This study critically analyzes the paradigms and practices of planning in Egypt since 1952. It interrogates the politics of national and physical planning while tracing the ideas that informed the establishment of new settlements in the country across the regimes of Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak. Based on primary and secondary data, the study argues that under Nasser, plans often diverged from their blueprints and revealed the myth of ‘technical objectivity’ that underpinned the planning industry. It outlines the program of new settlements under Sadat and unveils the systematic exclusion of planners from decision-making apparatuses while institutionalizing ‘profit-opportunism’ in favor of private interests. The study then demonstrates the decline of planning under Mubarak and its emergence into a ‘special purpose vehicle’ in service of real estate developments associated with neoliberal shifts of the economy and skewed toward resource and privilege concentration in the hands of a few, thus further exacerbating uneven spatial morphologies.
Planning Egypt’s New Settlements: The Politics of Spatial Inequities
Cairo Papers Vol. 32, No. 1
Dalia Wahdan
14 June 2012
124 pp.
14.2X21.6cm
ISBN 9789774165344
For sale worldwide
$19.95
Related products
Agrarian Transformation in the Arab World: Persistent and Emerging Challenges
Cairo Papers Vol. 32, No. 2
Edited by Habib AyebReem Saad
This collection of essays revisits agrarian transformation in Arab countries in the light of new realities and emerging challenges. Apart from the urgency of the deepening food crisis, such realities include environmental challenges, changes in consumption and life-style choices, and a new set of rules governing the conditions of access to resources. The issue investigates the commonality and diversity in the current processes of agrarian transformation, based on empirical case studies from different Arab countries.
...read more
31 January 2014
Paperback
176 pp.14.2X21.6cm
$19.95
Beyond the Exotic
Women’s Histories in Islamic Societies
Edited by Amira al-Azhary SonbolMost manifestations, research has accepted stereotypical images of Muslim women, treating their outward such as veiling, as passive and oppressive. Muslim women have been depicted as different, and by exoticizing (orientalizing) them—or Islamic society in general—“they” have been dealt with outside of general women’s history and regarded as having little to contribute to the writing of world history or to the life of their sisters worldwide. By approaching widely used sources with different questions and methodologies, and by using new or little-used research (with much primary research), this book redresses these deficiencies. Scholars revisit and reevaluate scripture and scriptural interpretation; church records involving non-Muslim women of the Arab world; archival court records dating from the present back to the Ottoman period; and the oral and material culture and its written record, including art and architecture, oral history, textbooks, Sufi practices, and the politics of dress. By deconstructing the past, these scholars offer fresh perspectives on women’s roles and aspirations in Middle East societies. Contributors: Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, Sheila S. Blair, Randi Deguilhem, Mamoun Fandy, Richard Freeland, Fatima Zohra Guechi, Nelly Hanna, Howayda al-Harithy, Mervat F. Hatem, Bernard Heyberger, Valerie J. Hoffman, Haifaa Khalafallah, Ramadan al-Khowli, Patricia Mihaly Nabti, Lisa Pollard, Mona Russell, Elyse Semerdjian, Selçuk Aksin Somel, Amira El-Azhary Sonbol, Denise A. Spellberg, Barbara Freyer Stowasser, Judith E. Tucker, Fariba Zarinebaf, Madeline Zilfi.
...read more
Paperback
562 pp.15.5X23.5cm
$29.95
Cairo Contested
Governance, Urban Space, and Global Modernity
Edited by Diane SingermanThis cross-disciplinary, ethnographic, contextualized, and empirical volume—with an updated introduction to take account of the dramatic events of early 2011—explores the meaning and significance of urban space, and maps the spatial inscription of power on the mega-city of Cairo. Suspicious of collective life and averse to power-sharing, Egyptian governance structures weaken but do not stop the public’s role in the remaking of their city. What happens to a city where neo-liberalism has scaled back public services and encouraged the privatization of public goods, while the vast majority cannot afford the effects of such policies? Who wins and loses in the “march to the modern and the global” as the government transforms urban spaces and markets in the name of growth, security, tourism, and modernity? How do Cairenes struggle with an ambiguous and vulnerable legal and bureaucratic environment when legality is a privilege affordable only to the few or the connected? This companion volume to Cairo Cosmopolitan further develops the central insights of the Cairo School of Urban Studies.
...read more
15 November 2011
Paperback
536 pp.15X23cm
$29.95
Arab Regional Women’s Studies Workshop
Cairo Papers Vol. 20, No. 3
Cynthia NelsonSoraya Altorki
The proceedings of the Arab Regional Women’s Studies Workshop held at the American University in Cairo in May 1997. Among the theoretical and practical issues discussed are: the importance of introducing gender studies in order to achieve social equality in the Arab World, rethinking political and research priorities in order to give more attention to gender issues, and comparing gender programs in some Arab countries.
...read more
Paperback
148 pp.15X23cm
$16.95