WJ DORMAN

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 is the fifth and last essay in a book forum dedicated to Yahia Shawkat’s book: Egypt’s Housing Crisis.

Online commemorations of ‘25th of January’ were especially sombre on this tenth anniversary. These events seemed to mark the definitive failure of the 2011 mass movement, and the political opening (however brief and conditional) which resulted. Many retrospectives were framed in the now near-total closure of public space. The authoritarian resurgence of Summer 2013 was also a profoundly missed chance to take  seriously the challenges of actually governing Egypt.

Despite the failures of political transition, the post-Mubarak period enabled Egyptians to consider publicly their built environment, and to imagine what a more just urban order might entail. At a conference about Cairo in the late 1990s—organized by Middle East Report and held at Cairo University—local scholars scrupulously refused to engage with research presentations looking at informal and sha‘bi (popular) neighborhoods. By the 2000s, however, a new generation of Egyptian urbanists, often coming from social-justice or -development backgrounds, had emerged. Since 2011, this new generation of scholars have figured prominently in conversations about the urban sector. While the post-2013 resurgence has not silenced critical voices, it has drastically narrowed the public imaginaire. The al-Sisi government’s attempt to reassert state ‘sovereignty’ over the built environment has combined brutal interventions with a long-standing tradition of state-led mega projects: the regime has promised to build hundreds of thousands of apartments and, in 2015, announced development of a New Administrative Capital. Such ‘edifice urbanism’ usually fails to engage with Egyptian social reality, but may serve to ‘crowd out’ dissenting voices by embarking on a series of eye-catching (but ephemeral) construction projects.

Egypt’s Housing Crisis can be located in the traditions of activist research initiated in the early 2000s, and which thrived during the brief post-2011 interregnum. The book is also an attempt to come to grips with the increasing violence, dispossession and dead-weight of post-2013 dispensation. Combining an unprecedented breadth of concern, depth of documentary research and methodological rigor, the work is a welcome addition to a body of urban-studies literature which has been largely defined by narrowly focused dissertation projects or more instrumental donor-funded studies. Previous reflections on Egypt’s Housing Crisis, in this forum, have focused on its headline concern for the commodification of housing, and Egypt’s position as embedded in global patterns of spatial accumulation and regulation. Therefore these comments will take up a different set of issues, of interest to students of social space, politics and urban-sector policymaking. 

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Shelter & land rights

Most problematically, the book’s substantive focus on housing seems overly ‘bricks and mortar’ Its exploration of the built environment might be usefully re-framed in a more analytically inclusive notion of ‘shelter.’ Such a conception might integrate a broader set of concerns including land access, spatial organization (planning) and service provision (utilities) to the issue of dwellings/settlements.

Specifically, the question of land ownership and rights is not discussed systematically, but nonetheless appears in virtually every chapter of Egypt’s Housing Crisis. For example, the Nasserist conception of housing in a ‘productionist’ paradigm—e.g. ma‘arakat al-bina (the battle for building) etc—was arguably a misdirection, distracting public attention. More important, in the long term, was the underlying hisa fil-ard (land portion). For their own use, the soldiers gradually appropriated substantial portions of the prestige Cairene district of Heliopolis. They have laid claim to a series of would-be enclaves, starting with the adjacent Madinat Nasr. As Egypt’s Housing Crisis and numerous other observers have noted, the housing sector does not suffer from an absolute shortage of units—indeed there has long been a surplus. Rather the constraint has been a shortage of sub-divided and serviced land. Land price inflation was the root cause of what became known as the ‘ashwa’iyyat: the informal self-building boom on privately held farmland around Cairo and many other Egyptian cities.

Such factors suggest that the ‘commodification of housing’ is not, by itself, the core or root cause of Egypt’s shelter crises. Indeed, it is a fairly recent phenomenon, first observed in the 2006-17 intercensal period. Instead, control of land has been a more enduring element in the Egyptian political economy, especially given the absence of a sustained process of development or capital accumulation. In the countryside, for example, the issues of landlessness and concentrated holdings in extended family networks, have had a more structural significance than the semi-carceral ‘izab (hamlets). The ‘rent gap’ and the resulting predation by state agencies-turned-property entrepreneurs likely reflect an unbundling—whether conjunctural or instrumental—of land rights from those of housing, and the former’s generalised erosion. The implicit value of land rights is further manifest in the continuing reluctance of state agencies to regularize informal settlements built on state land or to include land title in public-sector housing projects. Egypt’s political trajectory since February 2011 has graphically illustrated the elite aversion to bottom-up demands for inclusion. Egypt’s Housing Crisis helps reveal the underlying stakes.

Egyptian state qua ‘black box’

The chapter narratives inventory a profusion of housing initiatives by post-1952 governments, as well as those put forward by their predecessors and earlier social reformers. However their implementation and significance are often difficult to substantiate. Model housing schemes were frequently proposed, but rarely built as intended (if at all). At best, planned urbanism has been absorbed into the fabric of actually existing cities and communities. Housing policy in the Nasser era is perhaps more notable for apparent memories of its “massive” public housing investment, than the number of units actually built. Top-down housing production in the final decade of the Mubarak government often resulted in vacant units and uninhabitable developments. One post-2011 project ran for four years without delivering any shelter. 

Egypt’s increasing independence since 1922 included the development of an official culture characterized by a steady stream of legislation, decrees and regulations. But yet again their significance is often unclear. Legislative and executive actions have sometimes had an almost ritual quality, standing in for actual governance rather than constituting it. In the housing sector, for example, the Nasser government and its successors periodically amnestied informal self-building. Yet such declarations were of uncertain applicability, and perhaps reflected little more than de facto policies of neglect and indifference. They may yet fail to protect informal homesteaders against the al-Sisi government’s more confrontational approach to spatial control. Successive governments also sought to reform the pre-1952 system of rent-controlled tenancies expanded during the Nasser era. How such reforms shaped the actual quotidian processes of landlord-tenant bargaining, is nonetheless unclear. Egypt’s Housing Crisis documents the sharp decline in rent tenure since the mid-2000s, but also notes that the status of the (roughly) million families affected is unknown.

In part, such problems of evidence reflect the long-recognized opacity of the Egyptian state and political order. Pertinent data is not released or not even collected, or perhaps is published in ways which complicate analysis. Such opacity has an obvious instrumental value in shielding hierarchies of privilege, obscuring sources of grievance and blunting critiques. It may also reflect the more structural incapacities and absences of a state which rules but does not govern. Indeed, one of the many interesting sub-themes of Egypt’s Housing Crisis is the seeming ‘criminalization of the state’—with agencies behaving like property racketeers—raising questions as to its coherence and state-ness.

Built environment as spectacle

Egypt’s Housing Crisis speaks to long-standing suspicions that much of Egypt’s post-1952 production of habitat has been for show, rather than for shelter. The model villages of Tahrir province housed paramilitary cadres deployed during Nasser’s 1954 consolidation of power, and were shown off to Egypt’s Soviet backers. But they eventually became a casualty of regime infighting and an unsustainability of concept. Desert development—dominating the official spatial agenda since the 1970s—has always stressed the visually impressive and entailed a pronounced element of wishful thinking. From the late 1990s, its pretexts seem to have become especially perfunctory, resulting in sprawling zones of destitution and abandonment. The al-Sisi government has now initiated yet another round of monumental but environmentally perilous settlement, foregrounded by the so-called New Administrative Capital on the eastern edge of the Greater Cairo agglomeration.

Such ‘national projects’ can be variously understood as a visible fulfillment of ‘social contract’ expectations that the state provide shelter for the masses; as signs of a developmental mission through which governments have claimed purpose and legitimacy, and, more cynically, as a means of circulating rents and devolving patronage. This ‘edifice complex urbanism’ also serves to instantiate a state—beholden to a largely self-absorbed dispensation of power—which is frequently absent from the grass-roots of Egypt’s social space. It helps obscure the neglectful character of state rule, the increasingly informalized built environment and the predatory character of such interventions as do take place.

Urban governance in the breach

The realities of entrenched autocracy, neglectful rule and state incapacity have usually precluded serious consideration of governance. Students of Egyptian politics and political economy have largely focused on the post-1952 authoritarian trajectory: its reproduction and dysfunctions; internal and societal challenges; and potentials for liberalization. For all the putative discussions of ‘reform,’ there has been little concrete consideration of how Egypt might be better governed or, indeed, what the actual governance of existing Egyptian society might entail. The pathologies of the post-1952 order usually prevailed over policy analysis. Its durability preempted consideration of counterfactuals.

But the brief opening in 2011-13 meant that such substantive issues became salient, for perhaps the first time in decades. With respect to the urban sector, for example, online activists in the ‘Mahaliat’ campaign drew attention to local government as an essential institutional precondition for improved governance and management, a view taken (since the 1970s) by every serious observer of Egyptian urbanism. Yet a genuine ‘municipalization’ of Egyptian cities would force neighborhoods to confront profound disparities in community resources, as well as a socio-legal order defined by ‘states of exception.’ Egypt’s Housing Crisis concludes with some fairly anodyne proposals for reform, but the insightful analysis of the preceding chapters suggests the substantive constraints on serious urban-sector governance.

Most problematic for shelter provision, is that planned and serviced housing is unaffordable to ordinary Egyptians. The historical case studies suggest that they have usually lacked sufficient and stable incomes to buy or rent in the ‘formal’ sector. While the speculative pressures of housing commodification may account for some of the deficit, it also results from longer-term issues of under-development, wage stagnation and a rent-based political economy. Self-build has been a preferable strategy because, among other factors, it is better suited to the windfall nature of family income. However, the self-help strategies of economic precarity are a poor fit with the infrastructures necessary for mega-cities, such as Cairo, to be habitable.  Water-sector services, for example, require stable income-streams to finance operations and maintenance. Hernando DeSoto’s much-maligned notion of ‘dead capital’ notwithstanding, cities need liquidity to pay for public utilities.

Egypt’s Housing Crisis notes another long-term challenge to sustainable urbanism: the intensification of informality as the result of disrupted title continuity and the general breakdown of property registration. Such systematic ambiguity profoundly complicates the management of urban space, reinforces the unjust allocation of public resources and consequently degrades the health of communities. However instrumentalised in recent decades, the erosion of ownership rights likely reflects a more generalised institutional and juridical porousness. Rationalising the complicated mesh of conflicting ownership and usufruct claims is likely impossible without acknowledging ‘adverse possession’ and claims-in-place. But doing so raises a different sort of problematic: that of the fait accompli and the creation of ‘facts on the ground’ by the local centres of power found in both elite and subaltern neighborhoods.

The underlying dilemma is thus the lack of public authority with sufficient ‘reach’ and competence to negotiate competing demands. The Egyptian state is not entirely absent, but its presence is usually manifest as collusion, entanglement and self-serving brutality. The top-down indifference of successive governments has thus been preferable to their likely maladroit interventions. 

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Such seemingly insoluble quandaries, and not just in the urban sector, may help explain the aborted 2011-2013 political transition. Sticky structural constraints and an absence of attractive policy alternatives likely undermined substantive political agendas. They may also have helped reproduce the state-dominated imaginaire in place since the 1950s. Authoritarian resurgence hence took place on the path of least resistance. In the face of such inertia, Egypt’s Housing Crisis is a serious attempt to set out a new understanding of the built environment. Such understandings can challenge the foundations of misconception and mendacity upon which the current dispensation depends, and may someday inform the political agency of ordinary Egyptians. In the meantime, Egypt’s Housing Crisis should provoke further research and argument to such ends.

WJ Dorman previously taught at Edinburgh both in Politics and Islamic & Middle Eastern Studies, as well as at Durham University in the School of Government and International Affairs. His PhD thesis, completed at the School of Oriental and African Studies under the supervision of Charles Tripp, was joint winner of the 2008 Leigh Douglas Memorial Prize awarded by the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies. Prior to doctoral studies, he worked at the US Department of State.