Unmasking Cairo: The Architecture of the City in an Age of Contradictions

Ziada, Hazem; Gohar, Amir

Abstract

Cairo is a city that is changing dramatically. How does one probe a city amidst dynamic change? And what role does architecture play in it?

About this Event:
Underpinning this symposium is a hypothesis that a distinct phase in Cairo’s urban/architectural and socio-economic histories started to take shape in the last decade of the twentieth century – that the 2011 Egyptian uprising was symptomatic of a longer wave of changes in Cairo’s ‘city making’ that arguably started in the early-1990s. Since then, Cairo has witnessed a sharpening of socio-economic and political contradictions that have profoundly transformed its physical fabric along with its experiences, perceptions and cognitive mapping. In Cairo, the urban seems to overwhelm the architecture. Yet, the judicious eye discerns architecture’s potent role in Cairo’s ongoing urban change. As contributors to this symposium argue, architectural developments – among the city’s primary productive industries and recent sources of wealth-generation – are key to deciphering Cairo’s contradictory condition. The socio-economic problems suffered by Cairo and similar cities of the Global South may be more acute or apparent, but are far from absent in cities of the North, particularly since the 2008 Recession and the post-2011 waves of immigration. The theoretical discourse on Cairo’s contemporary architecture and its socio-economic contradictions resonates well beyond its limits.

• Presentation Conference Type: Presentation / Talk
• Conference Name: Unmasking Cairo: The Architecture of the City in an Age of Contradictions
• Start Date: Feb 26, 2021
• End Date: Feb 26, 2021
• Deposit Date: Feb 3, 2023
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/10423073
• Publisher URL: http://majlis-remomm.fr/71434
• Related Public URLs: https://research.hud.ac.uk/architecture/events/unmaskingcairo/; ; http://majlis-remomm.fr/71434