A city on the edge: Aspiration, anxiety management, and the politics of urban planning in Cairo

This dissertation is a study of large, state-led projects that are meant to shape the growth, form, and identity of Egypt's capital city, Cairo, with a focus on the latter years of President Hosni Mubarak's rule. It focuses on downtown regeneration schemes, strategic vision plans, and most centrally, a New Towns policy meant to relocate up to 5 million Cairenes to new suburbs in the desert. The Egyptian state's formal commitment to these projects has remained robust, despite three decades of minimal success in ameliorating the social and economic issues they were intended to address. Scholarly and media accounts have tended to portray this single-mindedness as evidence of corruption, irrationality, or both. The central question of this dissertation therefore is, what are the incentives, priorities, and ways of seeing Cairo within state institutions responsible for managing its growth, that can explain commitment to a lackluster model of development? Drawing on techniques and literatures from political science, anthropology, urban studies, and geography, and based on 21 months of fieldwork in Egypt dissertation uses official planning documents and studies; a personally constructed archive of documents related to abandoned and failed building projects; observation at project sites; court documents; news media and advertising sources in English and Arabic; and in-depth interviews with planners, developers, academics, journalists, NGO workers, architects, and state officials. It finds that the logic behind official plans for Cairo, while making little sense from a planning perspective, reflects the aspirations of state elites to transform Cairo from an `out of control' capital city into a privileged node in the global economic system. The seeming disorder and `lack of planning' that characterizes Cairo's growth is the result of elite focus on transforming Cairo based on imaginaries of what an `emerging global city' should look like, while both neglecting and tacitly tolerating the informal, unplanned areas in which most of the city's population lives.