Egypt grapples with new views on development

Explosion of illegal building in Cairo mirrors citizens’ battle for ownership

CAIRO - The telltale signs in post-revolutionary Egypt are not just the riots and rapes, the mega-traffic snarls and sectarian battles. There is also the highway ramp in Ard El Lewa.

After the revolution two years ago, working-class residents of that vast informal neighborhood, tired of having no direct access to the 45-mile-long Ring Road, took matters into their own hands. In the absence of functioning government, they built ramps from dirt, sand and trash. Then they invited the police to open a kiosk at the interchange.

This do-it-yourself infrastructure is not unusual in Cairo. For years, the government of former President Hosni Mubarak turned a blind eye as millions of poor Cairenes built homes without permission on private plots of agricultural land in places such as Ard El Lewa, greasing the palms of bureaucrats for basic services.

But since the revolution, the pace of illegal construction has exploded. Along with the spread of graffiti and of street vendors clogging the sidewalks downtown, this explosion is either a sign of post-revolutionary populist empowerment or of chaos, depending on one’s perspective.

A struggle pit the forces of collapse against the halting emergence of a new urban class, born in the aftermath of the revolution. Egyptians have long been experts at fending for themselves in a top-down system where the president ruled by fiat and the government was unaccountable. But now, it seems, they must improvise as never before.

Egyptians are figuring out anew how they relate to one another and to Cairo. Headlines have focused on the larger battles, but the bird’s-eye view does not always reveal what is happening at street level, on corners and in neighborhoods, where daily life today means navigating new relationshipswith fellow citizens and the spaces they share.

As Omar Nagati, a young Egyptian architect and planner, put it: “This was always a revolution about unjust urban conditions and about public space. The ramp is just one example. People now realize they have the right to determine what happens on their own streets, to their own neighborhoods. So there’s a battle of ownership throughout Egypt: over whose space this is, and who determines whose space it is.”

In Darb al-Ahmar, a conflict was playing out as developers illegally demolished old houses to throw up cookie-cutter apartment blocks.

“There’s no law enforcement, and there’s so much drama now just getting through the day here, that most people can’t worry about such things,” said Yasmine El Dorghamy, the editor of Al Rawi, Egypt’s heritage review.

Government officials promise urban improvements but push ideas about sweeping away informal neighborhoods: ridding the city of its poor while erecting skyscrapers.

Many Cairenes who can afford it continue to flee to gated communities. Mubarak’s government built highways to speed the wealthy out of town.

One such community is Katameya Heights, a golf resort with a little shopping village where the signs are in English, and Roman villas rise behind walls of bougainvillea. Since the revolution, real estate values have been rising in these gated developments, whose allure remains a life that is quiet, slow and green.

At the same time, the protests in Tahrir Square “introduced thousands of people of different classes, from all over the city, to each other and to an urban alternative to the Cairo of suburban developments. The revolution was partly about rediscovering the city on foot,” said Mohamed Elshahed, the editor of the online magazine Cairobserver.

Front Section, Pages 12 on 04/28/2013

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