Cairo as Neoliberal Capital?

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To cite this version:

Eric Denis. Cairo as Neoliberal Capital?. Diane Singerman and Paul Amar. Cairo Cosmopolitan,

American University in Cairo Press, pp.47-71, 2006. �hal-00379202�

Cairo as Neoliberal Capital?

From Walled City to Gated Communities

Éric Denis

SED ET – CNRS-Paris 7 University

Insecurity a nd a Land of Dreams

Ahmed Ashraf al-Mansûri

will not be slow ed down too much by traffic this evening. His chau ffeur is without equa l fo r sinuously extricating him from the agitation o f the inner city. Blowing the horn and winking to the police, h e climbs up the on-ramp and merges onto the new elevated beltw ay. He dashes quickly w estw ard, toward the new gated city in the once-revolutionary Sixth o f October settlement.

Without so mu ch as a glance, he has skimmed over that unknown world where peasants are packed into an inextricable universe o f b ricks, refuse, self-mad e tenements, and old state housing projects. Wh en it occurs to him to turn his head, it is to affirm that he has made the right choice in moving far aw ay from wh at h e th inks of as a backward world that remains a burden fo r Egypt, and that d iminish es and pollutes the image o f Cairo. He knows that h e has again joined the future of Egy pt.

1

Mr. al-Mansuri is not a real individual. Mr. Mansuri and this opening narrative represents a

fictionalized composite of several individuals interviewed by the author during the past four

years, and evokes the overall contours of their experience and vision of their new Cairo.

At any mo ment, he thinks, this crowd could mutate into a rioting horde, pushed by who knows what manipulating sheik’s harangue.

N either the heat, nor the muffled noise o f the congested streets have penetrated his air-conditioned limousine. Ahmed Ashraf al- Mansûri considers the pro spect of a round o f golf, followed by a discussion at the club house with his friend Yasin fro m the Ministry of Finance, then a short stroll home. The stress of his day is already fad ing away.

Since 8:00 am, shadows had begun to haunt Ahmed as he looked out fro m the eleventh floor windows o f the Cairo World Trade Center do minating the Ministry o f Foreign Affairs and loo ming over the boardwalk “cornice” that lin es the Nile Riv er. He is experien cing a downturn in his business transactions -- that important monopoly o n Ice Cream was not granted to him and that apartment building opportunity escaped him. “Risky ” remains his watch word . Would that it were owing only to this currency devaluation o f which no one knows the way out, or the d isappearance o f foreign ex change.

Fortunately , he h as obtained a respectable distribution contract with an

international chain o f hotels to buy his cartons of milk th at he

packages in his small fac tory . He will h ave to go there to morrow to

accelerate p roduction before going to the office. He has h ardly the

time to call his son who is in his third year in Politic al Science at the

SOAS [School of Oriental and African Studies] in London. But in his car his anxieties fad e away as h e commu tes away fro m downtown Cairo, past the Py ramids, into the d esert. Then Mr. Mansuri arrives ho me, entering the gates o f his new resident co mmu nity, Dreamland.

There he crosses Abu Mohammed , his u sual caddy who, having finished his day , is w aiting for the minibus that will take him to his small apartment of 40 square meters, shared with so me ten other waiters and workers living in the old est quarters o f the town of Sixth October, farther to th e west on the desert plateau . His wife and children, having n ever migrated to the capital city , have remained in the village near th e city of Mansûra in the Delta.

The wife o f Ah med Ashraf al-Mansûri has not been to Cairo for mo re than two weeks. She co mes only to visit a female cou sin in Utopia, a n ear-by gated co mmu nity . After her foray to the shopping center, she is late picking up her children . They are returning fro m an afternoon a t the amusemen t park with Ma ria, the Ethiopian maid. They are play ing now in the pool, watched over by Mah moud, the guardian.

Maria, the Ethiopian maid, knows that she will return to her roo m, a

small room without windows behind the kitchen, but only later that

evening. There are the guests; she will have to help the cook after

putting the children to bed .

N ew R isks a nd Privatized Exclusivity

On the desert plateaus bordering the city and suburbs o f Cairo, to the e ast and to the west, for a dozen or mor e years, p romotion o f the construction o f private apartmen t-buildings has led to the acquisition of vast expanses o f the public domain, putting them in the h ands of develop ment contractors. More than one-hundred square kilometers are actually under construction, that is to say , a surface equivalent to mo re than a third of the existing city and suburbs, which has been fashioned and refashioned among the same fo unding sites for a thousand y ears.

Dozens of luxury gated commu nities, acco mpanied by golf courses,

amu sement parks, clinics, private university schools have burgeoned

along the beltways like their siblings, the shopping ma lls. Again st an

extremely compact “organic” urban area, the model for the den se , non-

linear “Asiatic”city an aly zed by orientalist geographers, is then

juxtaposed the horizon o f new a city mo re like Los Angele s, g auged

fro m now on according to the speed o f the auto mobile . This new

dimension of Cairo is marked by a flight o f the urban elites mad e mo re

visible by the d e-densification o f the urban center.

This radical re-

formulation o f the metropolitan landscap e which its pro moters invite

us to view as an urban renaissance or nahda umraniy a, is comp letely in

tune with the parameters of econo mic liberalization and IMF-driven structural adju stment.

To be sold, the gated co mmu nities b randish and actualize th e universal my th of th e great city where one can lose oneself in privatized do mestic bliss. Promoters exploit more and mo re the stig matization o f the street, spread by the media on a global scale, and fin ally o f the Arab metropolis as a terrorist risk factory that is necessa rily Islamic. Far from b eing rejected, the Islamist peril is exploited by the Egyptian authorities to legitimize political de- liberalization, while it pro motes a particular landscape o f economic

“deliberalization.” The current regime redirects and displaces the urgency of law and the imme diate interests o f Egypt’s elites through the affirmation of market and security sy stems, o f which th e gated communities are a pro minent feature.

Within this optic, the g ated co mmun ities mu st appear as a privileged window onto the reality of liberalization in Egypt. Analy sis of these settlements allows one to understand how mechanisms of risk control impose social exclusion (the reverse side elitist globalization) and how they define the risks themselves. Urban ecology and the priorities o f security are reversed to favor suburban desert colonies:

defensive b astions again st the lost metropolis. At the heart o f this

reversal, global/lo cal developers and state agen cies play out the

transfer o f power to businessmen asso ciated w ith the construction o f a new hy brid, globalized Americano-Mediterranean life-sty le.

A d v e r t i s e me n t f o r c o m me r c i a l c o mp l e x t h a t a p p r o p r i a t e s n e o - o r i e n t a l / I s l a mi c a r c h i t e c t u r e r e f e r e n c e s ( a l - A h r a m, 1 9 9 6 , n d )

At the center of this new way o f life are Egypt’s elites,

themselves connecting togethe r th e archipelago o f micro-city

communities that they ad minister as if they were so many experimental

acco mplish ments of a private democracy to co me. The gated

communities, lik e a sp atial plan, authorize the elite s who live there to

continue the forced ma rch for econo mic, oligopolistic liberalization,

without redistribution, while protecting themselves fro m the ill effects

-- o f its pollution and its risks. In the same way , these elites rejoin the

trans-metropolitan club o f the world-wide archipelago o f w alled enclave s (Caldeira 2000). The potential guilty anxieties relative to the su ffering o f ordinary city dwellers are, then, ma sked by global rejection of the city , according to an anti-urban discourse that incorporates and naturalizes pollutions, identify ing it with poverty, criminality and violent p rotests against the regime. In this elite perspective, Cairo has become a co mplex o f unsustainable nuisances against which nothing more can be done, except to escape or to protect oneself. Urban risk and, by the same token , urb an ecology are radically reco mposed.

In the rest o f this chapter, I will trac e the mate rial developmen t of the g ated co mmunities, th eir pro motion and appropriation. Th en I will identify the risk discourses that create the foundation for and enable the legitimation of the ren ewed management o f social distances.

But first, it is appropriate to define wh at w e mean by fear, risk , my th , and urban ecology .

Contouring Risk and Legitimacy in the Landscape

Risk is understood as a social and politica l construct th at

cry stallizes, sorts, and normalizes dangers, fears, and anxieties that

define and limit a given society (Hacking 2003). The formulation o f

risks allows one to focus on mod alities o f individual and collective

action, and to determin e strategies o f habitation, in order to protect

integrity and the sense o f b eing among one’s own or, simply, diversity control. A s places in which diversity and coexistence are ma ximized, metropolitan areas are , in their ma terial, social, and political expressions, the product of responses and reactions to the dangers that are neg atively associated with density and div ersity . Dimissive fears, like those associated with pollution, nourish the procedures o f self- definition and delimitation of a city co mmu nity . They facilitate the creation of “society” (Douglas 1971, Douglas and Wildavsky 1982).

Like marginalities, fears define borders. Th ey lie at the heart o f the interactionist formulation of identity as relationships o f do mination.

The specter of risks, projected through media and representational struc tures normalizes collective fears (Weldes 1999).

It claims to validate legitimate worrie s and puts aside superstitions that appear as backward. This work authorizes a system of protection and o f individual or collective control, and the establishment o f norms and institutions, such as insurance, legislation, a rmed forces, police, med icine, borders, architecture, urban planning,etc.. Measures taken to acknowledge risk aim at replacing chance occurrences with predictable events.

Alway s present is the myth o f the u rban Baby lon, portrayed as a

giant pro stitute , a s a plac e o f potentially unfathomab le corruption and

loss. As alway s, this image serves to reify diffu se anxieties that

threaten the stability of the regime and is emb edded in urban order. It allows the legitimation o f borders and o f ter ritorial command . The definition o f risks enters into the h eart o f p rocedures that stig matize subordinate groups, d esignate “scape goats,” and ma p illegitimate territories (Girard 1982). It lies at the foundation o f the designation of clandestine transients -- those who do not have their place in the city and must be kept at a distance because they threaten the ha rmony o f the city.

It is, therefo re, more than coincid ental that, precisely in Egypt, the word ashwaiyat, which derives fro m the Arabic root that signifies

“chance,” app eared at the beginning of the 1990s to designate slu ms,

sh antytowns, self-mad e sate llite cities of th e poor, i.e. illegal and/or

illegitimate qu arters. Quickly, by the end of the 1990s, th e term

ashwaiyat came to describe not just spaces but peoples, enco mp assing

a n ear majority o f the city as risky , “hazardous,” errant figures. The

figure of the errant is that which most frighten s this urban society .

Seen as the invading silhouette o f the decidedly peasant migrant from

the provinces, the fellah (peasant)frighten ed and still frightens urban

so ciety . This designation also reanimates the classic Muslim

opposition b etweenthe fellah and th e hadari, the latter which signifies

civilization, and urban and nomad commu nities.

Today Egypt’s globalizing metropolis finds itself at a point o f instability, sway ing between a society in which fatalism and malediction play a major role in the man agemen t o f crises and catastrophes, and the “society o f risk” characterized by a lack of certainty , in which it beco mes impossible to attribute uncertainty to external or ungovernable causes. In reality, th e level o f risk depends on political decisions and choices. It is produced industrially and econo mically and beco mes, therefore, politically reflexive. However, Egypt, analy zed from th e perspective o f Ulrich Beck (1986) reminds us that old mo dernization solutions are not tenable, because religious radicalism and authoritarian practices,are strengthening, but are always attributed to foreign plotting, denying the d evelop ment o f a reflexive national public and repressing internal debates. In this context, risk remains an ambivalent object that produces exclusionary norms all while ancestral my ths and belie fs are re -appropriated and remad e in order to master and stabilize current forms of political monopoly .

Gated commu nities are one o f the most striking and revealing products o f this new ecology of risk and monopolization o f politics.

They reveal processes disorganizing and reorganizing modes o f living

and cohabiting in the city , th at is, the dynamics of sp atializing a new

neo-liberal “moral order” and justifying it through risk discourse

(Park 1926).

The New Liberal Age and the Material Framework of Colonial Nostalgia

The state’s o ffering o f a new exclusive lifesty le ignited an explosing. Fro m 1994, wh en the Ministry of Housing began, on a massive scale, to sell lots on the d esert margins o f Cairo, the nu mber of luxury constru ctions very quickly surp assed capacities o f market absorption. The region o f Greater Cairo only includes a limited nu mb er of middle-class families; not more than 315,000 families’

current expenses exceed 2 ,000 Egy ptian pounds per month ($350 in 2005 dollars). And th ese are counted as the 9 .5% mo st wealthy .

Y et within this limited market, 320 co mpanies h ave acquired land and declared projects that, in potential volu me, total 600,000 resid ences.

In th e first years since the boo m, no less than eighty gated city projects have been erected , with many sectors pre-sold, and th e first families mo ved in. In 2003 alone, these co mp anies put so me 60,000 housing units on the market, villas and apartments o f standing. Where will all these rich families come from?

Utopia, Qatamiy a Height, Beverly Hills, Palm Hills, Jolie-Ville,

Mena Garden City , Dreamland: these are so me of the g ated

communities under developmen t. So ma ny products sold as the

reflection o f an isolating post-metropolitan model, invented between

the imag inaries o f “fo rtress A merica’s” sprawling cities and the new

risk-Apartheid of Johannesburg (Blakely and Snyder 1997). However,

if the ensemb les of villas respond perfectly to the global concept o f the

protected city, encircled by a wall and assuring a totally manag ed

autono my , this is not just an imp ortation o f a universal model. There is

also visible the in fluence of the Persian Gulf oil mo narchies’ taste for

luxurious living. Gulf fashions are represented in the grand

rein forcemen ts o f baroque guilding, imposing balconies, and neo-

classic colonnades. The models and, moreover, the forms o f

appropriation by residents show that they are in accord with world-

wide trends, but in a “hy bridized ” form mixing local and Arab-regional

valu es as mu ch as th ey correspond to values fro m global cities

(A lsayy ad 2001). The idea of the Mediterranean is also an essential

referent framework for Egypt as a South-Mediterranean country,

expressing itself through its evoking of idealized Greek village motifs,

tiled roofs, Tuscan pine gardens, or the shimmering colors o f Riviera

resorts. The Mediterranean model has already been articulated through

the Egy ptian Riviera development experimen t, on the west coast of

Alexandria. This coastal model has since been adopted by potential

inland Cairene buyers as an extension o f a society perpetually on

vacation under th e sun. This positive Mediterran ean image and the

extravagant Persian Gulf style s are at least as central as

American/Western in fluenc es as Egypt renegotiates its international identity , reframing its primary Middle Eastern-Arab id entity through touristic and residential commercialization.

Reference to the Mediterranean allow s Cairo to negotiate and to

attenuate Arab and Mu slim values that are present architecturally, but

mad e into folkloric consumer sy mbols. Islam and Arabness are

referenced in a way closer to the iconography o f Disney ’s Alladin or

Sinbad rather than to the culture o f austerity, modesty, and self-

discipline identified with contemporary Islamic populism and

militance. Th e businessman Ah med Baghat even explains that it was

after a visit to Celebration (the private ideal commu nity built by the

Walt Disney Corporation in Orlando, Florida) that h e conceived of

Dreamland. More than a collection of luxury residences, this gated

community complex o ffers a view o f the plateau of the py ramid s o f

Giza, access to a golf course, and your own private amu sement park. .

Wh en, at the end o f the nineteenth century , the khedive Ismail

conceived o f a new city center fo r Cairo, h e dreamt o f a Hau ssman ian

Paris of boulevards uniting public square s and apartment blocks. But

today , a hy brid, Egy ptianized v ersion of the American dream

functions; but with a strong referen ce to the p ast and the

Khedival/Colonial era itself. This new global reconstitution of

nostalgia beco mes an essential argu ment for selling and living in the

desert, as inhabitants are faced with the uncertainty of the future and the instability of the p resent.

Exclusivity as urban renaissa nce

Before we a spire to the day when, as Toussaint Caneri a sked in 1905, th e Mogattam (a p lateau to the east of Cairo ) becomes a park sp rinkled with villas, linked to the c ity by a tram, can we wish, at least, for a less egotistical attitude among th e ruling classe s? It is even in their own interests, if the y do not wish to prepare a terrain of choice for the social experiments of tomorrow.

Clerget perceives, perfectly , the tensions and the risk s induced

by liberal luxury d evelopmen ts, a distinguishing feature o f his

projects, that rupture with the tissue of th e urban mass by building

outside the margins o f Cairo (1934; t.2, 21). A nostalgic view of a

vanished late-19

-early -20

-century ‘liberal era’ is co mmon today .

This p erspective invites us to view the connection betw een the two

epochs o f liberaliza tion in mo dern Egy pt, as w ell as their urban-

develop ment consequences. The late nineteenth and twentieth centuries

were already a period o f re al-estate excess that marks, to the presen t

day , the co mposition of the metropolis (Arnaud 1998). The promoters

of the gated co mmu nities love to reflect back on the past in v iew o f

investing their own projects with the positive image o f the “Belle

Epoch” liberal age , that is, the age o f Egy pt’s Khedive Ismail, the era

of British colonial occupation, o f high debt, foreign investment and

control, as well as of rampant speculation and luxury public and

private construction. This Colonial ( a.k.a Khedival or Isma ilian era) is called by some Egy pt’s liberal ag e bec ause it also featured the develop ment o f limited and elite-oriented and colonially constrained liberal political and cultural institutions, and is rememb ered for the birth o f demo cratic Western-leaning nationalism under Sa’ad Zaghlul.

Today , many prominent Egyptian real-estate developers, like Tala’at Mustafa, do not hesitate to present th emselves as inheritors o f the Baron Emp ain, a Belgian settler and investor in Egy pt who founded in 1905 the su mptuous urban oasis Heliopolis, then in the middle o f the desert to the east of Cairo and linked to the city center by a tramway that he privately owned and profited fro m (Ilbert 1981; Garret 2001).

Close to the family o f president Anouar al-Sadat, Tala’at Mustafa built his fo rtune through th e construction of military in frastructures fro m the 1970s. Mustafa is mobilizing support for o f the construction o f an entire satellite city, al-Rehab, to be situated to the east o f Cairo and designed to welco me so me 150,000 residents (Zaki 1999).

Similarly, the project “Joli-Ville,” a gated co mmunity boasting a

view o f the pyramids o f Giza to the w est o f the main city o f Cairo, was

pro moted in the d aily press and in magazines with photos that drew

parallels between irretrievable architectural prestige of the Ismailian

center, allotted since 1870, and the emergen ce o f a future according to

the image o f this new, glorious page of private urbanism. Mena Garden

City was shown on televisions in an advertisement th at made the villas of the former Garden City, an early 20

century Bohemian and foreign-residence zone, fly away , carried by powerful cranes.

A d v e r t i s e me n t f o r J o l i e - V i l l e G a t e d c o m mu n i t y n e a r t h e G i z a P y r a mi d s , w h i c h c e l e b r a t e s i t s l i n k s t o t h e c o l o n i a l a r c h i t e c t u r e o f l a t e n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y C a i r o ( a l - A h r a m, 1 9 9 6 , n d )

The old Garden City was built a t the beginning of the tw entieth

century on the banks o f the N ile at the edge o f the heart o f the

Ismailian center, pro mising to residents quiet metaphorically co mpared to life in a desert oasis. Now, the G arden City o f the future bloo ms literally in th e distant desert, while the old Ismailian Ga rden City is invaded by up thrusting towe rs and militarized security checkpoints that protect the few foreign residents and emba ssies that remain there.

Elsewhere, mod els o f villas don the names of the Egyptian khedives o f the nineteenth- and tw entieth centuries -- Farouk, Isma il, etc. Even the g randson o f the o riginal Baron Emp ain himself has participated in the pro motion o f a scheme fo r a New Heliopolis.

If this reinscription o f the past, lik e the rehabilitation o f roy al names and properties, legitimizes new meg a-entrepreneurs linked to foreign investors who are partitioning and seizing the public lands in the desert. Enterprises engaged in the creation of a n ew elite n ational patrimony, of the sort developed at the beginning of the twentieth century . Th ey participate in the creation o f a “p atina,” that is, a nostalgic landscape built upon the re appropriation o f an old framework, p atrimonializing, and historicizing the gated communities.

This patina pro motes a sense of authenticity and nostalgia for the

present (McKraken 1988; Appadurai 2001). Not only does

contemporary life appear historicized, but also as something already

lost. Like fash ion, a product of the tangle o f worlds and a p arable of

accelerated circulation on a worldwide scale, the patina generates

ephemerality. This effa cement of the present for the co mmercial ends of pro mo tion and consu mp tion is akin to the visibilization o f risk, in that they both create instability . They both invite self-protection, leading to demand for protections in the face of growing insecurity , and to destabilization of routines and relations.

The rehabilitation of the spirit and th e city o f roy alty and colonial investors before the anti-colonial struggle, before independence and befo re the Egy ptian Revolution, is inscribed very clearly in th e renovation o f the old City Center o f Cairo , and also is reflected in the support for the id ea o f Hosni Mubarak crowning his own son the n ext President, as a kind o f Khedival successor. A legitimate fa cade of liberalization and adjustment is sought, paradoxically in the imaginary o f the archaic colonized Khedival mo narchy and its new/old luxury landscap es.

Wh en, live on television, the President of the Republic, Hosni

Mubarak, inaugurates a golf course and say s that he sees there a green

lung fo r the Cairene p eople, he validates, as a na tional project, a very

exclusive enterprise. He sanctions an elitist appropriation, closing o ff,

and privatization o f the once publically owned deserts (and a seizing

of the w ater ne eded to irrigate them) while cloaking it in the spirit o f

great open public projects realized in the national intere st (mu shru’al-

ga’u mi). In a p arallel process, the state tightly censors and controls all

forms of citizen representation by political parties and NGOs are suppressed by a mountain of disabling laws, police seizures and bureaucratic penetration, all while businessmen are highly regarded and cultivated by the state, notably in support for the formation of working groups and privileged lobbies given highest level access in the National Assemb ly . While press, NGOs and social movements are crushed, co mmercial foundations and business associations flourish, like those regrouping the businessmen fro m the industrial zones o f the new cities. To con form to the new national ‘ethics’ o f n eo-lib eralism and stru ctural adjustment that p rohibit direct intervention by the state in the domain o f construction, the allian ce between entrepreneurs and those in service of the state is redefined: Those public contractors who previously performed the construction, en masse, o f public housing, now operate as semi-private contractors, dev eloping luxury lots while benefiting from credit furnished by public banks, which is gauged according to the speculative and overvalued worth of purchased land at a very low p rice, with the state holding down the price for developers.

At the same time, charity again becomes an urban bourgeois

valu e and a way of self-presentation essential to the image o f a good

citizen and a good Mu slim. In particular, populist soup kitchens,

which had not b een existence since 1952, hav e been reactivated ,

whereas the list of subsidized products is presently reduced to four

articles (oil, sugar, flour, and bread), whose stock s are constantly shrinking (Korayem 2001). The ostentatious ch arity tables fo r the mo nth o f Ramadan , begun at the end o f the 1980s, and a pure p roduct of the reinvention o f the Islamic tradition, are more and mo re in evid ence. They now constitute an emb lematic figure o f th e rapport betw een the bourgeoisie and the urban p eople. They emb ody the legitimate exhibition o f wealth mad e manifest through the concern to have the largest table , the one that provides the mo st places. These table s dramatize the gift o f scraps. Here , the state and religious practice, lik e the rewriting o f monarchical/colonial-era national history , va lidate the pertinence o f (neo)liberal change and reflect the

“best times” o f social reformism and its b enevolent organizations. This sp ectacle o f social inequalities and alms can a lso be read in terms of risk, o f the accentuated risk of uprising. Ch arity is imposed as the only relation to the poor and only vehicle for social uplift, with the police as the last rampart. There are no other modalities allowed for the redistribution of the fruits o f liberalization.

This med iatized work of th e new urban world , affilia ted w ith the

liberal age b efore 1952, erases the period o f national construction and

of ‘socialist’ public, modernist, integrative p lanning. The

revolutionary , Arab n ationalist, Th ird-World Solidarity era of the

1950s-1970s, wh en Egypt won its independence has since become

represented as a dark period, identified by its visible lack of elegance, rather than its social achiev ements, by its architectural stagnation and infrastructural stagna tion. Para llels with real-estate specula tion during the Belle Epoch era suggests that only private entrepren eurs, not revolutionary states, are able to create the city and to distinguish it in an enduring way . But it should be said that this parallel does not just ro man ticize the spirit of (n eo)liberal free enterprise, certain elite aesthetic values and lifesty les; it also reconfigures modes of production. Indeed, in both elitist epochs, then and now, the state offers up its public patrimony. It opens vast expan ses of territory to be divided up amongst a hand ful of private developers, while stimulating the flow o f capital through the sale o f land.

Today ’s parallel is not, then, just about sty le, façad e, or a set o f sy mbolic representations. It indicates a disillusionmen t with respect to the public, state, n ational develop ment dev elop ment, and the project o f mo dernization do minant sin ce 1952.

A sense of shifting priorities is also generally in the air. It

corresponds in effect to the spirit o f “good u rban and corporate

governance ,” pro moted by the World Bank. Does the structurally

adju sted state in Egypt really h ave an alternative? Must it rebuild its

alliances with cosmopolitan elite entrepreneurs in order to survive?

Entrepreneurial Spirit and the State

In 1991 Egy pt signed a trip artite man agement agreemen t w ith the IMF and the World Bank. This Econo mic Reform and Structural Adjustment Program marks the entrance o f Egypt into an activ e phase of reforms, transforma tions of the econo mic apparatus, and change in mo des o f govern ment. Privatization was imposed as the privileged instru ment o f urban reform with the deleg ation o f a network of public services.

Since then and until today the privatization o f electricity h as been launched in the production sector and soon in the power distribution sector. The privatization of telecommunications and waste treatment are well advanced . The state has privatized the building o f parking garages, the subway system, ro ads and tunnels through pro ferring o f “Build, Operate and Transfer” contracts (where privat e transnational co mpanies, usually based in Europe or the U.S., build infrastructure, pro fit fro m it by toll or fe e collection, then much later transfer it to the state and public).

Fro m now on, under-integrated “slu m,” in formal or self-

constructed quarters in which poor people reside may be demo lished,

restructured , and ‘managed’ by a for-profit co mpany, as a state

concession, providing that the firm guarantees in-place relocation or

so me co mpensation for residents, and that it build in frastructures.

In 1997, the governor o f Cairo, Dr. Ibrahim Sh ehata explained his slu m privatization plan: “Here, I have an informa l quarter in which 50,000 people live. The governorship o f Cairo is interested in signing a d evelopmen t contract with a p romoter, providing h e furnish 10,000 resid ential units for those living there, a public garden, two clinics, and three schools. And he may develop the rest of the quarter according to his interests.” And to this Dr. Shehata adds: “The volume of irrational use o f urban land is insane. I would say , w illingly, that all of Cairo is not appropriate to a logical, rational econo mic plan , with rare exceptions, like perhaps the Ramses Hilton [an international luxury tourist hotel that in cludes cinemas and a shopping mall for Egyptian upper-middle classes and Persian Gulf Arab visitors].”

Hospital services are progre ssing toward privatization, and of

course the state has moved to p rivatize and globalize mo st o f the

country’s industrial b ase. The possibility o f a private police force

operating on the public highway has also been raised following violent

incidents between union organizers. Finally, the gated co mmu nities are

pro moting, while asserting their autonomy in the matter of sanitary

drainage, potable water or security as a guarantee of quality servic e,

free fro m ponderous state involvement, all while these co mmunities

benefit ungratefully fro m state-paid public in frastructures developed

for the new cities.

In this regard , we subscribe fully to the analy sis advanced by Timothy Mitch ell. This neo-liberalization does not in reality signify a retreat o f the state (2002). Here, to account for the fo rmal se mblance of econo mic liberalization, it is necessary to recogniz e more fully the change of alliance modalities b etween entrepren eurs and the state. In fact, in addition to its huge projects, like the Peace Canals, or the other branch of the Nile, Toshka, to be ca rved out o f the (public) desert by state funds and labor, and then sold to global agro-business investors, the state continues to subsidize and construct housing that it calls “social” or “low cost” but which is in fact speculative and directed toward stimulating elite settlement. The explosion in private luxury construction, within the gated communities, also falls within the project to reformu late the p aradoxical neo-liberal, neo-mo narchical appearan ce o f an alliance between entrepreneurs and public elites in support of industrial channels for cement, steel, and construction, this gigantic industrial engine which lies at the heart o f the sy stem of wealth-generation and speculation, and serves as the b ase for th e few families that monopolize both the private and public power.

Political de-liberalizing and privatizing demo cracy

G ated communities represent th e political result o f economic

(neo)liberalization. Here private democ racy materializes. While

estimating th at public institutions cannot assure the well-being and the defense of the collective, a restrained co mmunity o f like-minded people itself takes ch arge o f the management o f the protection o f its own w ay o f life. The community o f residents o f the ga ted co mmunity of Mena Garden City ma nag es shared spaces, lighting, and the roadways fro m commo n funds that it places in the Cairo stock exchange.

This kind o f private d emocracy flourishes in Egypt while on th e national social scale, political ex clusion and repression has inten sified.

The election of mayors or Umd a was suppressed in 1994 under the guise o f the struggle against Islamism, rep laced by a sy stem o f administrative appointmen t from above.

In April 2002, the elections of lo cal councils were mark ed by the attribution o f 97% of the seats given to the party in power! What is mo re, these representative, elected bodies even in their highly constrain ed form have alway s played a merely consultative role. The executive no minates the man agers of the public ad ministration who are typically drawn from the ranks of the army. The Cairo region is thus administered by three military governors named by presidential decree.

Adding to this climate of “political de-liberalization” is the revision of

law on labor and blocks the free constitution o f labor unions and the

right to strike. These prohibitions date to the declaration o f the

Emergency law promu lgated just after the assassination o f President Sadat in 1981 (Kienle 2001). Similarly , non-governmental organizations are more and more tightly controlled . Their mo des o f fin ancing their own actions cannot be political.

The adheren ce by the elites to the political model o f the gated community, a form o f voluntary disaffiliation and exclusionary self- organization facilitated by the state and stock-exchange, aims to constitute autono mous units in which it is possible to live in a directly participatory democracy without waiting for, or while blocking the arrival o f the substantive demo cracy for the country as a whole. The elite gated co mmunities authorize the construction of private democracies when, all around on the outside, economic liberalization is acco mpanied by politic al de-liberalization. Privatiza tion o f reform is extended into the priva tization o f politics, accelerating the downward spiral o f ex clusion, disenfranchiseme nt and poverty dispossessing the rights and th e potential o f the work force which are so me o f the primary resources Egy pt possesses on the world mark et of goods and services.

Evasion of Risk or Inversion of Risk

Although it is apparently motivated by an escalation o f urban

risks, the mo ve to live in the desert cannot be understood as a mere

evasion of risk. The pheno menon o f gated co mmu nities is a form o f

fixing worth, investing the unshared gains flowing directly from the liberalization and privatization process, and then fixing them in a new global/lo cal hierarchy and landscape. These constructions are inscribed in stone and real estate, fro m wealth extracted fro m the public and fro m public lands in a context o f inflation, certainly reduced in relation to the 1980s, but ch aracterized by a strong monetary devaluation.

In this regard , we adhe re to the theses o f stru ctural geography , as much according to the “theory of takeover” formulated by Rebour (2002) as according to the works o f Desmarais and Ritchot (2000, 121): “Dysphorias emanating fro m urban areas marked by industrial concentration (insalubrities, social agitation...) were often invoked to explain the departure o f bourgeois residents, conjoined to positions of contiguous assembly , for suburban villas and their country do mains.

These distant, su mptuous develop ments d enote, however, so mething other than flight. They differentiate the urban expanse, break its ho mogeneity , and capture new valu es placed in charge by the dy namics of takeover [rachat] that feeds the economic sy stem.” The social values of the metropolis are taken over, refixed, and thus inverted.

Thus, th e Sh âtar clan at the head of a farm-produce empire, enjoy s a quasi-monopoly on the production of potato chips in Egypt.

The family has lo calized its factory units in the industrial zone of the

new city of Sixth of October and then b egan to develop an ensemble of villas in a resid ential co mplex, o f which the family is the proprietor.

Up to the present time , they have not sold th e seat o f their company located in the co mmercial center o f Cairo.

Negotiating appearances

Living in the desert does not speak for just th e living. In Egy pt, it alway s sy mbolize s the realm of the dead. The desert remains asso ciated with the su ccessive displacemen ts o f cemeteries and visits to the d ead. To render the desert attractive supposes then, on the one hand, that the repulsion o f the dense metropolis is intense, and that a fundamentally distinctive change o f desert soil has b een effected.

Ecological reco mpo sition is at p lay in the tension between rejection

and attractiveness and b etween stigmat ization o f the mass and over-

valu ation of th e elite. Pro moted for more than twenty y ears as a space

for th e relegation o f polluting industries, and, with the new cities, o f

the working classes, the deserts are no Garden of Ed en, nor are they

perfect sites for creating modern utopias (although one o f the new

gated cities o f Sixth o f October is called “Utopia.”). The shift o f

perceptions is socially constructed through neo-liberal discourses that

redefine the d esert as a virgin terrain for the refoundation o f Egy ptian

so ciety .

After independence, the desert became the space to conquer and to populate, not only for reasons o f de-densification and preservation of agricultural lands, but also, even above all, in view o f producing a new peasant and a new urban resident, veritable pioneer o f a new so ciety (Fanch ette 1995). The gated commu nities, twisting this revolutionary perspectiv e, are presented as inheritors of the national project for the conquest o f the desert. Private investors, while substituting themselves for the state , restructure the nation in accordan ce with neo-liberal mo dalities. Be side the pro moters, who are lionized by the media for their effo rts to populate the d esert and to turn it green, the buy ers o f villas in the gated co mmunities may see themselves as pioneers working fo r the expansion o f inhabitable space, thus working for the valorization o f the common good, embodied in Egyptian territory . Among the first residents of the g ated co mmunities, there are a good nu mber of gentlemen-farmers who have first-hand experience with land improvemen t, allowing them to “tame the d esert.”

The figure o f the industrial pioneer – th e hero, frontiersman, the

innovator -- allows buy ers and pro moters to divert attention fro m the

private and above all very exclusive appropriation o f public lands, and

therefore fro m th e disappearance of space and resources around the

capital. The will to express one’s individual difference, to expose

one’s capital, to speculate without worry ing about society or general

national uplift is thus tran smuted into a land of pioneering courage, and a kind o f develop mental innovation and entrepren eurial bravado.

Fro m this point on, living in the dese rt is no longer conceived of

as a departure toward the p eriphery , but as a relocalization o f the city

center and new focus on places o f innovation. This acts as a visible

show o f the reconcentration of the spaces o f power that in part

acco mpanies the expansion of th e gated co mmu nities. This migration

of the experimental spac es of a model society , of “agricultural

improvements,” to the new suburbs o f Cairo is acco mpanied by the

sy mbolic transfer of the power to innovate from th e state’s civil

servants to elites and entrepreneurs, and from the public to the private

do main , which is mad e manifest by the marked exclusivity o f the

mo del.

M a p s h o w i n g t h e n e w g a t e d c o m mu n i t y , B e v e r l y H i l l s , o n t h e f r i n g e s o f S i x o f O c t o b e r c i t y f o u n d e d b e y o n d t h e p y r a mi d s ( a l - A h r a m, 1 9 9 6 , n d )

This way o f seeing development as pioneering makes personal su ccess stories visible -- stories that were mask ed in th e heart o f the metropolis and in the concepts of the public, n ational and social. In the city, such successes are effaced by d ensity , proximity , and d ecency , which cohabitation, social diversity and inequality imposes. In the popular city , ostentatious display o f such situations is mad e imp ossible there due to a lack o f space in which displays o f individual

‘innovation’ or distinction might be expressed without risk o f friction.

There, they must be con fined to priv ate or semi-private interior spaces,

su ch as the large fiv e-star tourist hotels, in order to remain in con formity with th e norms of discretion associated with modern public sp ace.

In contrast, the desert o ffers distance and perspective. The expanse favors the expansion of v iew-scapes, o f rites o f approach and of passage s that the atrica lize the grandeur o f the new residents:

su ccessive th resholds are thus established between the exit from the agglo meration and the arrival at the colonnade and steps of th e villa.

First, there is the rupture in the landscape o f the desert, followed by the monumen tal entrance o f the new city, and finally the passage through guard ed doors o f the gated co mmu nity .

D esert lo calization favors the exhibition o f one’s success with

grandeur and ostentation. The architecture of the villas expresses this

clearly through recourse to panoply o f cosmopolitan tran scultural

signs: the pool, the square, the neo-classic colu mns, the lawn, the

pines, and the garage. The garag e in turn refers of course to owning a

car, which has long served as a projection o f private space in the

crowded urban space, th e only vector expressing one’s rank and

su ccess amo ng the popular throng. Perfectly understood by the

ensemble of the social body , the Mercedes in Cairo has been given a

popular nick-n ame, “th e phantom.” This term reflects a view o f the

elites as distant, me nacing, and ephemeral. Mercedes are a lso

nicknamed “pig ey es” or “powder,” the latter imp ly ing that only cocaine dealers can afford th em.

Projection o f the spectacle o f elite distinction from city street to desert gated city enables speculation and spectacle in the same way as does the mig ration to summer resorts on th e shore o f the Mediterranean, or driving a tinted-glass Mercedes through a Center- City traffic jam. It is through a double rapport that one must understand the adhesion o f the elites to the progam o f the gated communities: th ey can have access to this space because they have these cars, and inversely , th e distance allows th em to enjoy the power of these auto mobiles. Living in the distant desert has become a luxury, while th e n ew cities had been, p reviously and since 1956, seen as a burden, where poor workers and ordinary citizens took long bus rides to reach their factory jobs.

O stentation leads us to a du ality o f the model o f gated

communities, which are apparently sold according to the theme of

protection and security . Nevertheless, far fro m the bunker architecture

of South African villas o r the compounds o f Latin America, defenses

here are so mewhat expressively outward looking. Certainly, the

settleme nts are closed , but the walls appear to be quite fragile, rather

low, and esp ecially open, with guilded grills that allow one to glimpse

the luxury o f the villas from the outside. The buy er purchases a

protected resid ence with a plan to create a sense of distance, o f filtering; but he desires at the same time to be seen . Thus exposed , the security figure associated with the pro motion of the gated co mmunities expresses their fragility . Th e closure confirms the radicality o f the so cial rupture and clearly indicates the will o f the pro moters, like the buy ers, to disa ssociate themselves voluntarily from th e mass remaining in the agglo meration. But the mod el app ears quite vulnerable. It responds to the demand for distinction and for exposure, but at the same time, it emphasiz es insecurity rather th an protecting fro m it. It produces risk in a city that remains perhaps quite con fident.

Ecology , liberalization, and authoritarianism

Ecology appears on th e Egy ptian scen e as a radically imported

category that acco mpanies the p rocess of econo mic liberalization in the

same way as IMF/World Bank programs fo r mastering poverty . These

are two major tools for the mastery and regula tion o f the effects o f

liberalization and adjustment. Ecology imp oses a foreign expertise and

reorganizes the industrial apparatus on the b asis of imported

procedures and technologies, jo ining with fore ign companies. While

the struggle against poverty fills the domain once occupied by welfare-

state social-services and abandons questions formerly posed in terms

of repartition.

In Egypt, the institutionalization of ecology remains at the center o f North-American aide programs o f USAID and Canadian aide.

In 1992, a p residential decree launched the National Environ ment Action Plan (N EA P) carried by the Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency (EEAA), instituted in 1982 to formu late environmental policy and to educate public and private sectors, and the population at large, to the d angers posed by pollution and the manner in which to co mb at them. In 1994, the parliamen t voted for law no. 4, conc erning environmental protection and instituting norms for water and air pollution. In 1997, presidential decree no. 275 lead to the no mination of the first Secretary o f State for the Environ ment, and in 1999, the government launched the first p lan for environ mental action. Ecology arrived in Egy pt at the same mo ment as and in the context of gated-city sp eculation.

The state apparatus, while appropriating and instituting ecological discourse, con firms th e largely shared sentiment of a global, ecological shift. It appropriates the monopoly on the me asuring and defining o f what is pollution, ignoring pollution fro m industrial, agricultural, and military sources, while dire cting attention to other kinds o f pollution against which it is mo re convenient to fight.

Measures then co me to rein force regulation and new elite social order

at the heart o f the metropolis. For example, the policy on green spaces

and gardens empowers organization for clearing and de-densify ing central and peri-central spaces, but does not allow the public or NGOs to enter or u se these spaces.

Ecology also reveals itself to be an ideal tool for showcasing the transfer of competences that characterize liberalization. From the regime’s point of view, “good”

environment is based on an alliance with businessmen who know the stakes, whereas the people, completely incompetent, can only be polluters. Gated communities are emblematic of this transfer and of the commodification of the environmental question. Here, ecology plays the role that reformism played during Egypt’s Liberal Age before the 1956 Free Officer’s Revolution. Ecology becomes one lever for putting into place the apparatus for taking charge of space and for population control.

Naturalizing the urban order

The appropriation o f ecological discourse would merit mo re ample develop ment and se rious investigation. The alliance o f the “greens,”

with right-w ing Islamism reinforces the co mpetences o f authoritarian

power. This allianc e finds in ecology a new list o f legitimate

argu ments to justify in the name o f protecting the co mmun good, their

increased ascendance in so ciety and politics. One again finds here a

despotic emerg ence o f the e cological values according to the

mo dalities th at resemb le those pro mu lgated by Luc Ferry conc erning

Europe: elite-defined “n ature” comes before the n eeds o f the social

order. This kind of ecology favors the enlistment o f the technocratic

edifice and the authoritarian state apparatu s. It offers to the state a new savant discourse and instru men ts of scientific do mination. Cairo ecologism favors th e construction o f threats and constraints legitimating the maintenance o f an authoritarian regime and o f an exclusivist mode o f redistribution.

This kind o f ecologism differs in a certain sen se fro m the old reformism: pretensions to ameliora ting life conditions and to education are effaced because the concern is with non-human ‘nature’: “it is in their nature (...), they are filthy, they are v iolent, fanatics....”

Otherwise stated, the people are not educable or reformable. These

principles o f natural inferiority , already present in the construction o f

the categories o f colonial ad min istration, again find here a n ew

political youth. This colonial-liberal continuity o f mo des o f

government and of w ay s of understanding the social totality , its limits

and its ex cluded p arties, questions the very idea o f n ational

construction and of an independent state that strives to develop a

community of citizen s. Similarly , gated co mmunities reveal forms o f

disaffiliation and disinterest toward the life o f the city, to the ben efit

of a locally inscribed life, but at the margins, permitting th e

man agement o f elite social or familial networks and the continued

privatization, min ing, and exploitation o f national resources with

community redistribution reduced to the minimu m, all while

max imizing memb ership in a transn ational articulated elite. The valu es convey ed in their time by colonial urbanism are reproduced, dissociating the people’s city fro m the city of their ma sters.

Conclusions: The Gated Co mmu nities, an Intersection o f Neo-Liberal Risks and Ju stifications

The phenomenon of the gated co mmu nities takes shape at the

intersection o f two kinds o f justify ing or legitimating argumen ts. The

new exclusivist geography o f n eo-liberal Cairo represents, on the one

hand, a planetary display window o f a certain kind o f liberalization,

that which stimulates praise and affirmation far fro m Egypt, as the

Washington Post in 1997 blessed the new projects, remarking, “How

far Egy pt has gone”

On th e other hand, this gated-city geography

imposes a redefinition of risks. The so-called urban renaissan ce

justifies and bears w itness to the performativity o f liberatization

policy and to the new delegation of co mpetences that will remake

Egypt for transnational businessmen . Further, these developmen ts must

be justified by the construction o f risks corresponding to g eneral

principles associated with this mode o f lifestyle o f living separately,

among one’s own class and clans, in elite micro-collectivies that are

protected , subsidized and “d emocratically ” self-run. This nascent mode

of partititioning cristallizes the true logic of current neo-liberal

reforms, all while h ardening th e social landscap e against multiple counter-effects, alternatives, and resistances.

Mo ments, Models, et Universality

In this context is it acceptable, fro m the perspective o f urban so ciology , to define today ’s city , the v ery big g lobalizing city in particular, as a co mbination of mixed elements, o f diversity , and o f density, favoring cosmo politanism and innovation?

We must reconcile this definition with the n ew facts, not less universal, th at the object o f new u rban policies is to struggle aga inst combinations o f incongruous ele ments, eliminate diversity, and criminalize density, mélange and proximity . These policies separate and establish a hierarchy well beyond that which a simp le functionalist perspec tive would require. The model of the European, cosmopolitan global city -- without a doubt my thic, elitist and ethnocentric in its own way -- is not today a useful ‘ideal’ nor even a useful point of comparison. And may be European and U .S. settler colonial cities and post-industrial dystopias are more interesting points o f comparison. Or perh aps Cairo is a city that ‘models’ neo-liberal fashions is a way which is paradoxically and troublingly ‘ideal’ in a universal sense.

Egypt’s gated co mmu nities are impo sed as the ultimate figure of risk .

Yet they generate by their very presen ce many profound forms o f

so cial risk, fragilization and gen eral vulnerability that all the phy sical and discursive ramparts o f neo-liberal g eography and luxury housing would like to block out. Walled commu nities rea lize, in fact, the national fragility and produce the generalized social risk they claim to secure against.

If gated commu nities came to sp ectacularize Egypt’s

(neo)liberalization from 1990 to 2000, then it is not surprising that

they lie at the heart o f th e post-2000 fin ancial c risis in Egy pt. The

immense capitalization that was n ecessary for th e exclusive subsidized

develop ment of these desert areas was evidently one of the major

causes o f the crisis in liquidity and the bursting of the building bubble

that caused the collap se o f property prices and the collapse of th e

national econo my in g eneral. The elite development model appeared at

the center o f the n ational crisis. And it came to stand, perhap s, fo r

risk itself. The depreciation of speculative investments in the gated

communities, sustained largely by many private as well as public

banks, is reflec ted in all of econo mic h eadlines o f the 2003-2004

period, including the quasi-failure of th e Baghat group, whose

proprietor was even imp risoned, the difficulties o f the steel magnate

Ah med el-Ezz or again the scandals that haunt the shadow o f the

Minister of Housing, Ah med Soliman, responsible for th e sale o f lands

on which the gated co mmu nities were implanted. Protections and

alliances among businessmen and public o fficials were reconstituted

and purged through the crisis. Certainly as Timothy Mitchell shows, it

is important to see capitalism in action, a channeling o f b enefits and o f

credit toward the most irrational d esires, nevertheless with the pro fits

of the “boom” y ears taking shap e in land and stone, transforming the

desert into an inhabitable place. The bubble burst. The Egyptian

econo my collapsed after 2000. But the n ew liberal, neo-colonial city,

the embodiment of risk and ex clusivism, h ad already taken shape to

occupy , constrain and remake the social world. Cairo has been

radically altered.

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