition: a cycle of revolution followed by stagnation, leading to widespread disillusionment. The absence of meaningful change fosters a resigned malaise among people, visible in their demeanor and reflected in the city’s architecture. The prevailing attitude seems to be one of helpless acceptance—"this is the way it is." Such an outlook is unsurprising for a population repeatedly told they "cannot," "could not," and "never will." The architecture becomes both a mirror and a symbol to this wearied state of existence.
Public spaces, once aspirations of civic engagement, have become decayed remnants, green bulldozed into dirt. Turning black land into red or often grey and then red ostensibly turned into financial gain. In reality all is transformed into the inaccessible tendrils of the surveillance state.
Post-postcolonialism is also evidenced by a fractured urban landscape. Luxury developments abound in contrast to crumbling ad hoc housing blocs echo a collective resignation to inequality as an unchangeable reality. There is an idea that this is the way it is not necessarily the way it ought, it’s a pragmatic matter of reality.
This cycle also characterized by a city designed to exclude rather than unify. Where vast swathes of the urban landscape are neglected coupled with a lack of institutional accountability.
Its also present in the lack of meaningful architectural innovation. Rather than addressing pressing urban issues such as affordable housing, sustainable or better yet functional infrastructure the architectural production sponsored by the power apparatus prioritizes aesthetic grandeur, politicized to legitimize one person’s regime over the other.
In the architecture of Cairo you can see what post-post colonialism looks like.
It’s in the hundreds of vacant housing developments and satellites.
It’s in the seemingly unregulated yet authoritarian and militaristic streets.
It’s in the way public services are handled.
It’s in the extraction of resources away from Cairo towards the periphery into the desert.
The post-postcolonial city is trapped between aspirations of modernity and the weight of unresolved historical and political struggles. It doesn’t just mirror disillusionment it perpetuates it
Epilogue: a taxonomy of linear spaces:
What exists in Cairo today is made possible through the quotidian architectural condition of the street. In the same way Koolhaas made sense of New York metropolitan life and western, namely American, cultural development through a deep reading of its skyscrapers. I’d argue the street is the analogue spatial organizer present in Cairo.
First the River, then highway, road, street, path, alleyway, corridor, crack.
These are the sorts of spaces which mediate between two sides. Spaces which cut through. Allow for the passage of time. Become receptacles for life. They are transitory spaces—long and linear, subject to change, and in constant flux.
They are carriers, transporters, and bridges between.
These spaces (the river) were naturally occurring thus cosmologically democratic. The Nile typified a way of life and fundamental conception of the world. It was open to all; understood as a natural right. Conversely the rivers contemporary urban counterparts are spaces which consign urban inhabitants to a limited territory, always adjacent to, but never within the contemporary mode of formal architectural production.
Cairo’s satellites are connected through these spaces; the street is where the undesirable, the difficult to deal with, the watermelon stall and the toy vendor spills out onto. The streets of Cairo are what connect the myriads of projects the government has undertaken. The streets in Cairo are simultaneously where every revolution has taken place and what gash through settlements to connect increasingly distant satellites.
The five-thousand-year-old urban agglomeration of Cairo and its history can then be traced, understood, and made sense through a taxonomy of its streets and related conceptual spaces, the river, highway, road, alleyway and corridor. Emergent from this framework I argue is a city always trying to move away from itself, developing satellites in chase of political legitimacy, connecting them with infrastructural chaos, never seeming to commit, always on the verge of ending…ultimately creating cracks the inhabitants of Cairo pushed through left to be ignored.
The cracks are highways cutting through neighborhoods, severing communities while funneling wealth and resources toward gated developments on the city’s periphery. They are the hollow promises of satellite cities—constructed as solutions to overcrowding but designed for elites, leaving the majority in informal settlements with no access to basic infrastructure like water, electricity, or public transit. These cracks are the product of a state apparatus that demolishes informal housing only to replace it with standardized, inadequate government units that fail to accommodate the cultural and spatial needs of the displaced.
The cracks also manifest in the everyday struggles of Cairo’s residents. They are the spaces where public services have been privatized or neglected, forcing communities to improvise solutions. Education is underfunded, healthcare is inaccessible, and informal economies flourish in the absence of state support. These gaps in the urban fabric and governance are the result of deliberate choices: policies that prioritize large-scale developments and foreign investments while ignoring the needs of those who live on the city’s margins.