Cairo

City of Sand

Maria Golia

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781861896131
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Travel

Cairo is a 1, 400-year-old metropolis whose streets are inscribed with sagas, a place where the pressures of life test people's equanimity to the very limit. Virtually surrounded by desert, sixteen million Cairenes cling to the Nile and each other, proximities that color and shape lives. Packed with incident and anecdote Cairo: City of Sand describes the city's given circumstances and people's attitudes of response. Apart from a brisk historical overview, this book focuses on the present moment of one of the world's most illustrious and irreducible cities. Cairo steps inside the interactions between Cairenes, examining the roles of family, tradition and bureaucracy in everyday life. The book explores Cairo's relationship with its "others", from the French and British occupations to modern influences like tourism and consumerism. Cairo also discusses characteristic styles of communication, and linguistic mêmes, including slang, grandiloquence, curses and jokes.Cairo exists by virtue of these interactions, synergies of necessity, creativity and the presence or absence of power. Cairo: City of Sand reveals a peerless balancing act, and transmits the city's overriding message: the breadth of the human capacity for loss, astonishment and delight.

References

I VANISHING POINT

1 Greater Cairo refers to the area and population of the Cairo governorate along with the urban bulk of the Giza and Qalyubiyya governorates to the west and north respectively. Population estimates vary according to source from twelve to sixteen million. Sandstorm information gathered from conversation with Dr Mohammed Eissa, general director of information, Egyptian Meteorological Authority, 20 January 2003.

2 The storms are also calculated with relation to Sham el Nessim (sniffing the breeze), an Egyptian national holiday falling on the Monday following Coptic Easter. Sham el Nessim celebrated the harvest in Pharaonic times and now is associated with Spring.

3 According to the Greater Cairo Atlas (published in 2000 by a division of the Ministry of Housing in cooperation with the Centre d’Études et de Documentation Economique, Juridique et Social (CEDEJ), Cairo’s built-up area reached 350km² in 1990.

4 Milad Hanna, Acceptance of the Other, trans. Ahmed A. El-Sherif Hammad (Cairo, 2001), p. 26.

5 Robert O. Collins, The Nile (New Haven and London, 2002), p. 12.

6 The mud is nutrient-rich Ethiopian silt, deposited for the last 8,000 years atop six million years’ worth of coarser dirt, sand and gravel; Collins, The Nile, p. 11.

7 ISIS: Information System for Informal Settlements, A Cooperation Project in Urban Research, a Participatory Urban Management Programme, involving the Ministry of Planning, German Technical Cooperation (GTZ) and the Observatoire Urbain du Caire Contemporain (OUCC of CEDEJ); Report prepared by Eric Denis and Marion Séjourné, April 2002. By permission of the authors.

8 ‘Consolatione ad Marciam, IX.5’, quoted in Alain de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy (London, 2001), p. 89.

9 ‘De Ira, II.21.7’, in De Botton, Consolations, p. 84.

10 Akhbar el Yom columnist Ahmad Al-Garallah, translated by Andrew Hammond for the Cairo Times, 28 November–11 December 2002.

11 Mandy McClure, managing editor, The Egypt Almanac: The Encyclopedia of Modern Egypt 2003 (Cairo, 2002), p. 27.

12 One ha = 10,000m²; ISIS report, p. 3. Density figures for the Old City from the Greater Cairo Atlas, p. 49.

13 Participatory Urban Development of Manshiet Nasser Project, Draft of guide plan documents, GTZ and Cairo Governorate, 2001, courtesy of David Sims.

14 The population and residential growth rates in informal settlements is 3.4 and 3.2 per cent respectively (ISIS report, p. 4); ‘The increase in informal settlement built up area is not a classical sprawling, it maintains its density; showing the intensity of the demand and its capacity to attract it immediately’ (ISIS report, p. 12).

15 CAPMAS Statistical Yearbook, 1994–2001, p. 21. Actually, living space is even tighter than reported since a significant portion of the city’s built-up area is unused. According to the ISIS report (p. 22), 1.27 million housing units stand empty, 46 per cent of them (mostly unfinished due to shortage of funds) in the informal sector. Much of the balance has been empty for years due to outdated rent and mortgage laws, preventing most people from obtaining purchase loans. A significant portion of the empty units are upscale dwellings too high-priced for anyone but the rich to afford.

16 David Sims, ‘Mortgaged Hopes’, in McClure, The Egypt Almanac, p. 124.

17 ISIS report, pp. 3, 8.

18 A small sampling of housing collapses includes, in 1999, a four-storey building in Sayyedda Zeinab, killing three elderly people; sixteen people dead in May 2000 in a building in the same quarter following ‘repairs’; in December 2000, eight people dead beneath a three-storey building in Giza (all reported in the Cairo Times). The Al-Ahram Weekly reported four collapses in the same week in September 2002, and in May 2003 seven people dead in a collapse in the popular quarter of Shubra.

19 Azza Khattab, ‘And we all fall down’, Egypt Today, May 2002.

20 Fatemah Farag, ‘Conquering the Beast’, Al-Ahram Weekly, 2–8 December 1999.

21 Ibid.

22 Omnia Abukorah, ‘Massacreurs de Palais, Élus Corrompus et Défenseurs de L’Histoire: La destruction des palais et villas à la une des journaux’, Observatoire Urbain du Caire Contemporain (OUCC), Lettre d’Information. no. 49, January 1999, p. 53.

23 Nicholas S. Hopkins, Sohair R. Mehanna and Salah el-Haggar, People and Pollution: Cultural Constructions and Social Action in Egypt (Cairo, 2001), pp. 43, 139. This fascinating book presents and analyses research focusing on people’s attitudes towards environmental problems and is used here interpretively. The majority of the people questioned for the purposes of the studies live in Cairo, a small portion in a farming town just outside the city.

24 ‘Voice of the Metro’, Cairo Times, 20–26 July 2000.

25 Celam Barge, ‘The Big City is Bursting at the Seams’, in McClure, The Egypt Almanac, p. 42.

26 ‘Subway sins’, Cairo Times, 1 June 2000.

27 Celam Barge, ‘Le Premier Tunnel Routier du Caire’, Observatoire Urbain du Caire Contemporain (OUCC), Lettre d’information Electronique, no. 1, January 2001.

28 The islands of Dahab and Warraq (known as ‘Cairo’s lungs’) were nearly sequestered by governmental decree in 2002 for the ‘public benefit’ despite having been declared environmentally protected areas in 1988. Facing eviction, 12,000 inhabitants rose in protest amid outraged media who blamed the decree on private investment schemes and successfully delayed its enforcement. Meanwhile, a few kilometres upriver, a new, artificial island is taking shape, the identity of its builder held secret by the government, despite persistent public inquiry as of June 2003.

29 According to some African traditions, jewellery and shiny objects sidetrack malevolent spirits who might otherwise make mischief for their owners.

30 Hopkins et al., People and Pollution, p. 73.

31 According to the Greater Cairo Atlas, p. 35, Cairenes have 1.2m² green space per inhabitant; by comparison, the inhabitants of London and Rome dispose of 9m² each, Parisians get around 12m².

32 Berndt Lö...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• I Vanishing Point
• II Artifice and Edifice
• III The Guests
• IV Listening
• V Ensemble
• References
• Select Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Photographic Acknowledgements