Paris was never along the Nile

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.” Contemporary Orientalists also use the expression to further emphasize the notion that Europe, namely Paris, monopolized the very idea of 19^th century urban modernity. The straight boulevard is thus a Parisian invention and if one exists in Cairo or any other city, particularly non-European cities, then credit is due: “Thank you Paris, thank you Haussmann, what would our cities have become if it weren’t for you?”

Numerous books and essays perpetuate the notion that 19^th century Cairo was nothing more than mimicry, and a bad copy at that, of Paris. Words such as “flimsy” and “haste” almost always make it into the description of “Khedive Ismail’s Cairo.” In fact Paris was never along the Nile, nor were the intentions, designs or social and political contexts of 19^th century Cairo at all similar to Paris, nor should they have been.

Here are a few reasons why Paris was never along the Nile:

1.     The relationship between the existing historic city and its 19^th century extension in each case differs significantly. In Paris, the medieval city was entirely erased with only few highly selected monuments left as testament of the past. In Cairo the old city was left intact. Few modern streets were surgically cut through the dense fabric such as Clot Bey Street and Muhammad Ali Street. Streets carved out of the existing city were done slowly taking up to 40 years to complete, and such streets build on urban policies that began with Muhammad Ali’s Tanzim laws for urban modernization. Khedive Ismail’s plans were thus a continuation of policies that existed for decades prior to his vision for urban expansion.

2.     Architectural style is not comparable in the two cities. Baron Haussmann’s plans for Paris called for a strict building code that dictated building styles and elevation dimensions including window sizes and heights of floors which created a certain level of uniformity not found in Cairo. Ali Pasha Mubarak, planner of Cairo’s extension on the other hand did include some building requirements, mostly minimum building costs to guarantee a certain level of building quality without defining architectural styles. This opened the door for real estate developers and speculators to hire the architect of choice (who came from various Mediterranean countries mostly France and Italy, where the profession of architecture was well established) who conceived and built mostly residential blocks utilizing various architectural styles including some attempts at incorporating “local” motifs. The end result is a much more eclectic rather than the fascist architectural uniformity of Haussmann’s streets. In addition, only a small percentage of the urban plan was actually filled architecturally by the time Ismail’s guests arrived in Cairo. Much of the building fabric was filled during a building boom at the turn of the century from 1897 to 1907 and again in the 1920s. A final period of building commenced in the 1940s and even the 1950s left an architectural mark on this part of the city.

3.     Haussmann’s urban plan for Napoleon III was designed to allow for the French army to march down wide streets in case the French revolted (again). The political dimension of Paris’ design is a central component that should not be overlooked and that element is missing from Cairo’s planning intentions. Napolean III and his regime were authoritarian and used the city as a mechanism to force society into a new capitalist way of life where a certain dress code, a particular code of public behavior, and a certain type of consumerism were promoted by the very fabric of the new city. This political and economic authoritarianism was not present in Ismail’s Cairo where camels and herds were freely allowed to occupy the new spaces and commercial life largely continued into the new city with the addition of department stores as it was the a new global trend (without replacing existing trade or social networks). For Ali Mubarak and Ismail what had been built in Paris was simply a response to conditions in cities across the world: unhealthy spaces, crowdedness, sewage problems, lack of open space, etc.

While those basic factors listed above were motives for urban revolutions across the world, not only in Paris and places that supposedly mimicked Paris, the solutions were inevitably similar in conception. If the problem is, for example, the need for efficient streets for the transport of goods across the city, then why should the solution be conceptually different in Cairo from Paris, London or Mexico City? Is it because the orient likes cul-de-sacs and mysterious narrow lanes versus the pragmatic west that naturally solved the problem with straight streets? This is what it comes down to, the belief that modernity is a European business and conflating the terms modernization with Europeanization as if they are interchangeable. Also this assumes that Paris has a monopoly over urban modernity but also a monopoly over European urbanity.

Edward Lane and Stanley Lane Poole (a page from his The Story of Cairo pictured above) both escaped Europe during a transformative period and they were distressed when they witnessed Cairo undergoing similar processes of change. For them escaping to Egypt meant getting away from “modernity” because (being Orientalists) they assumed that Cairo was frozen in time, stagnant, unchanging. And for them places in Cairo that seemed to combine elements they labeled Oriental with elements they understood to be European were particularly distressing, as they thought those two worlds should not blend in such ways. It was also at this time that the medieval city gained the label “Islamic Cairo” as if in contrast with “unIslamic” modern Cairo. Islam was embodied only in medieval space and modernity was clearly its European antithesis. It maybe interesting to consider the urban patterns of medieval Paris in comparison with medieval Cairo, they too share much more in common than we are told to believe.

Some will insist “But Ismail himself said he wanted Egypt to be part of Europe” or that he only went on his modernization urban project after his visit to Paris for the World’s Fair, or that he really built it to impress his European guests. That may all be true but these statements are not enough to wholly dismiss the actual processes that took almost a century to give us the part of Cairo we today call Khedival Cairo, nor does it give enough credit to the local actors, architects, entrepreneurs and builders who realized Ismail’s “vision” in stone (or brick or concrete).

At the core of the faulty narrative of “Paris along the Nile” is that it views the two cities (Cairo and Paris) in a vacuum. Also missing from that narrative is Cairo’s relationship to another key city, Istanbul. In fact there is a constellation of cities across the globe all of which underwent similar transformations for different motivations and by various regimes transporting urban planning models via differing mechanisms. Vienna and Berlin, Mexico City (colonial) and Buenos Aires and other cities experimented with urban modernization models that were later credited only to Haussmann. These cities and others developed in the spirit of the time (zeitgeist) in an increasingly connected world. Also cities such as Torino (war), Barcelona (expansion) and St. Petersburg (imperial) had already experimented with urban models that later came to be known as Parisian. The dominance of Paris as THE modern city is a political one related to empire and cultural hegemony, and it is time we let go of such hang-ups.

Cairo was, is and always will be Cairo. What makes a city isn’t just its buildings or street patterns, it is the people who build, labor, occupy and navigate the city that matter the most and those people were always Cairenes, were never “Parisians.” Buying into the narrative that downtown Cairo, or “Khedival Cairo” is less Egyptian has contributed to its negligence. But where do we draw the line? Is Mamluk architecture really anymore Egyptian than Ottoman or the eclectic architecture of downtown? The brilliance of Egypt is that it does not need to choose a period in its past to place on a pedestal. 19^th century Cairo is as Egyptian as any other part of the city. Paris was never along the Nile, and that is ok.

+pictured above: Dome of the Abd-al-Hamid al-Shawarby Pasha building. Designed by the architect Habib Ayrout in 1925.