About

Cairobserver is the start of a conversation about Cairo’s architecture and buildings, urban fabric and city life.

Cairobserver is an online platform that acts as a focal point of architectural and urban discourse in Egypt. The blog provides a space for writings by specialists and non-specialists, students and teachers, city residents and visitors, architects and concerned citizens. The aim is to stimulate public debate and conversation about the architecture, urbanism and cultural heritage of Cairo, other Egyptian cities and beyond.

Cairobserver is dedicated to presenting visitors and residents with lucid analysis, commentary and information about Cairo’s architecture and urbanism. A major aim of the project is to confront stereotypical views of Cairo by enriching the ways in which professionals, students and residents understand the policies that shape the city. The site also explores Cairo’s history and sites, its urban and architectural merits and the city’s many challenges. Additionally, Cairobserver aims to connect readers with the activism and grassroots action that engage with Cairo’s urban reality.

Cairobserver welcomes contributors from all disciplines and interests. The site is an on-line space, a platform, for architects, journalists, historians, artists, and residents to find and share content that offers ways for understanding, representing, and improving the city.

The site brings together personal accounts, historical anecdotes, current news, relevant links, and useful lessons from elsewhere that may help us rethink Cairo.

Contact: If you wish to contribute to the site send a 300-600 word contribution (English or Arabic) to Cairobserver [at] gmail [dot] com and include your name and relevant pictures. Photography and video contributions are encouraged.

Cairobserver was founded in April 2011 and is edited by Mohamed Elshahed.

Mohamed Elshahed is a curator and architectural historian focusing on modernism in Egypt and the Arab World. His work spans architecture, design and material culture with numerous publications in edited volumes, academic journals, online and print magazines. He is the curator of the British Museum’s Modern Egypt Project and Egypt’s winning pavilion, Modernist Indignation, at the 2018 London Design Biennale. Following an undergraduate degree in architecture from New Jersey Institute of Technology, he earned his Masters from MIT’s Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture and a Phd from NYU’s Department of Middle Eastern Studies. In 2014-15 he was an Art Histories and Aesthetic Practices post-doctoral fellow at the Berlin-based Forum Transregionale Studien. In 2019 Apollo Magazine named him among the 40 under 40 influential thinkers and artists in the Middle East. Elshahed is the author of Cairo Since 1900: An Architectural Guide (AUC Press, January 2020), the first comprehensive survey of Cairo’s modern architecture.

Graphic design by Ahmad Hammoud.

*Photo by Sylvie Weber.

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