Portraits of Disengagement

The following text was published in the "900 km Nile City" book (Rhimal Design, Egypt, 2013) as a part of the commentary on the research and design proposal for Egypt's Nile Valley. The project is by Atelier Kempe Thill, baukuh, and Grau, and the book is edited by Moataz Farid, and Pier Paolo Tamburelli. 

Portraits of Disengagement

01.

We entered the brightly neon-lit office with its pale stone flooring and its dark brown wooden walls, and were signaled to proceed inside, now directly facing a large old wooden desk. The governor of Sohag sat comfortably behind it with a remote in his hand carefully following the morning news. The interview had been planned to discuss development priorities and models for Sohag with the 900 km city project team. The governor, a previous senior military official, had been appointed after the revolution. He spoke of the successes achieved during his term (which had only lasted months) and of his future plans for the governorate to become ‘prosperous’. He also spoke of the extensive lack of funding to solve many of the problems facing him, and his will to partner with foreign governments and agencies for financial and technical aid. When asked about envisioning the Nile valley as one large connected city, he was surprised. It was quite clear that he had never seen it that way. Most importantly, he spoke with unparalleled pride of his 1 million resident city project, planned to absorb revolutionary demands, although he did not know exactly where it was located in the desert. It was evident that there was an absence of a clear long-term vision for the governorate or the valley, besides of course an apparent lack of experience and imagination. A typical official with a typical extreme dissociation from reality, enforced by an alarming false sense of achievement, and an overwhelming excitement for the failed new desert expansion model, promoting escapism under the “new fresh start” logic.

02.

Our taxi driver had been driving for about 30 minutes on the highway before we reached our destination. A large rusting archway sign saying “Welcome to New Sohag” greeted us. Beyond the extended desert sand ahead of us, we could see silhouettes of some buildings. As we came closer, it became obvious that it was fairly empty. The only signs of life, apart from the barking dogs, were the occasional hanging laundry in some of the apartment balconies. We decided to stop the taxi and take some photos and were instantly struck by the intensity of the sunrays and the heat radiating from the asphalt. This close, it was now clear how much the city was vacant. Governmental housing looked like it was perfect. Everything was in place… buildings were nicely painted and ready… roads were paved… light posts were erected… even trees had been planted but now withering and dying. Yet the city was abandoned, or actually never occupied. As we continued our taxi tour in the city, I could imagine why nobody lived here. There were no real services… no operating schools, no corner supermarkets, and no fast and cheap transportation alternatives. But most importantly, making the trip from the valley to the desert showed a stark contrast. Everything seemed so ‘different’. The landscape… the density… the infrastructure… the family ties… everything was indeed in contrast. It was clear that nobody lived here because it was alien… because it did not represent the valley… and perhaps also because it was imposed.

03.

A member of Monsha’a local council had taken us on a tour around the village. “It will be much safer for you if I join you. People are not very friendly with foreigners these days”. As we toured the village, we talked about Monsha’a, its people, its problems, its poverty and its future. He was a simple man dressed in a traditional ‘galabeya’, a teacher in the local school. He was involved with the local council representation aside from his full time job, hoping to do something for his community. He complained about Mubarak’s regime monopolizing Monsha’a council with its men. Between the unfinished houses of Monsha’s, with their concrete structures and red brick, rose a huge brightly painted white monolith. We stopped in front of the closed metal gates and asked about this huge decaying building. “This is the culture palace. It has been closed since it was built. This is how the government and the ministry of culture dealt with us. If you were a large village (markaz) you must have one of these. It is a useless odd building that has nothing to do with us. We do not use these cozy red seats… We are used to the wooden stiff ones.” He continued “Mubarak had been wasting our resources only to portray this false image of development. We do not want that. We want real development… clean water, sufficient housing solutions, and better land to cultivate. We want a decent living. That is why we had the revolution… tell them… that is why we had the revolution.”

The 900 km city is perhaps just another project by a group of European researchers and designers. It might be misunderstood if taken too seriously or evaluated too harshly. Yet it holds the premise of being unexpected. It suggests a fresh territorial setting through which one can look at the Nile valley. It admits that it is not a solution but rather a challenge… a possibility. It admits to being subjective. It does not jump to conclusions nor does it make any assumptions. It admits the duality and existing distance between dysfunctional strategic planning and individual small-scale ingenuity. It acknowledges the gap between the bureaucracy of typical power structures and the fast appropriation of real life, yet it does not attempt to fill it. It admits the failures of governments and officials to deal with changing everyday realities of the valley with imagination. The 900km city does not make any claims nor does it remain passive. It does not innovate beyond what exists… and is not merely a hasty reaction. It is too general and abstract yet very specific. The 900 km city is indeed more than just another project… it is a call to abandon preconceptions and adopt new positions towards the Nile valley and towards the realities of Egypt… but only for those who dare to contest, defy, and imagine.

(published in "900 km Nile City", Rhimal, Egypt, 2013)

What Morsi means for the suburbs

Mohamed Morsi is Egypt’s first elected president. His 4 army predecessors all lived in the large bustling inner city Cairo. Nasser lived all of his presidential life in manshiyet el bakry, close to Heliopolis (at that time considered to be a neighborhood for the affluent), while Sadat lived in his Nile front house in Giza. Mubarak, who lived in Heliopolis since he was an army officer and vice president, moved the presidential office to the neighboring Heliopolis palace in central Heliopolis. The block where his house was located, has been, since then and still remains even after his overthrow, completely cut off from its surrounding fabric by checkpoints and barricades. His neighbors were continuously scanned for political affiliations and security clearances, only for living on the same block. Probably, some of them had been living there long before Mubarak became president. The area was a complete black hole in the perception of the city and it wasn’t until Google earth started showing the area, that the size of that block became evident, and with it the suffering of its residents.

Morsi, the new president, lives in new Cairo, considered by many as the most successful of the new cities (suburban) model launched by Sadat since the 70's. The new city started out as three separate suburban housing settlements to the east of Cairo, and were later joined together into one large city. Morsi lives in a new Cairo typical 3 story family house with its unidentifiable neoclassical (supposedly luxurious) style mixed with a large Islamic verse literally glued on top of the pediment. If, like Mubarak, the neighborhood in which his house lies will be sealed off for security measures, and considering the urban arrangement of new Cairo’s plots, we are looking at a great deal of discontent from his neighbors, as well as many of new Cairo’s residents. If the presidential offices remain in Heliopolis, the idea of moving back and forth everyday in a 20-30km commute becomes completely absurd. According to David Sims’s numbers in ‘Understanding Cairo’, almost 64% of new Cairo’s built residential units are uninhabited, and it is already suffering and suffocating from lack of proper infrastructure and daily traffic jams. If we add Morsi's high security commute, which demands clear and flowing roads, then we are looking at a much worse situation. Furthermore, it is evident that Morsi will not practice a radically different economic and development model than Mubarak’s (if at all different), which was based on brutal neoliberal policies focusing on concentrating capital in the hands of very few, and catering to the benefit of real estate development tycoons. Perhaps the names will be different, but the policies remain the same. This definitely means that his policies towards Cairo’s suburbs and Egypt’s new cities, which have clearly shown significant failures over the years, will be similar to Mubarak’s fake bubble of real estate speculation in order to maintain a hardly hit economy that needs a booming construction sector to get back on its feet. This also means that his so-called priority to inner city under-developed informal settlements is simply election talk. Perhaps he will do better than the complete neglect and sometime intentional destruction of these communities that was characteristic of the Mubarak era, but a genuine interest in providing suitable and sustainable communities for inner Cairo residents remains highly improbable.

Morsi's Family House in New Cairo

Presidential Guard secure Morsi's house after election results were announced with supporters celebrating

Nevertheless, Morsi does add a lot of legitimacy to these new cities. Mubarak’s neighboring district elkorba, was very well maintained, planted, lighted...etc. and provided some pleasant examples of public space, only because Mubarak lived next doors. Yet another severe example of the dissociation between Mubarak’s family and the rest of Egypt. I can imagine a huge boom occurring in new Cairo soon. Not only in terms of development and construction, but also a big leap in terms of state investments whether in public spaces, infrastructure, parks and green areas (which have all been completely lacking for years now). I imagine Morsi will be quickly blinded by the elite neighborhood he lives in, and the trials by city officials to portray the new cities as the cure to all of our continuous urban failures.

Morsi indeed could mean an electric shock to the dead body of the new cities program and Egyptian suburbs.

On Cairobserver

A couple of weeks ago I attended the launch of the printed edition of www.cairobserver.com.  The blog has been online for almost 1.5 years and is concerned with ‘Cairo’s architecture and building, urban fabric and city life’ and is run by Mohamed Elshahed in an open contribution based format. The 2 hour launching event started with a short introduction from Mohamed and some comments from his guests and turned into a rather short open discussion with the audience on issues like land policies, public engagement, and informal settlements. In his introduction Mohamed emphasized that the publication spurred from his belief that the discourse about the city and its architecture should be based on wider societal participation and engagement, and that without careful repositioning of the professionals within a larger system of public conscious the field would only become more irrelevant by time.

After the event was over, I managed to carefully study the publication and come up with several points that I think are essential to highlight in order to have a better understanding of the state of discourse in Egypt.

Print matters

The decision to produce a printed edition of a blog is a very risky decision. Although this is not the first, only a few could be called successes, at least in this field. As we all turn to the internet to get our news and information, digital blogs have become the easiest way to engage with like-minded people. And that’s exactly its drawback. If you are not interested in these subjects, the likelihood of you stumbling upon cairobserver is very minimal. On the other hand, print has very different rules. Although its not as flexible nor extendable as a blog, engaging the reader physically still has its appeal to a lot of people. It is also a much easier way to engage a wider audience, especially in a place like Egypt. Printing the edition in A3 newspaper format, Mohammed also managed to keep the publication simple, share-able, lightweight, graphically elaborate, and cheap to produce. A publication that really doesn’t suffer from the real burdens associated with a publication.

Arabic… Arabic… Arabic:

Realizing that the real audience in such an endeavor use Arabic to discuss and debate these issues, and trying to engage with non-academics and non-specialists, Mohammed managed to translate many of the posts and articles from the blog that were originally written in English into Arabic. Architects are quite difficult to understand in any language they use, so the attempt to translate their texts into another language without loosing too much of the meaning, yet not resorting to direct translations that don’t make any sense, is quite a difficult task. With the help of Nabil Shawkat, I thought the translated texts were very clear and informative. They did not use any overly complicated terminology that architects usually use. The threads of ideas were quite easy to follow, and the arguments remained interesting. Again, this was a very successful decision to widen readership, engagement and debate. The blog itself has transformed over the last months to include more posts written in Arabic from different contributors, which indicates a genuine interest in this direction.

Why pay for that

I would like to think that the decision by the British Council to spend their grant money for artists on such a project is a decision based on a larger interest in promoting urbanism and architecture-related projects rather than a specific interest in cairobserver. Realizing the necessity of moving the discourse of architecture and the city from the professional realm to that of normal citizens and engaging them in order to create a larger ‘movement’ surrounding this field, instead of within it, is very promising. Their belief that architecture-related content deserves to be made available, read, and discussed by everybody makes a fundamental statement about the state of discourse in Egypt and its future.

The more the merrier

Although the publication presents opinions and arguments on a wide range of topics (from transportation to heritage to governance and public policy), I believe this diversity was a bit distracting even if it kept the publication fresh and fast-paced. Overall, I don’t think it compromised the continuous thread going through the whole publication, while keeping all of the different views juxtaposed. It also sent a message that collectiveness and collaboration are essential in dealing with the city, in dissecting its problems and in providing assumptions and positions.

The cairobserver publication is definitely a big step on the way of opening up the discussion on architectural and urban issues in a huge and out of control city like Cairo, especially in a post revolutionary condition, when a lot of the existing models and ideas need serious re-evaluation and re-positioning.

The complete publication is available for download here.

On Control

When my partners and I decided to enter the competition to re-envision the Bab al Bahrain Square in Manama, which was held in early 2012, we were intrigued by a number of different issues. First, and most importantly, Bahrain resembled a political situation that was quite unique with its recent protesting movement, police and army crackdown on protestors, and the demolishing of Lulu roundabout (the place where protesting was happening). From this angle, Bahrain was a place where the idea of the political role of public space was indeed needed to be challenged and perhaps rethought. This was one of the two targets required in the competition brief itself, to question and rethink what a contemporary public space could be within the understanding of the current Arab World (i.e. how will it be used and what it will represent). Secondly, we read the competition, with its brief and international jury, as a trial from the monarchy to engage in political propaganda to enhance their image in front of the western world, especially that all eyes were fixed on Manama as the cultural capital of the Arab world of 2012. With such an international jury, we naively imagined that the role of the Minister of Culture on the jury would be a purely political propaganda role, a genuine trial to send out signals of free expression, engagement and debate, with the intention that the results would reflect this shift in attitude towards the political public. Thirdly, the competition was apparently quite well-organized. Noura al Sayeh, who was responsible for the winning entry for Bahrain in the Venice biennale in 2010, was apparently quite energetic, and committed to the idea, and I could imagine, had gone through a lot of opposition in order to make this competition happen the way it did. Finally, I was personally interested because, although I am Egyptian, I was born and raised in Bahrain till I was 17 when I started my architectural education in Egypt. I was quite familiar with the social and political issues of Bahrain, as well as with all the physical issues of BAB square. I had also witnessed the transformation of tahrir square during the Egyptian revolution in early 2011, and the change that happened in our perception of what a public space constitutes, what it means, and how it operates.

It is then quite impossible to understand the problematic of this competition without including all the different factors that affect it. On the macro scale, there is the regional political situation, the Arab Spring, and its effect on the protesting in Bahrain, and the strategy in which it was handled by the GCC army forces. On the micro scale, there was the demolishing of Lulu square, a strong symbolic act that portrayed the political significance of public space in Bahrain, its possibilities and its limits. There was also the ongoing protesting, mostly decentralized and dispersed, and its calls for freedom (of speech, assembly, and participation) as well as social, political and economic reform. And of course, there was the specific site conditions, the old city, the lost connection to the waterfront, the overwhelming parking lot…etc. Dismissing any of these important issues, or degrading the symbolic nature of the competition or the BAB square, especially in such timing, would result in very shallow outcomes, and if endorsed by the state (organizers) could be considered a pure act of dictatorship similar to that of demolishing Lulu square.

Needless to say, the results were a big disappointment for us. Not because we did not win, but rather because the winning entries, each in its own way, disregarded the very basic premises of the competition. Instead of reviving the square as a ‘liberated’ public space, a space for assembly, protesting and challenging, a space that is accessible and well connected to its surroundings, a space that represents freedom of speech, movement, congregation, and activities, the winning entries created bland, fragmented, and heavily controlled spaces.

In an extreme mix of a franchised copy of the swiss landscape and fake disneyfied architecture of the gulf, the first winner replaced the large public space with an artificial lake surrounded by a promenade and dotted by a mixture of activities in fishermen huts. The argument is that the void will connect people.  The fountain in the middle of the lake (a gift from Geneva) resembles Lulu square sculpture. And that is as close as it gets to reading into the socio-political situation of Bahrain and the region. The second place winner decided, voluntarily, to wall off the space. An 11m high wall surrounds the space and dissects it into 2 ‘rooms’. A myriad of activities are promoted inside the walls, but none outside. A pure call for dictatorship control, with a flagrant disregard for a politically liberated ‘free access’ public space that is the ambition of the Bahraini people. With the new walls, everything will be controlled, all voices will be contained, no additional army forces will be needed. Finally, the third winner, taking a formal inspiration from tahrir square and mecca mosque (the circular shape), focused on incorporating the car parking on the ground level of the space with the public activities. In a radial organization, program and car parking are intertwined chaotically. While the jury celebrates this ‘embracing of the automobile’ as a strategy that proposes new possibilities for public space, this totally negates major contemporary urbanist thought on promoting pedestrian use of public spaces and cities to create clean and vibrant communities. Furthermore, incorporating cars into the depth of public space eliminates again any possibilities for allowing large congregations of people, and thus fragments the space along car paths into smaller pockets of disconnected activities.

I believe that the wining projects failed to realize, or intentionally overlooked, the potential of BAB square as a symbol of the political struggle in Bahrain, and as a representation of social and political control. If the jury, as it was promoted, was seeking innovative contemporary interpretations of public space within the current moment in the Arab World, I genuinely believe that these projects, and those similar to them, should have been automatically dismissed, in favor of those creating a 'liberated' space physically, symbolically and morally.

If the jury’s decision was not influenced by any political pressures from the state (represented by the minister), and had decided to intentionally celebrate this clear opposition of the ideals of the Arab Spring (a movement by citizens to regain control over their countries physically and symbolically), then we are again facing stubbornness from the west (winners and jury members) in realizing what is really happening in the Arab Spring, what it means to the people of the region, and what they will never accept anymore. This could be understood as a significant decision to stand against the Arab Spring and side with controversial regimes and practices. Promoting and supporting dictatorial practices of control over public space and endangering people’s control on their cities in favor of established controversial political regimes in this critical moment of history in the region is a huge blow to the credibility of western architects, urbanists and thinkers. What western architects and planners are yet to realize, is that Arabs will no longer be controlled... no matter how high you build the walls.

On the contrary, if the state representative in the jury was the one with the final say in setting the trajectory of the winning schemes, then this was, as usual, yet another example of how architectural competitions are politically manipulated to advocate a specific political agenda (this time of the Bahraini regime), and raises a lot of questions on the decision of the jury members to continue in the jury under these circumstances of being dictated what to promote, as well as their credibility as established architects and practitioners. If that was the case, which I regard highly improbable, it is a shame that our profession remains continuously weak and powerless in front of those in power, especially with jury members of such stance.

The competition results for BAB square do not only disappoint us, but also make us wonder why it was held in the first place.

Left : Demolished Lulu Square, Right : Protests in Lulu square in early 2011 (note peaceful protest written on the ground)

Bab Al Bahrain area existing situation

BAB 1st place winner : Pearl Dive by Lukas Lenherr

BAB 2nd place winner : Two Rooms by Baukuh and Guido Tesio

BAB 3rd place winner : New Times Square by Partizan Publik and DUS architects / partners in OPEN COOP 

BAB competition entry : Voicing Bahrain by Contrast Designs

BAB pavilion : by noura al sayeh + leopold banchini

 BAB competition entry by Ahmed Hazem, Ahmed Hendawy, Mohamed Hegazy, Mohamed El Shawadfy

 BAB competition entry by Ahmed Maghraby

   BAB competition entry by Atelier Uraiqat

    BAB competition entry by Influx Studio

On Defiance

The outraging reality of downtown Cairo where concrete blocks have been cutting off streets preventing residents and buisnesses from moving in the surrounding area of the ministry of interior has been widely discussed and criticized. Two weeks ago some graffiti artists challenged the walls with an event called 'mafeesh godran' promoted via social media, and drew street extensions of what happens on the other side, art challenges authority.

More information here 
And a detailed coverage here

The photos below have been floating around on facebook, only one indicates the photographer's name. 

The Red Lines of Cairo

One of the red lines that were added surrounding the ministry of defense area, and where barbed wire, and army soldiers prevent Friday marches from proceeding forward. On normal weekdays, they are just painted lines... traces of dissecting Cairo and its people.

photo by author

Cairo; a city of walls & barricades

"Recurrent street battles between police and protesters have led the interior ministry to literally wall itself in"

Map via Ahram Online