Shelter as Capital: Egypt’s fight for Domicile Against ‘Gentrification’
KARIM MALAK
Borderlines inaugurates its first book forum titled “Shelter as Capital” which engages with urban politics in the Global South and draws the connections between Egyptian and Indian urban politics. This essay is the second part of five in a book forum dedicated to Yahia Shawkat’s book: Egypt’s Housing Crisis.
Private agricultural land that is informally subdivided and built on. The nine-story block is clearly not a family home. Mansuriya Canal, Giza. April 2012. (Photograph by Yahia Shawkat.)
“Housing is social…[h]ousing is money…[h]ousing is political,” writes Yahia Shawkat in his masterful second book Egypt’s Housing Crisis. Yet he insightfully parses out each of his three programmatic statements to his book; beginning with his first premise that housing is social. He shows the reader how housing only became a money machine in the 1970s when a housing market in Egypt was born. Prior to that, Yahia astutely argues, the government had treated it as a ‘political’ issue and even before it had encouraged self-building which for the most part had provided positive results. With Egypt standing as the largest producer of housing per capita in the world, and with an astounding rate of vacant properties, the difference between housing – as a public issue – and houses as a social requirement for domicile, becomes clear. He points to Milad Hanna, a famous Egyptian engineer in the 1960s and 1970s, citing his famously coined phrase of siyadat al-muqawil ‘the sovereignty of the contractor’ to point to increased financialization of housing. It is the contractor, for Hanna and Shawkat, who sets the national agenda of housing in order to reap its benefits in the form of more contracts. Yahia is thus emphatic that housing cannot be solved by the state, it is too big a monster; but in so appropriating and marshalling that discourse of crisis a different process was underway. This process aimed to control the subject and also to financialize the crisis. Yahia traces a pervasive development that unfolded whereby these housing projects and discourse of crisis created a new object for intervention and created the model subject through their material environment: their house.
All three facets of urban politics in Egypt come to the fore through a different mechanism. But the discourse that binds them – namely the housing crisis azmat al-iskan – is a relatively new term that belongs to 1960s Egypt and its socialist policy of creating housing for all. The shift, from the abstract article in mushkilat iskan to the denominative mushkilat al-iskan the housing problem, is a shift that is known to most historians and theoreticians of the economy as opposed to the older use of the word economy – as Timothy Mitchell has argued. The later and newer inauguration of an object of intervention in the 20th century designated a space for statisticians, economists and for government officials to manage resources in reference to this new object as a totality: the economy. All of this is to say that, analogously, Egypt’s Housing Crisis is manufactured whereby a new object of intervention is created for other means; be they political, social or market goals. One would be remiss not to appreciate this seductive narrative when making sense of Egypt’s “postapocalyptic” housing scene – to borrow from Yahia. The state regularly refers to squatter settlements as unsanitary and unsafe licentious spaces of crime, ashawa’iyat, that are un-zoned and often the result of incursions on state land. The state also regularly illegalizes those who hold tenure and fails to recognize their customary rights to land which they can often get legally recognized through litigation. The latest example in contemporary Egypt of the illegalization of tenure is the island of al-Warraq. Since 2017, residents of al-Warraq have been subject to a state of siege after their land was expropriated in order to forcibly evict them; presumably for a real estate project. In this review essay I want to tease through these different means to argue that the shift that Yahia speaks of – and manufacture of this discourse of crisis – has its roots in a larger process that Egypt underwent in the early 19th century. This process inaugurated a shift from popular customary mechanisms of sovereignty to a different modern and Bodinian version of sovereignty.
Yahia historicizes the shift to a discourse of crisis by focusing on the very first housing initiatives under monarchical Egypt. In the 1930s and 1940s Egyptian housing projects aimed at creating the ‘model’ citizen similar to the Dutch Woonschols experiment that likewise aimed at creating the model citizen through housing schools. He reminds us that such schemes began and were aimed at producing the “model” rural subject by producing “model” and symmetrical villages to house the unruly Bedouins who settled in the Delta. These villages corresponded to the hamlets of England which later became known in Egypt as ‘izbas and were transmitted by one 19th century bureaucrat named Joseph Hekekyan under Mehemet Ali. Hekekyan observed and sketched these hamlets when he was in England in the 1840s – as Timothy Mitchell has also shown. These schemes of corporatist and colonial housing continued with the Suez Canal Company’s housing plots in Port Fuad built in 1874 and the Heliopolis Housing Company in 1911. The key takeaway from his point is that housing was a way to control and fashion a model subject who could be controlled and disciplined in a village that controlled their movement. Yahia’s genealogical work reminds us why at the heart of Cairo today there are several hold over hamlet neighborhoods with the term ‘izba in its name – such as ‘izbat Awlad ‘Allam off Mussadaq street; a street named after 1952 Iranian Prime Minsiter Mohamed Mosaddegh. This particular ‘izba belonged to Princess Fatma the daughter of Egypt’s Khedive Ismail. Her estate included several hamlets in this ‘izba with her palace remaining intact until today in the form of the Agricultural Museum. These ‘izbas not only had mansions for their owners, but houses for guards, intendants nazir and a dawwar livestock barn; in many ways these are the colonial artifacts of Egypt’s housing predicaments today.
But Yahia’s own philological work can stand to inform his genealogy. The word iskan in fact has another interesting Ottoman/Arabic origin which comes from the Ottoman word sükne written in Arabic script thukna – which was later incorporated into the Arabic language as thakana: meaning military barracks. Corporatist ways of organizing domicile and abode were first fashioned militarily in addition to British informed ways of organizing lands into ‘izbas/hamlets. In the same vein I want to suggest that a deeper genealogy explains how other facets of British common law made their way into Egypt while also etching away at the customary ways of negotiating and providing proof of tenure. In the process a transition occurred from treating one’s abode and domicile – the affective idea of a ‘home’ which corresponded to a particular geographic domicile – into a physical place that was termed a house and required certain physical attributes that were standardized.
Yahia nevertheless is able to triangulate such customary and traditional holdover regimes that govern housing; be it the racketeering that occurs in the form of ‘key’ money – khiliw rijl – or outright protection money for residents of a particular neighborhood. His intervention into tracing this form of ‘grey’ tenure. In Egypt, people can squat in an area and have utilities registered in their name until they prove to a court it is their permanent abode. This example of tenure demonstrates how people have built homes before the era of private property and how it is a holdover of non-state forms of tenure that contribute to Egypt’s housing crisis. Yet, it has also fueled a heavy-handed response from the state to evict people who have encroached on its land; making housing in Egypt a precarious situation since the vast majority life in this form of grey tenure. From 2011 until 2014, when Egypt underwent three different regime changes, scores of Coptic Christians were evicted in what has been labelled as ‘sectarian’ incidents in which to be sure Egyptian Coptic Christians underwent discrimination and were forced to leave their homes. Yet Yahia places such events within the wider frame of communitarian violence and struggle for autonomy; of which one facet is housing and another is discriminatory practices based on faith. He does not fall into the sectarian trap of essentializing the experience of Copts. He reminds the reader that such communal methods of adjudication, outside state law, confront ordinary citizens as well as Copts. Egypt’s Housing Crisis thus places housing at the intersection of communal politics and politics proper – rebutting against the essentialization of extra-legal spaces of contention.
Yet such customary practices can also be invented. As it so happens the idea of Khiliw Rijl was first codified in Qadri Pasha’s 19th century treatise dealing with waqf properties: Qanun al-‘adl wa al-Insaf lil-Qada’ ‘ala Mushkilat al-Awqaf. As a jurist, Qadri Pasha wrote many codes that the Egyptian state used to codify its laws at the turn of the 19th century. Yet this particular article stood out as a novelty when compared to older pre-modern treatises. It demonstrates that ever so slowly ‘communal’ forms of jurisprudence were being hybridized and ossified by jurists during Egypt’s occupation by the British – demonstrating what Mahmood Mamdani has shown as a form of invented tradition. More than that, Yahia’s discussion of the Egyptian state’s propensity to evoke eminent domain more recently – in the face of many challenges – should pause to have us think if the state is extending its sovereignty when it does so as opposed to being a process that is accepted as fait accompli.
In England it took close to six centuries for that process to occur. It began with what E.P. Thompson has historicized as the loss of common usufruct land and resources owing to the ‘enclosures’ decrees of the 13th century. As late as the 19th century, the British House of Commons debated the ‘Mortmain’ laws (morte-main; literally dead hand) while it was inquiring into the status of what it deemed common land that had been neglected and ‘dead’. Since the arrival of property laws in Egypt came through colonialism in the 19th century, no wonder the state has yet to extend its reach elsewhere and continues to amass land as late as the 21st century. Till today it continues to create committees to reclaim state land; land that was arguably never claimed by the state to begin with. In the United States and England both states ushered a violent form of expropriation of land that witnessed the genocidal murder of natives and the extension of eminent domain through property rights. The same 15 years that Yahia alludes to as the amount of years a court in Egypt requires a resident to hold tenure in order to acquire title in fact, follows British common law; it corresponds to legal theorist F.W. Maitland’s 15-year stipulation to prove continuous possession which is also known in common law as assize by novel dissesin.
If Egypt thus has been using the discourse of housing to extend its sovereignty and reach, how have the people responded and resisted? I would like to close this essay by considering two moments where the state was weakened and its façade of legalism fell to the ground. At those contentious moments a different array of norms was laid bare. It showed that popular illegalism and housing norms in the form of self-building and squatting were widely accepted but then came to be threatened by the state. Indeed, this is Foucault’s disagreement with E.P. Thompson’s narrative of the accumulation of land – following Marx – when narrating the inception of the enclosure laws as synonymous with the rise of the landed gentry. It is not that these land decrees corresponded with the class interests of the ruling bloc or the means of production only. But rather, it is that they were done after a revolutionary moment that sought to start anew and begin to implement laws that were widely disregarded before which everyone broke. Popular illegalisms – such as vagabondage, squatting and living on enclosed lands – were now enforced by the new magistrates of the revolutionary regime who stood to benefit from these decrees while hurting those of yesteryear. In Egypt the same argument can be made. For years Egyptian peasants had benefited from Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser’s land reform. Veterans of the Yemeni Civil war and the 1967 War against Israel received special land grants. In the 1990s, their tenure was disregarded after a new agricultural land tenure law was passed by the ruling party in 1997. Instead of paying land tax and making them eligible to hold tenure, the plots of land peasants occupied were sold to agricultural investors while security forces evicted the peasants who lived on them. Yet after the Revolution of January 25th 2011 these peasants returned and occupied their land in Fayum; their so called manufactured de facto illegalism had become void. These customary mechanisms have also been recognized jurisprudentially despite the most draconian of legislation. In November of 2019 Egypt’s Supreme Administrative court set an important principle on the subject of eminent domain. It took umbrage to the state’s prolonged execution of demolition and eviction orders that spanned several years, using it as prima facie evidence of implicit recognition of tenure which cannot be revoked. The resistance of Egyptian squatters which had received de facto recognition had thus also received de jure recognition thanks to this ruling; making eminent domain of the state inapplicable in this situation.
To assume that Egypt’s Housing Crisis – like that England and the US – is a result of recent efforts of gentrification by new Gulf and Egyptian real estate companies, is to transplant the history of England and the US onto Egypt. In Egypt, the process of land expropriation and seizure only began in the last two centuries and the fight for tenure remains. Gentrification usually refers to the purchase and ‘upgrade’ of neighborhoods via the acquisition of property deeds through deep pockets, and sometimes muscle, in order to make way for more expensive projects that introduce a different class of tenants. It is not only about the state’s legal prerogative of eminent domain. In fact many gentrification projects can only happen if and when the state evokes eminent domain to evict so-called ‘risky’ housing; this was the ugly story of the gentrification of black neighborhoods in Manhattan by Robert Moses that gave Manhattan its celebrated crown jewel: Central Park. In Egypt the fight for domicile, tenure and homes still remains at its beginning and the precursory work of gentrification – application of eminent domain – is still contested. To forget that history is to believe, and correspondingly fall prey, to the very discourse that sees housing as a commodity and not as a communally entrenched and social phenomenon. It is to give up the cause of housing – and to borrow from Yahia – believe in the manufactured crisis of azmat al-iskan.
Karim Malak is the Middle East editor at Borderlines and a PhD candidate at the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies.