‘Ashwa’iyyat — Auto-construction, Demolition, and Development in Egypt
Egypt is currently undergoing extensive modernization efforts following a decree made by the current President, Abdel Fattah al Sisi. This includes a focus on ridding the country of all informal settlements. As a result of this effort the Egyptian government and military has demolished large swathes of Cairo and Alexandria to make way for new commercial districts, highways and housing blocks. Concurrent to these large scale urban changes the Egyptian people continue to build their one homes; in a display of mass auto-construction. This paper lives within this current era of auto-construction, demolition, and development.
The new developments in Egypt will inevitably prove to be an inadequate solution to housing in Cairo. Understanding the current conditions of informality and looking at the case studies which these new developments emulate shows the fatal flaws being made in these urban plans. This ultimately does a disservice to the people who are being housed.
Informal settlements, known as ‘ashwa’iyyat, currently make up 40% of Egypt’s building stock. ‘Ashwa’iyyat are undefined, democratic and bottom-up urban conditions. They are self organized enterprises in which individuals come together to fund, plan and build multi-family houses for themselves. In Kemet I argued for a framework in which to think of buildings and built spaces as receptacles for human identity.
“These spatial moments were physical manifestations of the merging of two cultures and the creation of a new identity. Still largely undefined, still infant but distinctly new and different. At this scale of architecture, assemblage constituted the construction of this new identity. Furniture and household objects, of Egyptian and American origin, spatialized an empty box and created a sense of familiarity among that which was unfamiliar. The living room proved to be a place where the immigrant was no longer migrant. A home away from home.”
As bottom-up processes informal settlements, naturally, respond to the wants and needs of the people and in turn mirror their identities. Typically these houses are concrete-frame brick-infill constructions. This bare frame provides an empty canvas which people fill with colors, ornate decorations, and personal belongings. Their living rooms become places for the exercise of their personal agency. Informal settlements have no official designation. They are built without permits and exist within the interstitial space of society and economy; through the eyes of the state these people are invisible and do not exist. But their living rooms become places which these Egyptians use to contest their existence. They are vibrant architectures of personal identity, randomness and resilience. This personal identity is built as a part of auto-construction and is inevitably destroyed during this period of clean slate urbanization.
It is important to recognize that informality is not a condition to be fetishized and praised. While they may be culturally rich and vibrant places these areas are often plagued with poor infrastructure and poor planning. In the past, there have been instances where buildings have lost structural soundness and collapsed leading to the injury and death of many. Disease and crime also remains a major issue within informal settlements.
Informality is born out of necessity. In the 1960s Egypt’s urban population swelled as people migrated from the rural south to the urban north. In Cairo there was not enough housing for this influx of people and the population resolved to build their own. ‘Ashwa’iyyat took over Cairo. Settlements spread, covering any empty plot of land regardless of who owned it. Decades of unchecked growth have resulted in a difficult to solve problem.
In response, the Egyptian government has green lit the development of modernist style housing blocks, like Al Asmarat, all over Cairo and have begun the process of forcefully relocating people so they can demolish the ‘ashwai’iyyat. This response has a multitude of drivers. Partly it is out of want for the valuable land the informal settlements are built on. Much of this land is now planned to be developed by foreign companies into hotels, malls and luxury housing. It is also partly a ploy, by the government, to increase security on the Egyptian population to avoid another 2011 Revolution. And undoubtedly it is for the safety of the people who live in inadequate and unsafe environments.
This response is not new nor is it unique to Egypt. The modernist housing block originated in Europe largely by an architect named Le Corbusier. Corbusier held the belief that the model city should look like a series of building blocks in the middle of a grand park. Blocks would be designed uniformly identical and would have equal access to light and air. Centrally planned automotive corridors would connect these parks and each park would be exclusively pedestrian. It was a utopian idea meant to revolutionize the city with the advent of concrete construction. This was modernization.
Variations on this model proliferated across Europe and eventually came to America. The modernist housing block fully matured in its concrete and brick glory in the post-world war II era of American urban development. All over American cities identical housing blocks propagated like a diseased growth on the land. They were built with reckless abandon in the name of providing housing for the poor and a way of revitalizing the struggling urban centers of America. Which had been abandoned by the burgeoning middle class; who could now afford to leave and move to the suburbs.
In the decades since, many of these modernist housing projects have failed.
From its inception the modernist housing block was a flawed model as it never contended with nor did it operate at the human scale. Corbusier’s Radiant City and its many variants treated people as a unit of measurement. Questions regarding quantity were at the helm rather than questions regarding social realities. The Radiant City was concerned with housing the most people in the most efficient manner with the smallest possible footprint, maximizing access to natural resources like light and air. A beautiful ideal to aspire to, but only in theory. In practice the modernist housing block does not see people and their complex multitude of influences. It doesn’t see how someone’s profession or trade might not allow them to relocate to a brand new part of the city only accessible by car. It doesn’t see how a complex family structure of extended aunts, uncles, and grandparents couldn’t or shouldn’t fit in a nuclear family unit. It doesn’t see how cultural practices make it difficult to inscribe a European model onto non-European peoples. Architecture is inherently a political act. These buildings are not simply buildings, they are tools which those in power have and will continue to use to control.
Pruitt Igoe was possibly the most infamous of these housing projects. In St Louis Missouri, the construction companies of Wendell O. Pruitt Homes and William Igoe Apartments, having secured government funding, set out to build a large scale housing project meant to replace former slums in the city, a story eerily identical to that in Egypt. The Pruitt-Igoe project opened in 1945. Within the same decade white-flight had led much of the industry out of the urban center of St. Louis where predominantly African Americans lived, now without jobs. Pruitt-Igoe quickly ran out of funding and government backing; resultantly maintenance slowed and stopped entirely. Within the first decade of operation Pruitt-Igoe fell into a dilapidated state of disrepair and disillusion. In 1972, 27 years after it had first opened, Pruitt-Igoe was evacuated and demolished.
The economic and social reality of 1940s St. Louis was not taken into consideration when Pruitt Igoe was first developed. The fact that industries had moved away from the city and with them the jobs didn’t matter (Freidrichs). To the developers it mattered far more to finish the project and earn revenue; to the city it mattered far more to clear the slums. Neither party took into consideration the constituents for which Pruitt Igoe was being built. What resulted was a model which did not fit the needs of the people and the two fell out of harmony, ultimately destroying one another. The physical building was vandalized and physically demolished. The people who called it home were in return met with conditions ripe for urban decay; the project became a ghetto, crime flourished and people suffered.
The Radiant City, Pruitt Igoe, and now Al Asmarat treat urbanization as a clean slate, an empty plot of land to which you can develop ruthlessly and force people to conform to what’s been developed. Top-down development, as is the case with the modernist block, is not catered to individuals in the way that informal housing is. Developers often build to fill quotas and meet deadlines without referring to those who are going to live in the buildings. However the reality is backwards, people are supposed to make the land and architecture work for them. Urbanization is almost never a clean slate; it has to contend with existing conditions.
Today, people from multiple informal settlements have been moved to the indistinguishable blocks of Al Asmarat. An area with all the underlying challenges which led to Pruitt Igoe. Again you have a situation where developments are being built without consulting the people being built for. And again, like at Pruitt Igoe, Al Asmarat is not taking into account the economic conditions which exist surrounding this move. Al Asmarat is built on the periphery of Cairo. As such it is only accessible by car and while public transport is good in Cairo that doesn’t extend to the outermost ring of the city. This might not seem like a problem, urban planning like this is commonplace in America. However the people who live in informal settlements and who are being relocated to Al Asmarat do not own cars. They are typically trade workers who live above where they work; that’s how they designed it. But now the State has moved them to an area far from the place they work. Creating a problem in an attempt to solve a problem. People don’t have their livelihoods and the basic way in which they know how to subsist.
Furthermore, Al Asmarat is not planned in accordance with Corbusier’s model. Corbusier was adamant about the importance of green space and pedestrian-first urban spaces. His goal was to maximize the walkable area below through the verticality of each housing block. A look at an aerial view of Al Asmarat reveals a reality far from Corbusier’s model city. Al Asmarat is merely rows of tightly packed, tall identical buildings devoid of green space or pedestrian access instead favoring automotive roads to connect the city back to the urban core of Cairo. Removing the most successful aspects of a flawed model leaves you with an urban reality out of a dystopian sci-fi movie. Al Asmarat is not a “city in the park” rather a copied object in the desert. It’s a cold and harsh reality that doesn’t take into consideration the people it inhabits.
Informality contends with the idiosyncrasies of people. These settlements are designed to work best for the people who live in them but because they are built informally they are unfortunately unsafe and unsanitary living places. On the other hand, the modernist model while a safe and sanitary place to live treats the individual as a module to be inserted in series with other modules. Neither of these models works in Egypt today. A new model which utilizes participatory design and grounded urban practice is in order. A model which contends with the individual and their identity as a unique agent with wants and needs capable of making informed decisions. A model in between the formal and informal; between the bottom-up and top-down.
Works Cited
Angelil, Marc, and Charlotte Malterre-Barthes. Cairo: Desert Cities. Ruby Press, 2018.
Angélil, Marc, and Malterre Charlotte Barthes. Housing Cairo: The Informal Response. Ruby Press, 2016.
Corbusier, Le. Radiant City. Viking Pr, 1970.
Fouad, Karim. Om El Donya, 2023, https://om-el-donya.myportfolio.com/. Accessed 2023.
Fouad, Karim. “Kemet.” Medium, 2023, https://medium.com/writing-340/om-el-donya-18f1358e462. Accessed 2023.
Freidrichs, Chad, director. The Myth of Pruitt Igoe.
