Specific weights of architecture, the Cairo probe

By Ying Zhou

A little more than a year ago, twenty-six architecture students from the ETH Studio Basel landed at the Cairo International Airport. They were to begin their urban research sojourn. For most it was their first time in Egypt. For most it was also their first time doing urban research. They were armed with maps, readings, toolkits for understanding the architecture vocabulary of a city, a megacity of a contestable eighteen million nonetheless. Little would they know that their evolving analyses for the intricacies of the city, whose mechanisms of urban production they were studying, would unfurl into the world-awakening events of Tahrir only a few months later. And little would I know, as their instructor, mentor, academic elder sibling, and co-adventurer of sorts, that our novice comprehensions of Cairo’s nuanced urban complexity—formal, functional, systemic—would portend the power of an urban agency that I was, through our urban analysis, trying to explicate.

From Egypt’s encounter with modernity realized in the form of the belle-epoque downtown to the Nasserist Arab-socialism manifested in Sayyid Karim’s Nasr City and Mahmud Riad’s Mohandessin, from the first desert city of Heliopolis granted by concession to the Belgian Empain to oil-money infused likes of Sheikh Zayed in the namesake 6^th of October—curiously, private and semi-public enterprises by foreign capitalists—from the multilayered livelihoods of Mokattam and Imbaba to the austerity of the 15^th of May, from the revival and re-narration of Fustat’s heritage to the transformation of Abbasiya’s skyline, we dissected the thirteen areas chosen on account of their urban productions in historic development, as well as the manifestations of those crucial relationships between the formal/informal within the context of global capital’s impact on urban production.

In the short two weeks, places like Talat Harb, Sakakini, Mustafa Mahmud, Al Haram, and Beverly Hills became our intimate haunts and we found our short-term callings as urban adventurers, archeologists, detectives. With hunches fed by the half-year preparation research as well as with a growing list of local academic and professional contacts as well as residents and local gatekeepers, whose gracious friendships and generous patience fed our enthusiasm for understanding the dense, dynamic and sometimes grating metropolis, we began to see through our architects’ eyes relationships between building, space, city and demographics, economics, politics. To experience Cairo and to begin to understand its urbanity taught us not only about Masr but also the logic of how to sense the world.  

In a globalized world where international architects have descended on the so-called developing worlds, often planning villages the size of small European cities at speeds which far outpace western industrialization’s urbanization, the cultivation of a sensitivity to the nuances of geographic, cultural, socio-economic inflections of a place, not to mention a possible understanding of its specificities, seem only necessary responsibilities for the education of an architect. And in light of Tahrir’s victories and the ongoing battles fought in the other midans of the Arab and non-Arab worlds, understanding the then new visions of Cairo 2050, Ismailia’s downtown ventures, the growth of New Cairo juxtaposed against the realities of Nazlet al Samman, Manshiyat Nasser seem even more imperative.

Revolutions are not always necessary to rethink urbanism. A close look at Cairo’s urban condition reveals the way that the city again is the battleground for ideology rather than only of capital.

Check out ETH Basel’s Atlas of Cairo with downloadable PDFs for each district, here. This atlas is a collection of foundational data on Cairo that accompanied the students throughout the semester.

The links above allow access to student produced books for each of the districts. For a list of the districts covered by the students and their respective downloadable books click here.