NADA EL-KOUNY

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 third part of five in a book forum dedicated toYahia Shawkat’s book: Egypt’s Housing Crisis.

How do homes enter into multiple realms of life—from marriages, to income, to governance? How can we understand Egypt’s different governance regimes through a history of their housing policies and strategies aimed at  population management and control. Yahia Shawkat, in Egypt’s Housing Crisis: The Shaping of Urban Space, unearths the housing policies and practices of the Egyptian government from the mid-     1800s through 2016. Each chapter takes a chronological focus, providing a genealogy of the developments in different housing forms and the means by which they are regulated. Egypt’s housing crisis ultimately provides a lens through which to examine  the repository of housing governance records in Egypt over the past eighty years. Shawkat’s  book is a timely read, coming at  a moment in which the Sisi government has initiated a campaign against informally built buildings. The government has pursued a policy of tasaluh (reconciliation), mandating that informally constructed buildings pay fines equal to the cost of their construction (55). 

In the book’s first chapter, “Etymology of a Crisis,” Shawkat analyzes how different regimes have addressed Egypt’s  housing problem revealing a  discursive shift from the “problem” of homes to the housing “crisis.”      Each time a crisis was mentioned, the discourse shifted, delineating the problem but also making it the object of governmental intervention: new funds would be dedicated to this crisis, new apartment units built, or the government would initiate new population relocation schemes. Shawkat’s discursive analysis provides a useful way to assess the complex relationship between how a problem with housing emerges      and then materializes in actuality, through the provision of housing or the relocation and dispossession of citizens in existing homes. Shawkat centers his study on a primary paradox: Egypt has a housing problem owing to a general lack: citizens struggle to find adequate and affordable housing. At the same time, however, there is a significant amount of vacant housing around the country.

When commuting on the Cairo-Alexandria agricultural road, one does not have to look far to find high-rise apartment buildings that appear empty and uninhabited. Driving along the Cairo-Alexandria agricultural road, orange-colored residential units—built for youth under Hosni Mubarak’s government in the 1990s—     have remained empty since their construction. At the same time as these uninhabited buildings remain, he country has also seen the large-scale demolition of homes built informally on agricultural land. Government-led campaigns against building informal homes in the countryside have posed a particular problem, as these campaigns concern building structures on land designated for architectural use. Through doctoral fieldwork conducted in a Nile Delta Beheira governorate village between 2016 and 2018 I found that large scale demolitions were taking place by the government. Government policy prohibits construction on land designated for agricultural use in the countryside. Despite this, there has been a significant increase in residential constructions built on agricultural land since 2011. In 2017, while engaged in fieldwork, I observed army tanks demolishing several residential buildings on the Cairo-Alexandria agricultural road. In other, less visible, newly-built homes inside the villages, many informal constructions have taken place. For many rural inhabitants living on these lands, it has proved more profitable to use the land for construction purposes, rather than to continue cultivating it while also bearing the brunt of debilitating agricultural debts accumulated since the 1980s. The increase in construction on agricultural land is driven by the need for housing as family sizes increase, especially as newly married male members of the house usually reside in the same buildings as their families. Given that many apartment blocks designated by the government for youth are uninhabitable, people continue to risk housing demolition or pay hefty fines for their informally built homes on land designated for agricultural use. Shawkat engages in-depth with the process of tasaluh (reconciliation), stating:

Instead of recognizing self-building as a legitimate form of housing provision—and so designing a policy that accommodates and encourages it—successive regimes have sought to trap builders, and lately buyers of informally built homes, in a manufactured informality. The government creates a demand for infrastructure and recognition, which is met only through criminality. It is an informality that people have cut their teeth learning to negotiate, in order to provide themselves with decent homes, (55-56).      

The government’s position thus creates a paradox, in which the construction of housing is criminalized at the same time that government-constructed homes remain vacant. While this criminalization is faced by city-dwellers as well as those in rural areas, the latter face the added problem of these residential constructions being built on land designated for agricultural use.    

     Fieldwork I conducted in the Beheira governorate made  evident that  rural inhabitants continued to build housing on agricultural land even when construction was restricted by the government. A 1966 law prohibited rural landowners from building on more than two percent of their total area owned. But t     he majority of small-scale farmers, if landowning, held only about two acres of land, making building a residence on two percent while making a sustainable living nearly impossible. The 1966 law further stipulated that the land cannot be left barren for more than a year and has to be continuously cultivated. Despite this legislation     , farmers do build on land designated for agricultural use, in doing so facing fines, demolitions, and possible jail sentences. That farmers continue to take these risks is indicative of the fact that sole dependency on agriculture as a small-scale farmer in Egypt has become an untenable livelihood. In addition, rural villagers cannot meet their housing needs due to the increasing population boom. While lax security measures allowed for significant rural infrastructural increases took place in the construction of residential units after 2011,  many of my research interlocutors observed that there have long been conflicts over villagers’ building on land designated for agricultural use, especially after the 1990s. Most significantly, the state expresses concern about the decline in cultivable land—while failing to  provide the means for small scale farmers to live on and develop their properties. Instead, the state increasingly seeks to censure farmers for building on and leaving their land barren. This is connected to a more perduring debate concerning the rural and urban divide, a topic that requires more space for exploration than is available here. For the purposes of this discussion, the rural and urban divide is also an infrastructurally manufactured divide. Rural-designated areas are infrastructurally disadvantaged, at the same time that government regulations over land use make the rural need for efficient and affordable housing just as pressing— if not more—than that in urban areas.    

In chapter four, “‘Model’ Villages for ‘Model’ Citizens,” Shawkat provides a genealogy of rural population control as enacted through housing policies, tracing land-use policies over the course of the century. The chapter dives into a series of shifting policies, including agricultural estates, or Izbas, aimed at feudal agricultural production in the 1840s through the 1950s, policies of disease control in the 1930s and 1940s, model villages initiated under President Gamal Abdel-Nasser’s regime in the 1950s to 1970s, vacant new government-built desert settlements that Shawkat refers to as “neoliberal ghost villages” in the 1990s, and finally,      the reincarnation of rural Izbas through current-day agricultural workers compounds. This chapter is central to Shawkat’s argument that government policies have consistently failed to provide rural citizens with adequate dwellings. 

Through research  conducted in one of the Nasser government-led land reclamation villages—similar to the socialist model villages Shawkat writes about—I found that such villages were created and eventually ruined by retaliatory political and economic projects of successive regimes. The village in Al-Daqahliya governorate was created in 1956, four years after the 1952 Revolution. The government built sixty homes for the newly settled farmers who were to settle in the village and to cultivate the barren lands. Farmers were offered tenancies for private ownership of land, on the condition that they developed the land into arable, productive fields and paid symbolic rents to the Ministry of Agrarian Reform and Land Reclamation. In 1962, the village farmers received official ownership documents. But this move was reversed in the 1990s, when new land ownership policies forced farmers into buying the land, they had previously been given ownership over. This policy shift coincided with the shift in tenancy laws officially passed in 1992, along with the open market liberalization reforms starting with President Anwar al-Sadat, followed through with President Hosni Mubarak, that focused on returning land sequestered by the Izba estate landowning families to their prior owners. The policy change meant that farmers living in land reclamation villages were expected to buy their properties from the state at 1992 land market values. Even though land reclamation villages were not former Izba properties, many faced the fate of the shift in land tenancy laws of the 1990s. Village members reported complete neglect of their communities in the upkeep of their homes and the infrastructural services, as government-built structures were left to ruin, leaving village inhabitants to carry out necessary restorations themselves. The fact of their creation as socialist model villages under the Nasser regime meant that subsequent regimes—Sadat’s liberalization and Mubarak’s neo-liberalization—viewed and treated as such villages as relics of the socialist era. Nasser-era land reforms were therefore portrayed as a hindrance to economic development and as part of a bygone socialist-leaning era, at a time when Egypt was moving closer to  the West through ‘Open Door’ (infitah) economic liberalization policies. Village inhabitants were made to bear the consequences of these shifting political regimes and their contradictory political projects. In effect, the government deemed the villages unimportant after Nasser’s regime, an attitude  experienced by villagers through neglect of infrastructure, housing, and agricultural policies. 

          Many of those who grew up in the village and experienced its failures are also taking part in the building of their own homes, schools, and other missing infrastructural services in their villages, primarily through migrant remittances. Additionally, several also work in large-scale construction projects out of their village in private and government-led projects. Some of the government-constructed projects are the new graduate homes that Shawkat describes at length. This trend reveals the cyclical nature of these government-constructed plans through the decades, from villages, to homes and the need to pay closer attention to the actors behind that process. It is crucial to think about to what extent this experience shapes their subjectivity and to what extent the village locals possibly have an input in reshaping these projects. Moreover, it is necessary to think further about the different forms of continuity in housing policy, as well as how informality and government regulation are constantly being negotiated and reformulated. 

Shawkat’s work provides a space in which to think through these and other questions of housing needs through a sociological and anthropological lens. Scholars and readers interested in urban geography, architecture, Middle East Studies, sociology, and anthropology will find much material of interest in this book. Shawkat’s extensive use of archival sources, from policy reports to presidential speeches as well as his own experience working in housing policy analysis, make this a comprehensive look at Egypt’s how housing policies have consistently disempowered both rural and urban dwellers.

Nada El-Kouny recently completed her PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from Rutgers University. Nada currently works as Research Manager at the Center for Migration and Refugee Studies at the American University in Cairo for the UKRI GCRF South-South Migration, Inequality and Development Hub (MIDEQ).