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Speaking of the geography of the current street protests in Cairo, and my observations from this morning and this afternoon, here's a quick map that shows much of the city is now cordoned off.
Update: I've corrected some errors on the original map and added a couple of more details. See also this latest post on the fighting moving to Nubar Street, and some history of the names of these streets.
I went down to the warzone near the Interior Ministry this morning around 9am. There were a lot fewer people, but still a few hundreds out (no doubt their numbers will increase throughout the day.) The fighting stopped last night on Mansour Street, but seems to be moving to a second front on Nubar Street one block over. Once again I got close to the ministry as conscripts were eating their breakfast and cleaning crews were coming in and there are more truck-fulls of Central Security Forces and Army APCs. Everyone was just loitering around, the on the frontline barricades a few CSF were standing guard.
To get around the barricades you have to go around on the sidestreets of the Abdin neighborhood, and you see pretty much the same thing on the hand. Protestors having breakfast (it's amazing that even in the thick of the fighting the ambulant salesman are still there, selling sticky sesame-studded date bread and other goods), cleaning crews (one rather amusingly wearing a Halliburton uniform) and of course TV camera crews. The crowds, as they were, seemed to have moved to Nubar Street but were not engaged in any clashes when I was there, keeping a distance from the CSF barricade. Noubar Street is narrower than Mansour Street and appears to have seen some looting, notably at a small computer mall complex whose windows have been broken. People seemed to think that was the new center of fighting, and despite the calm, said there were sporadic clashes.
I thought that since the world is leaning about Downtown Cairo's street names, some history might be in order. The neighborhhood were the clashes have taken place is an administrative one and contains several ministries other than the interior ministry, as well as parliament, and the nearby (lower on Mansour Street, across from the ministry) beautifully renovated new office of the Freedom and Justice Party's MPs.
Mohammed Mansour Pasha was a two-time prime minister of Egypt, first as a member of the Liberal Constitutional Party and then for the Wafd.
Mansour Pasha could refer either to an Ottoman Sultan of Egypt (1642-44) or, more likely, a short-lived Minister of the Interior (1879) according to the ministry's own website. This is more likely because the neighborhood dates from that period and most streets bare the names of contemporary officials.
Nubar PashaNubar Pasha was Egypt's first prime minister (and served two more times) and an Armenian from Izmir, in modern Turkey. He was quite a fascinating character, and is associated with Khedive Ismail's accumulation of debts from the construction of the Suez Canal and lavish spending (such as building palaces to entertain Napoleon III's wife, Eugenie) that eventually brought Egypt under direct British control. Nubar Pasha collaborated with France and Britain, Egypt's biggest lenders, to reduce the power of the Khedive and begin the transformation of the country into a constitutional monarchy.
Here's a take on the recent events in Egypt by Nate Wright, an Arabist reader and Cairo-based freelance journalist. My own take coming up soon. Update: see this map to get a better idea of where's where.
After a week of violent clashes between protesters and police forcesin November, the military moved in and built a concrete wall betweenthe two parties on Mohamed Mahmoud street, the main thoroughfarerunning from Tahrir Square towards the Ministry of Interior. Lastnight, activists toppled the wall using metal beams and ropes, and thebattle lines were dramatically shifted.
Now, police officers are facing down protesters on Mansour street.It's a good distance from Tahrir but a lot closer to the Ministry ofInterior. The sight of tear gas raining down, motorcycles ferrying outthe wounded and protesters standing their ground recalls the clashesin November on Mohamed Mahmoud street and again in December on anearby street. But these similarities mask the changing geography of the battle.
Mansour street is straighter and wider, making it a lot easier forspectators to watch from a distance. The slight bend in MohamedMahmoud street meant that in order for people to see the tear gasthemselves, they often had to be fairly close to the front lines. WhenI walked down Mansour street this evening it was clogged withthousands of people -- many more than I'd ever seen on Mohamed Mahmoud.
Issandr El Amrani | cairo events Our own Ursula Lindsey will be joining our friend Jack Shenker (of the Guardian) and others at the Contemporary Image Collective in Cairo to discuss Jack and Philip Jason (sorry!) Larkin's text and photo publication on urban planning in the Egyptian capital, Cairo Divided. See below for details.
January 18 2012, 7 pm
Hosted by Megawra and CIC
Jack Shenker presents 'Cairo Divided' together with Wafaa Nadim, Ahmed Zaazaa, Ursula Lindsey and Mohamed El-Shaheed
Amid an uncertain tide of political change, the controversial ‘satellite cities’ project is dramatically transforming peripheries into new urban centres and consigning old focal points to a life on the margins. Against the backdrop of national revolution, photographer Jason Larkin and writer Jack Shenker collaborated for two years to produce ‘Cairo Divided’, a free hard-copy publication exploring the capital’s rapidly-mutating urban landscape.
Please visit the project's website for more details.
Photo from No Expectations
From Cairobserver, a site about Cairo's urban heritage and one of the best new Egypt-based blogs of 2011:
Take the lift at Cairo Tower to the top and look at the skyline. Besides the TV&Radio building from the 1960s and the ministry of foreign affairs from the 1990s, a couple of bank towers, the rest are hotels, mostly built with Gulf investments during Mubarak’s tenure. What does that tell us about Egypt, about Cairo? There are no condo towers for the wealthy because they opted to go suburban, there are few or no office towers (besides the two Sawiris towers further north) because most businesses that aren’t multi-nationals are too small to rent space in an actual office tower so they rent cheap-rent residential apartments. Big telecommunication companies don’t need office towers in Cairo because they went to the desert and built their own “Smart Village.” And media companies also went to the desert and built “Media City.” The skyline isn’t telling of a very healthy economy. The kinds of investments that typically make a city work have all abandoned the city.
The result of decades of petrodollar and comprador capitalism...
The Lions of Qasr al-Nil Bridge
Here’s an exercise in how I think the votes in the proportional part of Egypt’s parliamentary elections will be calculated. Let’s take the beautiful district of Kasr al-Nil — the Fighting Lions! — where The Arabist is based, covering parts of Downtown Cairo and the tony island of Zamalek. This district slants liberal compared to the rest of the country. These are the results that have been published in the press:
To give you an idea of how complicated the voting process is because of the mixed system used — 1/3 individual candidaies with two seats per district (one each for professional and worker/peasant) and 2/3 for party lists — here are pictures of the ballots being used for a central Cairo district (the pictures were taken inside the polling station on Port Said St, Sayeda Zeinab district)
The first one shows the individual candidacies, which voters have to choose two candidates from — among 122 possibilities:
Much easier is the party list ballot, from which they choose one party out of 16:
;)
My former neighbor, Miguel Angel Sanchez, is featured by the NYT's photography blog. I've been talking to Miguel about his project for years, and stupidly have not yet taken up his offer of a portrait. Check out the slideshow here.
On the right, Amm Rabia, a super-friendly bawaab on our street, now immortalized.
Issandr El Amrani
Miguel will be exhibiting the photos starting next week — here are the details:
Date:Sunday,December 11, 2011 Time: 7 PM
Venue: Palace of Arts, Cairo Opera House
Exhibition will be running from December 11, 2011 until January 9, 2012
I shot the video above in Tahrir Square just after the raid by the army and police. In it protestors say they captured an army officer — he was later released.
;)
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.”
Imagine Dubai in the Nile Valley, if instead of building it on empty sand, futurist skyscrapers and business parks rose over what are now the packed, informal neighborhoods that today house the majority of Cairo’s estimated 17 million people. This authoritarian, outsized development “vision” would involve relocating millions to the furthest edges of the desert — areas banally termed “new housing extensions” — to make way for “10 star” hotels, huge parks, “residential touristic compounds,” and landing-strip-sized boulevards lined with a monotony of towers. It’s unlikely to happen in an Egypt after Mubarak — if it was ever possible at all, given budgets and popular resistance. Still, Cairo 2050 offers a glimpse at the Egyptian government’s approach to urban planning and policy. As David Sims, an economist and consultant who has worked in Cairo since 1974, writes in Understanding Cairo: The Logic of a City Out of Control, the Cairo 2050 project represents “a continued penchant for the manufacture of unrealistic dreams” on the part of “government planners and their consultants.”
Issandr El Amrani | Egypt cairo Egypt's government: designed for dictatorship - Opinion - Al Jazeera English:
Egypt’s government is designed for a dictatorship: It is extremely centralised and tightly controlled by national policy, and local councils are void of power. Although Cairo’s three governorates have separate budgets and various departments, they largely depend on the country’s ministries, led by presidentially appointed ministers, to care for essential elements of the urban environment: housing, schooling, transport, parks, healthcare, etc. Governorate budgets largely go to paying salaries rather than public spending. There is no unified city government with elected local officials and a mandate to effectively manage the city. Instead, governors do the occasional ribbon-cutting, and make hollow announcements regarding randomly selected projects that suit their whimsy.
A good piece on Cairo's governance as a metaphor for the country's by Mohamed ElShahed. This kind of stuff is part of what has to change in the way the country is managed. Also, informal areas are as much designed for corruption and the rise of a mafia state as they are for autocracy.
Here are some links to get a better understanding of the sectarian situation in Cairo — some have appeared in the usual link dumps, other not. I will have something up about my take on the situation soon.
Issandr El Amrani | Books cairo
My friend David Sims' new book on Cairo's urban planning, Understanding Cairo, is newly out on Amazon.com. It comes highly recommend to anyone who wants to know more about Cairo's urban history, the problems of the slums and gated communities, the way the city has evolved and more. A must for the library of anyone interested in Egypt and this confounding city.
This week I have been reminded of the January 1952 Cairo fire, a riot by poor Egyptians targeting foreigners and the wealthy that was manipulated by the police and the British. From the conclusion of Anne-Claire Kerboeuf's article in Cairo Times, Volume 6 Issue 20:
More than just a fire, 26 January 1952 was an unprecedented national mobilization that for the most part was organized at the grassroots of Egyptian society. That mobilization was undermined by political, economic and social rivalries among the Egyptian elite that were exploited by the British. Those rivalries weakened the whole state apparatus inasmuch as high level officials used them for their own political intrigues and to satisfy their personal interests.Thus, Fouad Serageddin allowed the organization of a riot by paying Ahmad Hussein and did not take elementary precautions to contain the predictable overflow of 26 January. Notably, he deployed very few police officers in Cairo ahead of the demonstrations, unlike the governor of Alexandria. As for King Farouq, he kept 800 police and army chiefs in his palace during the riot for a banquet to celebrate the birth of his son. He also delayed giving the army to go-ahead to intervene.
Issandr El Amrani | cairo Cairo Dust Storm 2010-12-12 from arabist on Vimeo.
A great storm is ravaging through the Eastern Mediterranean:
In Egypt at least three people died when a factory collapse in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria, officials said. Five people were seriously injured, they say, blaming the accident "on bad weather and heavy rains."
Twenty-six ships were barred from entering the Suez Canal and 29 vessels delayed for three hours. The waterway was hit by poor visibility and winds of up to 40 knots an hour, said an official at the canal, which is Egypt's third-largest source of foreign revenue after tourism and remittances from expatriate workers.
Red Sea and Mediterranean ports were closed for a second day on Sunday, while an Italian container ship, Jolly Amaranto, was stranded off the north-western coast after its engines broke down.
Visibility at Cairo airport was reduced to 300 metres.
As a long drought that affected the region came to an end, temperatures plummeted and storms hit Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the Palestinian territories and Israel:
- In Lebanon seaside roads and ports have been closed after a 45-year-old woman was killed by a falling tree hitting her car – the year’s first snowstorm hit the country’s mountains;
- Off Israel a Moldovan freighter went down near the port of Ashdod but its crew of 11 Ukrainians was rescued.
- Syria’s capital Damascus was hit by snowstorms;
- Jordan suffered sandstorms and was braced for heavy rain and snow, which could lead to flooding.
Issandr El Amrani | cairo maps 
Last night, Ursula and I went to see Garbage Dreams, Mai Iskander's documentary about Cairo's trash collectors (and recyclers), the Zabbaleen. I had wanted to see this movie for months, but it was impossible to obtain on DVD, there were no screenings in Cairo and no one had put it up online — even though it won over 22 awards and, judging from the overflow crowd at Darb 1718, the great cultural center in Old Cairo where it was being shown outdoors in stifling weather, there is much demand for it.
Garbage Dreams follows the lives of a few boys from Mokattam, the hill East of Cairo near which many of Cairo's 60,000 Zabbaleen live and work handling the city's prodigious garbage output. The story of the Zabbaleen is a familiar one, so I'll just briefly repeat here for those who won't know it: they are a mostly Coptic Christian community of dispossessed peasants from Upper Egypt who settled in Cairo in the late nineteenth century and, as a community, became the trash collectors for about 60% of the city. Originally, contracts for trash collection were actually controlled by Bedouins who subcontracted the work to the Zabbaleen. In recent years, not only have they continued to collect trash, but they have also made additional cash from recycling what they collect, impressively reusing about 80% of the trash after sorting it. They live in filthy conditions, amidst their work, but with dignity and, until recently, regular income.
In recent years, the government began contracting foreign companies to use modern trash collection methods. These take Cairo's garbage to landfills and recycle much less of it — only 20% according to the film. This has eaten into the income of the Zabbaleen and is threatening their community, even if some of the workers for the company have been recruited from it. This is an interesting story, but unfortunately Iskander does not tackle it with sufficient diligence: we are given plenty of the Zabbaleen's side of things, but no explanation from the government or the companies about their strategy (which, I'm fairly sure, would have been even more incriminating — the ridiculousness of needing foreign expertise for trash collection is pretty self-evident.)
But perhaps this doesn't matter that much. The heart of the story are the lives of Adham, Nabil and Osama in the context of this threat to the community. They give poignant testimony about their awareness that they are at the bottom of the social ladder, there desire for both mundane and grandiose improvements to their lives, their attachment to their community and pride in its essential work. There are some pretty hilarious scenes, too, such as when the boys are taken to Wales in a NGO-funded trip to look at recycling methods in Europe. In their almost cruel exposure to a clean, green and prosperous Wales (hardly the reputation the country has, say, in London) they see ideas to take back home, but also great waste — there's a great scene in which Nabil lectures the operators of recycling center that they need to be more thorough about separation — essentially by doing the type of manual sorting done in Cairo that is simply impossible under European labor and safety regulations. "Here they have technology, but they don't have precision," he finally scoffs.
The greatest laugh of all for the Cairene audience came when one boy turns to the other at a road crossing, and says with wonder: "Did you see that car? It stopped to let people cross!" That is one other meditation on why Cairo came to be such a badly run city, saved from the total chaos by the hard work and good humor of its underclass.
You can now get the DVD on the film's site or soon on Amazon — highly recommended.
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. Photo by Dana Smillie.
I've just published a piece in The Review at the National that includes a lot of my thoughts on the topic. Here's part of the introduction:
Most capitals are magnets, but the speed with which the Egyptian one has grown in the last century is testament both to a remarkable centripetal power and to a surrounding vacuum of opportunity. Swelled by waves of rural migration, the population of greater Cairo has gone from less than one million at the beginning of the 20th century to about 18 million today – a megacity on the order of Mumbai or São Paulo, with more people than Lebanon, Jordan and Libya combined.
For centuries, Cairo’s expansion has been checked by geography: the city is bounded by a narrow strip of fertile, Nile-irrigated land, with nothing but desert beyond. The migrants who flocked to the city in the last century found there was nowhere to live: they built shacks on rooftops; they made homes out of covered alleys, inner courtyards, and stairwells. Priced out the soaring formal real estate market, they started building illegally--on the precious agricultural land that surrounds the city, and on the barren plateau that separates it from the desert.
Cairo has long been on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The city teeters under the weight of its multitudes – its public services worn ragged; its air pollution some of the worst in the world; its traffic barely managed by freeway overpasses and tunnels, clumsy last-minute bypass surgeries intended to repair the city’s clogged and failing arteries.
Faced with the city’s barely contained chaos and alarmed by the growing slums, Cairo’s elites have begun to dream of escape. Along the Ring Road, billboards advertise exclusive new private developments, with names like country clubs or bad discos – Utopia, Le Reve, Dreamland, Qattamiya Heights, Palm Hills, Belle Ville – and slogans like “The Egypt of My Desires”. One advertisement, overlooking dilapidated buildings in the centre of town, simply asks: “Why Are You Here?”
The piece goes on to look at, among other things, the--generally negative and very stereotypical--ways in which Cairo's "slums" are portrayed and discussed.
I couldn't quote from all the books that informed the piece, but I thought I'd take this opportunity to list some recommended Reading on Cairo:
1. Cairo Cosmopolitan. Ed. Diane Singerman and Paul Amar (AUC Press, 2006), and Cairo Contested, Ed. Diane Singerman (AUC Press, 2009). Collections of scholarly articles, many of them insightful and informative.
2. Maria Golia's Cairo: City of Sand (AUC Press, 2004). Loving and idiosyncratic essays about the city, full of wonderful details.
3. Mike Davis' Planet of Slums (Verso, 2007). Puts the development of Cairo's informal neighborhoods into terrifying global context.
4. Dina Heshmat's scholarly work Cairo in Contemporary Egyptian Literature (available in Arabic and French only).
5. Le Caire by André Raymond; 1001 Years of the City Victorious, by Janet Abu-Lughoud; and the extremely readable Cairo, the City Victorious, by Max Rodenbeck. Great books for getting to know the city and its history.
OK, this is quite cool: an architect commissioned to create a new project in Sixth of October City outside of Cairo (which is currently mushrooming with competing shopping mall / residential / office projects) created the draft of the project in Second Life. The website for the project is here.
