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Letter from Cairo – LARB | Hidden Cities
i Rate This “Why are we destroying our own city with our own hands?”
Warning: I’m about to throw a brick at the glass house where a lot of people live. The expression “Paris along the Nile” is popular among nostalgists and Orientalists alike. It has gained currency among a growing bourgeoisie who view contemporary Cairo with discontent and find a fragment of its imagined past to be a redeeming escape only because it maybe referenced via Paris, the “capital of modernity.”
Paris was never along the Nile
The shape that Cairo is taking--physically and in people's imaginations--is something that has interested me for a long time. I've long been fascinated with the two extremes that seem to represent the future of the capital: the عشوائيات, the so called "informal" neighborhoods where as man as two-thirds of all Cairenes live; and the new private gated cities in the desert, whose recent, staggering spread is altering the dimensions and relations of the city. Hoda, 26, Imbaba resident.
Where is Cairo headed?
THIS PAST AUGUST IN HELIOPOLIS, the Cairo suburb built over desert by a Belgian industrialist in 1905, I sat in an architect's office, a place called Cube Architectural Consultants, and heard a glowing, impromptu presentation on "Cairo 2050." Cairo 2050 is a series of outlandish master plans and megaprojects for Egypt's capital that the regime of Hosni Mubarak began promoting in 2008, with the help of the United Nations and the Japanese government. Its future, an earnest architect informed me gently, was "uncertain in the new Egypt."
2050 Or Bust
One of Jean-Léon Gérôme's most famous Orientalist paintings, Prayer on the Rooftops of Cairo, is backwards. The men in the scene are facing north in prayer, not south-east towards Mecca. Under the shadow of two Mamluk minarets with the mosque of Mohammed Ali in the distance, perched atop the Citadel, the Cairenes on the canvas pray just after sunset, with a sliver of the moon in the sky. It's an idyllic, invented scene that Gérôme, one of the most accomplished Orientalists of his day, painted in his studio in France, embellishing it to suit his viewers' desire for the exotic. Its inaccuracy was beside the point.
Histories of a City: the many hands that shaped today's Cairo
{*style:<b>العيش و العشوائيات: العلاقة بين رغيف العيش و النمو العمراني في المدن المصرية </b>*} Egypt, once the breadbasket of the Mediterranean, is the world’s biggest importer of wheat and grains. Egyptians are the world’s biggest consumers of bread per capita. Over the years Egypt’s dependency on imported wheat has steadily increased with no sign of reversal. Egypt’s population , currently 81 million, is growing at 2 percent a year.
Bread and Urbanism
CairObserver
Cairobserver is the start of a conversation about Cairo’s architecture and building, urban fabric and city life. Cairo is one of the greatest cities in the world with a rich history and a fascinating contemporary condition that makes it an ideal site for urban and architectural investigation. Cairobserver is dedicated to presenting visitors and residents with lucid analysis, commentary and information while confronting stereotypical views of this city and enriching the ways in which professionals, students and residents understand the policies that shape the city, explore its history and sites, its urban and architectural merits and problems and connecting with the activism that attempts to engage with Cairo’s urban reality. Cairobserver is open for contributions.