This article explores the recent urban transformations of downtown Cairo, in particular around the area of Mohammed Mahmud Street and Tahrir Square, after a year and a half of violent confrontations between the protesters and the military junta. The article first looks at how these confrontations led to the segregation of the city through the use of buffer-concrete walls, army tanks, check-points and barbed-wire barricades that made life for its inhabitants impossible. The squeezing of Tahrir and its surroundings created mostly (...) a delineated and restricted war zone. This was undertaken after a series of killings and massacres took place. The article reflects upon the explosion of sardonic graffiti and epic murals that followed these events as a vibrant expression of dissenting street art, as well as the creation of a memorial space. (shrink)

The metropolis of Cairo has witnessed unprecedented transformations since the January revolution of 2011. It witnessed evidently an escalation of war zones and confrontations between protesters and police forces; it also witnessed the militarization and policing of the urban sphere, the creation of segregating buffer walls that paralysed entire areas. However, the Tahrir effect remains evident in that it revolutionized the very notion of what a public space is about. It succeeded in imposing an entirely unprecedented novel choreography for the (...) city in which the ‘stage’ of Tahrir was the exemplary moment that triggered extended and replicated dramaturgical violent public confrontations, public performances and occupations in all the squares of Egypt. This article traces the transformations in relation to the debates pertaining to the ‘right to the city’ relating to the expanding visibility of the street vendors. Despite the military taking over after the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood, Cairo has witnessed for the past three years a mesmerizing flourishing art scene. (shrink)

Egypt witnessed in the last decade, as in many Southeast Asian mega-cities, the reshaping of public space through the creation of new shopping malls and recreation places. This went hand in hand with the `gentrification' of certain areas of the city of Cairo, which is continuing at the expense of pushing away the poor. The 1980s and 1990s also witnessed increasing prosperity among certain classes and the appropriation of new consumer lifestyles. This article attempts to look at the variations of (...) shopping malls in Cairo and the new phenomenon of hybridization of tastes. One can observe the creation of `chic' shopping malls functioning parallel to popular and working-class malls which are frequented by different classes, depending on the various districts of Cairo. These newly created public spaces are gendered. The malls provide new outlets for deprived youth to experience mingling and flirting, in other words, these spaces offer new forms of `mixity' between sexes. A glimpse at the ` grands magasins' is brought up in relation to the history of consumerism in Egypt. This article also analyses the government's official discourse which alienates those living in unplanned and scattered construction as `violent' and unruly and relates it to the new remaking of the town of Cairo. (shrink)

This article reflects upon the monopoly and repertoires of violence in the city of Cairo perpetrated in counter-revolutionary moments by the successive military and Islamist regimes, which lack alternative visions and imaginaries. It counters the myth that the Egyptian revolution was non-violent. It also reflects upon some of the debates about the Arab revolutions, the question of militarization, and the return of ‘order’ with the re-emergence of the army in public life. It also reflects upon the multiplication of segregating walls, (...) first as buffer zones to isolate protesters, then as the walls of the gated communities and compounds of the rich, examining the extent to which the supposed revitalization of downtown Cairo actually represents the flight of wealth and capital to isolated areas far from the city center. (shrink)