Gated Communities in Cairo
The reciprocal relations between aesthetic formations and their subjects
Wiebe Ruijtenberg (6119905)
Research Master Social Sciences
Supervision: prof. dr. A.C.A.E. Moors
Second reader: dr. A. de Jong
Content
List of figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1
Defining gated communities in Cairo 1
Theoretical inspirations 9
Methods 13
Outline 18
1: In search of order
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Order and its others 19
The preservation of order 22
Sensing order 27
Tuning and re-tuning the senses 29
Conclusion: the internalization of order 32
2: Walls and other boundaries
33
Boundaries and other gates 33
Experiencing boundaries and the discourse of fear 36
Fear of crowds 38
Angry revolutionaries 39
Conclusion: the production of fear and fear as distinction 41
3: Gated communities as profitable places
43
Ruled by crony-capitalists 43
Buying without consuming 46
Consuming profitable Cairo 49
The state and the market 51
Conclusion: becoming neoliberal 51
Conclusion: Gated communities as a vehicle for identity formation
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The construction of gated communities in Cairo 54 The production of gated community subjectivities 55
Looking into the future 56
List of Figures
Utrecht: a former gated community 2
The Salah al-Din Citadel: another former gated community 2
Cairo’s satellite cities 6
Gated communities in New Cairo 7
Gated communities in Sheikh Zayed City 8
Spatial zoning in Rehab 20
Uniform architecture in Palm Hills Katameya 20
The Coptic church of Rehab 25
Rehab’s boundaries 34
Acknowledgements
In November 2003, my father moved to Dubai. I was fourteen years old, had never been outside of Europe, and had not even heard of Dubai. Two months later, I visited him for Christmas along with my mother and three siblings. I had no idea what to expect and I did not spent much time thinking about it, as I was preoccupied with all sorts of high-school affairs. My father picked us up from the airport and drove us ‘home’. As it turned out, ‘home’ was a hotel-like apartment in a luxurious building with a members-only club featuring a lush garden, a swimming pool, and a spa. As a surprise, my father had arrange memberships for us all. Excited, but overwhelmed we went to bed. The next day my siblings and I got up early, ready to explore the aforementioned facilities. As we walked up to the club I noticed three security guards holding guns sitting in front of the entrance to the club. They were not doing much. Nevertheless, I was extremely intimidated by this unfamiliar sight in an unfamiliar setting. I got so nervous that I proposed to return to the apartment. Apparently, my siblings were less intimidated as they refused to return. I hesitated, but eventually decided to follow them, nervously holding my membership card. We reached the entrance but to my surprise nothing happened. The security guards did not even seem to notice us, and so we entered the club. My father ended up staying in Dubai for eight years and although I grew accustomed to the security guards and the exclusive character of the club, I was never fully at ease at the place that he called home.
Ten years later, in November 2013, my supervisor, prof. dr. Annelies Moors, encouraged me to think of a research project related to urban form and architecture. I had just returned from Cairo where I had studied Egyptian Arabic for a few months. I was fascinated by Cairo and especially by the satellite cities which I pretentiously called non-cities at the time, although I had only been there twice. I started to read on Cairo’s satellite cities and its upscale residential development. As I was reading, I remembered many of my personal experiences in Dubai. Inspired, I decided to study upscale residential developments in Cairo’s satellite cities. To narrow the research project further down, I decided to focus on gated
communities only. I am grateful to Annelies Moors, who has guided me in the right direction ever since. I am hugely indebted to all the professional and experiential experts in Cairo who have taught me
everything I know on gated communities in Cairo. In addition, I am indebted to Harry Pettit and Riet van Bork for their helpful comments and suggestions on early drafts of this text. Finally, I am thankful to my dear friends in Cairo who have supported me along the way, and to my dear friends and family in Amsterdam and Utrecht that did the same.
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Introduction
Ehab graduated from the University of Cairo with a dissertation on customers’ satisfaction in a gated community in New Cairo. After graduation he was offered a job as an urban planner in that same gated community. Ehab happily accepted the job. He had always wanted to work on gated communities, which he considers the epitome of urban planning. Moreover, the company offered him a good salary which would eventually enable him to move to a gated community himself. After his first year, he was able to buy an apartment. After his second year, he had saved enough to marry. After their wedding, Ehab and his wife moved to the apartment and started a family. They quickly adopted the gated community lifestyle. They started to drive cars, they sent their children to private language schools, and they started to spend their weekends in nearby malls. Ten years later, Ehab finds it hard to imagine a life outside the walls. He feels at home in the quiet and calm atmosphere of the gated community.
The relation between Ehab and the gated community is complex and multifaceted. Ehab
constructs and reconstructs the gated community both as a professional urban planner and as a resident. In turn, the gated community shapes Ehab’s conduct, his preferences, and ultimately his mode of being. This study explores this complex relation between gated communities and gated community residents in Cairo. It thus highlights the reciprocity in the relation between human agents and the built environment as a material agent. In the following, I define gated communities as a concept and I introduce the case of Cairo. Then, discuss different theories that inspired me to conduct this research. From these theories, I raise a set of theoretically inspired questions that have guided my fieldwork in Cairo. Finally, I outline the research methods deployed to answer these questions.
Defining gated communities in Cairo
A gated community is “a residential development surrounded by walls, fences, or earth banks covered with bushes and shrubs, with a secured entrance” (Low 2003: 12). According to this definition, the gated community is nothing new. For instance, the settlements in medieval Europe were typically surrounded by a wall with secured entrances and would thus classify as gated communities (Figure 1). The Salah al-Din citadel in Cairo similarly classifies as a former gated community (Figure 2). These gated communities of the past primarily served political and military goals. Their walls constituted a political community, and protected it against enemies in the outside world. Gated communities lost their political and military function with the rise of the nation state and especially air warfare. As a result, they slowly disappeared.
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They only regained popularity in the 1960s and 1970s when private developers in the US Sunbelt states discovered that customers were willing to pay for an exclusive urban environment (Ibid: 14). In their new form, gated communities are products, catering to affluent middle and upper classes who feel vulnerable in the city (e.g., Low 2003; Pow 2009; Caldeira 2000).
The gated community business concept quickly spread, first to other US states and later to countries all over the world. Today, gated communities are found in cities as different as Singapore, Riyadh, Johannesburg, and Sao Paolo to name a few. Gated communities look remarkably similar around the world. Nevertheless, the differences between gated communities in different localities are
substantial. For example, gated communities in Riyadh cater to Western expats who pursue a lifestyle at odds with local customs (Glasze 2006), while gated communities in suburban Durban cater to ‘whites’ petrified by the potential for ‘black’ violence (Durington 2006). Gated communities thus build on local circumstances, catering to particular social classes who feel vulnerable for particular reasons. Below, I discuss the local circumstances that gated communities in Cairo build on.
Cairo multiple
Cairo is many cities in one. This city multiple has inspired scholars across and beyond the social science disciplines. Cairo has been studied as cosmopolitan (Singerman and Amar 2006) neoliberal (Denis 2006), modern and post-modern (Ghannam, 2002), informal (Ismail 2006), and Islamic (Williams 2006). Cairo is said to be ruled by experts (Mitchell 2002) and security officers (Schielke 2012), and is home to, amongst
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others, pious women (Mahmood 2005), dreaming Sufis (Mittermaier 2010), shop floor workers (Shehata 2009), rural housemaids (L. Abu-Lughod 2008), entrepreneurial craftsmen (Elyachar 2005), affluent consumers (Abaza 2006), aspirational middle-classes (de Koning 2009), marginalized and excluded urban poor (Bush and Ayeb 2012) and romanticized revolutionaries (Winegar 2012). This multifaceted
character of Cairo has been recognized before. For instance, Janet Abu-Lughod (1965; 1971) tells a ‘tale of two stories’ to make sense of Cairo’s origins. In turn, Ahmed and Kamel (1996) tell a tale of ‘three cities, three periods, and three maidans’ to do the same. Moreover, Abaza (2006: 21-41) observes a Cairo that is ‘divided in two’ while Sims (2010) sees Cairo as ‘three cities in one’. Gated communities and their residents form yet another facet of this city multiple.
As the above suggests, contemporary Cairo receives much academic attention. This has brought about a solid understanding of the circumstances in which gated communities in Cairo materialize. This understanding routinely links the emergence of gated communities to the development of satellite cities in the desert around Cairo and to decades of economic liberalization and privatization policies
(e.g.,Kuppinger 2004; Denis 2006). Below, I first discuss the development of satellite cities and then Egypt’s economic liberalization and privatization policies.
As Sims (2014: 1) observes, studies on Egypt usually manage to mention that the overwhelming majority of people live in the Nile valley and the Nile delta, leaving Egypt’s vast desert land uninhabited. For decades, the Egyptian state has advanced this image of an overcrowded Nile valley and delta versus a mostly empty desert to promote the “conquest of the desert”. In the 1970s, President Anwar Sadat utilized the image to rationalize the establishment of Cairo’s satellite cities (figure 3). Following Sadat, subsequent presidents referred to the image in order to justify the vast resources spent on desert developments, and the current regime again refers to it to promote the establishment of a new capital. Despite the resources, Cairo’s satellite cities never attracted a substantial proportion of Cairo’s
population (Sims, 2010: 172). Instead, Egypt’s ‘ruling class of experts’ (Mitchell 2002) used the satellite cities for industrial development (notably Tenth of Ramadan City) and for real estate speculations through the development of upscale real estate project such as malls, food-courts, business-centers, five-star hotels and gated communities. This latter development was fostered by the infitah – or open-door – program initiated by Sadat in the 1970s and enthusiastically carried forward by Hosni Mubarak after he assumed office in 1981 (e.g., Mitchell 1999; Denis 2006).
Through his infitah program, Sadat opened Egypt’s economy to domestic and foreign private investment in order to generate macro-economic growth and to make Egypt’s economy internationally competitive. More specifically, the program sought to privatize state-owned companies, reduce the state
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bureaucracy, and cutback on state subsidies. These policies are said to be responsible for the significant growth of Egypt’s GDP over the last three decades (Mitchell 2002: 272). Yet, the infitah program also facilitated corruption and nepotism. Hence, only a small proportion of Egyptians benefitted from the growth in GDP.
The infitah program has fostered the emergence of gated communities in Cairo in at least four ways. First, the program engendered private real estate companies such as Orascom and the Bahgat group which later came to dominate both the real estate sector and Egypt’s government (Ibid: 282; chapter 3). Second, the infitah program arranged the privatization of state-owned desert land. This enabled real estate companies to buy land and develop it into profitable projects like gated
communities. Third, the infitah program generates elite consumers who can afford to live in gated communities (Abaza, 2006; de Koning, 2009; Peterson, 2011). Mitchell (2002: 286) estimates these elite consumers to comprise five percent of Egypt’s population. In absolute numbers, this sums up to a staggering four million Egyptians on Egypt’s total population of ninety million. The actual number of gated community residents is much lower, although it is notoriously, hard if not impossible, to estimate due to a lack of reliable data1. Fourth, the infitah program advocated social order and national progress as key values of the Egyptian state and linked to values to the development of satellite cities (Sims, 2009). Together, the alleged problematic demographics and the infitah policies generated a fertile ground for gated communities to materialize. In the following, I describe these gated communities in more detail.
Gated communities in Cairo
The gated community business concept arrived to Cairo in the late 1980s early 1990s, and was adopted with much gusto. In twenty-five years, Cairo has come to be surrounded by almost two hundred gated communities. The vast majority of these gated communities were developed by Egyptian real estate companies like Orascom, SODIC, and the Bahgat group (Mitchell, 2002). In addition, some gated
communities came into being through grassroots collective action by residents who ‘gated’ their upscale but ungated residential development (e.g., Yasmin, see chapter 2). In a recent move, even the Egyptian government announced to develop gated communities as part of their social housing policies. All two hundred gated communities are located in Cairo’s satellite cities, predominantly but not exclusively in New Cairo (Figure 4) and Sheikh Zayed City (Figure 5). The geographic distance between satellite cities and Cairo proper enhances the symbolic distance between gated communities and central Cairo. This
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symbolic distance is construed through a discourse that presents central Cairo as chaotic, polluted, noisy, and overcrowded while it presents gated communities as calm, clean, silent, and empty (Ghannam, 2014; chapter 1). This discourse is manifest in suggestive names like Evergreen, Meadow Parks, and Palm Hills, and in alluring brochures and billboards promising a distinctive and comfortable lifestyle
(Ghannam, 2014). As any discourse, this discourse flattens social realities, thus concealing the vast differences both within and between neighborhoods in central Cairo and within and between gated communities. The differences between gated communities are mostly related to size and price (Kuppinger, 2004).
In size, gated communities in Cairo range from a few villas surrounded by a wall with a secured entrance to complete gated cities such as Rehab and Madinaty which claim they can accommodate 200.000 and 600.000 residents respectively. The smaller gated communities tend to feature either villas or apartments while larger gated communities usually feature both, albeit in strictly separated
subsections. Furthermore, the smaller gated communities tend to limit their facilities to utilities, and maintenance and security services. In addition to these modest facilities, midsized gated communities tend to feature a social club (naadi), a café, and a convenience store. On top of that, city-like gated communities provide a wide range of urban facilities, including but not limited to schools, healthcare services, transportation services, mosques, supermarkets, and a banking district. The size of gated communities is further related to the aesthetics of its architecture.
In price, gated community units range from 3000 Egyptian pounds (LE) or roughly 380 dollar a month to rent a small apartment to 25.000.000 LE or roughly 3.2 million dollar to buy a villa in upscale gated communities like Uptown and Katameya Heights. Naturally, cheaper gated communities are modest compared to expensive ones. The cheapest gated communities only feature apartments. These apartment buildings are constructed with cheap, low-quality materials to keep prices low. In addition, cheap gated communities tend to be poorly maintained and their facilities are often not operating. The most expensive gated communities are ostentatiously luxurious. They omit everything considered poor. Hence, there are no apartments but only villas and twin-houses. There is excessive greenery, multiple public and private swimming pools, and ideally a golf course which is considered the supreme symbol of luxury in Cairo. These expensive gated communities are well maintained and their facilities operate smoothly. The price of a gated community unit is further related to the aesthetics of its architecture. As Kuppinger (2008: 46) observes, exclusive gated communities tend to mimic the architecture used in gated communities in the US. By contrast, less exclusive gated communities explicitly build according to ‘Egyptian traditions’, for instance through references to Pharaonic heritage (Elshahed 2007: 54), Nubian
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heritage (Abaza 2006: 174), Islamic heritage (Denis 2006: 52), or belle époque Cairo (Sims 2010: 15). Given the overwhelming academic attention for Cairo and the considerable academic attention for gated communities in Cairo, the lack of a profound study on life inside gated communities is
surprising. Some studies on Cairo fail to mention gated communities altogether, or mention them only once or twice. For instance, in an excellent study on the appropriation of space in Cairo’s social housing projects, Ghannam (2002) does not mention gated communities once, even though she explicitly
discusses the relation between the infitah program and urban development in Cairo (pp 28-34). Similarly, Peterson (2011) mentions gated communities only once (p. 17) in his study on cosmopolitan identities in Cairo, even though many of his ‘cosmopolitan’ interlocutors probably live in gated communities. Even Sims (2014) mostly ignores gated communities in his otherwise meticulous work on Cairo’s desert cities.
In addition, studies that elaborate on gated communities in Cairo tend to advance a generalized and simplistic understanding of life behind the wall that is all too often based on a stereotype image on gated communities in general. For example, Denis (2006: 48) introduces his chapter on neoliberal Cairo with an admittedly “fictionalized narrative” starring a gated community resident who lavishes himself in luxury while ignoring the suffering of his personnel. Ghannam (2014) skillfully unravels the promises made by gated community advertisement and Kuppinger (2004) accurately describes what gated communities look like on paper, but neither one of them describes life inside gated communities. This study thus fills a gap in the literature on Cairo by moving beyond the gates to understand the relation between gated communities and gated community residents. In the following, I outline the theoretical notions and insights that inspire my view on this relation. Before that, I show the map of Cairo’s satellite cities (Figure 3) and of gated communities in New Cairo (Figure 4) and Sheikh Zayed City (Figure 5).
Figure 3. Cairo's satellite cities Denis, 2011
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Figure 4. Gated communities in New Cairo Florin and Troin 2012 (used with permission)
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Figure 5. Gated communities in Sheikh Zayed City Florin and Troin 2012 (used with permission)
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Theoretical inspirations
We – human beings – construct the built environment, both discursively and physically. We construct our homes, our neighborhoods, our cities, and our nation-states. In turn, we – human beings – are deeply formed by the homes, neighborhoods, cities and nation-states we live in. This reciprocity is at the heart of this study on gated communities in Cairo. My understanding of the reciprocal relation between human agents and the non-human agents such as gated communities originates from the notion of aesthetic formations. This notion is introduced by Meyer in Aesthetic Formations: Media, Religion, and the Senses (2009: 2) to make sense of the media-religion-community nexus. Like Benedict Anderson (1983), Meyer (2009: 3) views “communities not as given but imagined and by implication mediated”. Nevertheless, she explicitly rejects Anderson’s notion of ‘imagined communities’ because of its “limited use” to show how imaginations become tangible by materializing in space and objects” (Ibid: 5) Instead, she proposes the notion of aesthetic formations to capture “the modes through which imaginations materialize and are experienced as real” and “the formative impact of a shared aesthetics through which subjects are shaped by tuning their senses, inducing experiences, molding their bodies, and making sense, and which materializes in things” (Ibid: 7).
The notion of aesthetic formations points out that material objects, like the built environment, incorporate the imaginations of those who designed it. In addition, the notion of aesthetic formations points out that such ‘materialized imaginations’ are experienced as real. In turn, material objects like the built environment hold formative powers over their subjects. These formative powers exercise power over their subjects by “tuning their senses, inducing experiences, [and] molding their bodies”. So, human agents and the built environment are mutually constructive of each other. This premise generates the following two research questions: how are gated communities in Cairo constructed and what kind of subjectivities do they produce.
This study is thus concerned with what Verkaaik (2013: 13) calls “processes of interactionalism” that involve “dynamic relations between the architectural object and the … subject”. As such, it answers to Vellinga’s (2007: 756) call to take into account the “agency and materiality of architecture”. It does so consciously, explicitly following Navaro-Yashin (2009: 14) who refuses to ‘choose camps’ between “a subject centred or an object oriented one”, and instead studies reciprocal relations between human and non-human agents in their “historical contingency and political specificity” (Ibid: 9). So, as I explore the subjectivities produced by gated communities in Cairo, I explicitly look for the ways in which subjects put gated communities “into their discourse, symbolize them, interpret them, politicize them, understand them, project their subjective conflicts onto them, remember them, try to forget them, historicize them,
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and so on” (Ibid: 15). In addition to Navaro-Yashin (Ibid), and following Meyer (2009) I explicitly look for the ways in which gated community residents incorporate and embody the built environment to which they are subjected or subject themselves. The work of Meyer and Navaro-Yashin informs my theorizing on the construction of the built environment and on the formative powers of the built environment. The construction of the built environment
The construction of the built environment is a collective effort carried out by a myriad of actors. As such, the power to construct is diffuse. At the same time, the power to construct is distributed unevenly. So, although no one holds the absolute power to construct the built environment, some hold the power to control large parts of the process or to direct it according to their interests, while others lack such powers. In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau (1984) makes sense of this power distribution and the different modes of agency they imply. To do so, he draws a distinction between strategies and tactics. According to de Certeau (Ibid: xix) strategies are the calculations of institutions who hold the power to isolate an object and subject it to their own will. In turn, tactics are the
calculations of ordinary citizens who use and maneuver an environment built by others (Ibid). So, while the built environment is generated through the strategies of the institutions of power, the tactics of ordinary citizens shape and reshape the built environment into its everyday reality.
This rather rigid distinction between powerful institutions and their strategies and ordinary citizens and their tactics is complicated by, amongst others, Farha Ghannam (2002) in Remaking the Modern. In it, Ghannam studies the appropriation of the built environment in al-Zawiya al-Hamra – or simply al-Zawiya – a social housing project at the northern edge of central Cairo. Al-Zawiya was constructed to house working class Egyptians who were relocated from a popular downtown
neighborhood called al-Bulaq in order to make place for a bus station and notably a World Trade Center. Al-Zawiya was designed to be modern and was supposed to produce modern citizens. However, the relocated Bulaqi’s did not subject themselves to al-Zawiya. Instead, they consciously appropriated it and transformed it according to their interests. For instance, they built a mosque, sidewalk shops, and some additional apartments. The local authorities tolerated these practices in return for some money. Ghannam (2002) rightfully reads the residents’ practices as strategies and the authorities’ practices as tactics, thus complicating the rigid distinctions proposed by de Certeau (1984)
Following de Certeau and especially Ghannam, I describe the strategies and tactics of both institutions of power and ordinary residents, in order to reconstruct how gated communities in Cairo come into being. This description reveals a mode of agency that both de Certeau and Ghannam overlook,
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namely the agency to preserve the built environment as it is (see especially chapter 1). As it turns out, these strategies and tactics stem from certain ideas on what the built environment ought to be like. These ideas originate in the notion of habitus.
Habitus
Habitus generally refers to internalized and incorporated bodily dispositions, aesthetic judgments, beliefs, norms, and values. The notion can be traced back all the way to the work of Aristotle, but it was Pierre Bourdieu who popularized it in the social sciences. Bourdieu (1984) argued that habitus is class specific, and unconsciously internalized and embodied as second nature. This embodiment leads subjects to experience preferences and beliefs as individual and even natural, even though they are undeniably social in origin. In addition, Bourdieu (1984) points out that different class-habitus stand in unequal relationship to one another. So, the preferences and beliefs of the upper classes are considered more valid and more sophisticated than those of the lower classes. Through this hierarchy, preferences and believes become a tool for distinction, deployed by upper classes in their attempt to distinguish themselves from lower classes.
The notion of habitus has gained much traction in the social sciences, yet Bourdieu’s understanding of habitus has rightfully been critiqued. For instance, Mahmood (2005: 139)
problematizes Bourdieu’s “lack of attention to the pedagogical process by which a habitus is learned” suggesting an “Aristotelian notion of habitus ... to problematize … how bodily form does not simply express the social but also endows the self with particular capacities through which the subject comes to enact the world”. In direct response to Mahmood, Schielke (2008: 541) suggests to bring “identity politics back into debate”. Following his own suggestion, Schielke (Ibid: 542) relates habitus to ideology and encourages his reader “to look at configurations of this relationship that are produced by people involved in social interactions and conflicts”. So, unlike Bourdieu, Schielke seeks agency in the way in which people configure relationships between their habitus and ideology, and in the way in which they act upon that configuration.
Schielke himself links habitus to ideology and space to study the spatial interventions by officials seeking to civilize the Egyptian saint day festival (mulid). These mulids are subject to opposition from both Egyptian modernists and Muslim reformists, who associate it with disorder and impurity. As such, the mulid challenges the “clear, universal boundaries: between the sacred and the profane, between piety and fun” (Ibid). Despite the lack of a state sponsored program, local officials have adopted
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presence in the center of the festival and separating different elements from the festival” (Ibid: 541). According to Schielke (Ibid), these similarities originate in the “shared class habitus” of state officials which “identifies an appearance of order with moral improvement and social progress” and “is immediately related to the visible structures of public space, which, in turn, are understood to be productive and expressive of moral boundaries” (Ibid).
The urban planners and architects who construct gated communities in Cairo adopt spatial policies that are again ‘remarkably similar’ to the spatial policies observed by Schielke. These urban planners and architects organize the gated community by ‘limiting the use of gated community space, and separating different elements from the gated community’ to paraphrase Schielke (Ibid; see also chapter 1 and 2). In contrast to most mulid visitors observed by Schielke, and to the resident of al-Zawiya observed by Ghannam (2002), gated community residents generally support these spatial policies. In fact, most residents work hard to preserve the order of the gated community by leaving its built environment as it is. These residents exercise their agency by not changing the built environment. This mode of agency is overlooked by de Certeau (1979) and Ghannam (2002) who only see agency in those actions that actively transform space.
As the above suggests, state officials, urban planners, architects, and gated community residents all share a class habitus that emphasizes order and purity. In addition, they configure a similar relation between habitus and ideology, and similarly act upon that configuration to construct space. In this study, I show how this shared class habitus materializes in gated communities. In turn, I unravel the formative powers held by material objects that were built according to this shared class habitus. In the following, I discuss such formative powers. This discussion reveals yet another mode of agency exercised by gated community residents.
The formative powers of the built environment
In her description of aesthetic formations Meyer (2009: 7) suggests several techniques through which material objects shape their subjects: they ‘tune the senses, induce experiences, and mold bodies’. Gated communities in Cairo shape their residents according to these techniques. Van de Port (2013: 65) sees these formative powers of aesthetic formations as “sovereign”. However, as Navaro-Yashin (2009) suggests, subjects do enjoy agency vis-à-vis the formative powers of materiality. For example, while architectural objects induce experiences, subjects put these experiences into their discourses (Ibid: 15). In addition, gated community residents exercise agency as they actively subject themselves to the formative powers of the gated community. This mode of agency arises from the work of Foucault (1983:
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208) which, according to himself, aims to unravel “the different modes by which … human beings are made subject”.
As Colebrook (1998: 50) states, Foucault’s concise efforts to unravel such modes of
subjectification allow him to move “beyond notions of norms, justification, legitimation, and meaning to include the consideration of the practices, selves, bodies, and desires that determine and are
codetermined by ethics”. Mahmood (2005: 29) explains that Foucault’s work thus “encourages us to think of agency: (a) in terms of the capacities and skills required to undertake particular kinds of moral actions; and (b) as ineluctably bound up with historically and culturally specific disciplines through which a subject is formed”. Mahmood herself applies Foucault to study the women’s piety movement in Cairo, to point out that subjects actually exercise agency as they subject themselves to modes of power.
As Mahmood (2005: 2) points out, feminist scholarship tends to locate women’s agency in resisting dominant, patriarchic modes of power. By implication, women who subject themselves to such modes of power are either perceived as too weak to resist, or, probably even worse, as deluded by a false consciousness. Docility, or “her ability to be taught” is thus associated with the “abandonment of agency” even though it “carries less a sense of passivity than one of struggle, effort, exertion, and achievement” (Ibid: 29). Mahmood thus sees agency in her willful submission to dominant modes of power. Gated community residents exercise this mode of agency. They actively subject to the gated communities and in doing so they change the way in which the formative powers of the gated community shape them.
Methods
This study is based on six months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Cairo between the end of July, 2014 and the end of January 2015. This entailed experiencing gated communities through observing them. In addition, I conducted almost fifty semi-structured interviews with urban planners, architects, managers, residents and residents-to-be. Finally, I was able to discuss my research in three lectures presented at the American University in Cairo in November and December 2014, and May 2015 (through Skype). Below, I elaborate on these research methods.
Experiencing the gated community
While preparing for fieldwork, I imagined myself living in a gated community. The idea did not necessarily entice me, but I assumed it to be imperative to my experiential understanding of gated communities in Cairo. Nevertheless, I decided to start off in central Cairo, from where I could acquaint
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myself with the city in order to make a well-informed decision on which gated community to live in. As I explored New Cairo and Sheikh Zayed City I started to have doubts. New Cairo and Sheikh Zayed City are designed for cars. The distances are huge and public transport is mostly absent. Without a car, one simply has to walk to get from one place to another. Gated community residents typically own a car, so they do not perceive the situation to be problematic. For me, the situation was problematic, as I could not afford a car or long distance taxis on a regular basis. Based on these initial findings, I concluded that I had to choose between living in a gated community and study it in-depth, or to stay in central Cairo and study gated communities in both New Cairo and Sheikh Zayed City. I contemplated for a couple of weeks, yet as I conducted my first interviews with gated community residents I was quickly convinced to opt for the latter.
Gated community residents are highly mobile. They leave their gated community for work, education, shopping, leisure, and to visit friends and family. In fact, most residents spend the most of the day outside the gated community. Moreover, residents generally conceptualize their time inside the gated community as a time of relaxation and recharging, and so they mostly keep to themselves. As a result, there is not much going on in the ‘public’ areas of gated communities in Cairo and consequently I did not see many opportunities for me to observe gated community life. In addition, the first interviews revealed that gated community residents associate themselves not only with their gated community as such, but with gated communities in Cairo in general. I wanted to explore this ‘gated community identity’ further by studying gated communities as a collectivity. I continued to question my decision to live in central Cairo throughout my stay. For instance, I was tempted to move to one of the gated communities in New Cairo that operates its own transportation system. Yet, despite that transportation system it would still have taken me at least two and a half hours to get to Sheikh Zayed City. So, eventually I ended up living in central Cairo for the full six months of fieldwork.
From my home in central Cairo I commuted to New Cairo and Sheikh Zayed City on a daily basis, either to conduct an interview or to hang out in a gated community or some other upscale real estate project such as a mall or a food-court. Within weeks, my knowledge of the local transportation system far exceeded the knowledge of any gated community resident I have met. Some residents are not even aware of public transport, while others conceptualize it as dangerous. I found it relatively easy to reach New Cairo and Sheikh Zayed City, although either way took me between one and two hours. To get to New Cairo, I took a metro and two microbuses, and to get to Sheikh Zayed City I took two microbuses. These microbuses can be slightly uncomfortable but they are reliable and run frequently. After arriving in New Cairo or Sheikh Zayed City, I sometimes walked to my final destination, along with construction and
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service workers who rely on public transport like I did. More often, residents picked me up from the main road or even from central Cairo, thus enabling me to experience the commute with them. These rides were usually complimented with a little tour through the gated community and its surroundings. During such tours I asked residents to comment on what they were showing me. Through the interviews with residents, I thus experienced dozens of gated communities without living in one. However, before delving into my interviews with residents I elaborate on my interviews with experts thus respecting the chronological order of my research.
Learning from the experts.
Before travelling to Cairo, I went through a myriad of articles on Cairo’s gated communities, including in-depth academic papers, opinionated essays, journalistic pieces, two photo-essays, and a novel. In addition, I extensively studied Cairo’s map and I explored a handful of gated community websites. Hence, by the time I arrived in Cairo I had some sense of how gated communities in Cairo are talked about, where they are located, and how they present themselves on the internet. I used this information as a point of departure.
The first thing I did after I had settled was to contact all real estate companies that developed one or more gated communities in Cairo, based on a map provided by Ahmed Yousry (2009). In my email, I introduced myself as a master student with a research interest in gated communities and asked to meet someone involved in the development or management of the project(s). Apart from
advertisement emails, I received only one reply in which the particular company informed me that they were not interested in meeting me. Apparently, an open and honest email is not how to get in contact with real estate companies in Egypt, at least not as a master student.
In this early stage of my research, I also reached out to others working on gated communities in Cairo. Fortunately, this was much more successful than my attempts to meet with developers and managers. Within a few weeks, I managed to conduct a total of thirteen (self-proclaimed) experts including academics, urban planners, urban activists, and real estate agents. As Mitchell (2002) points out, such ‘experts’ have de facto ruled Egypt and Cairo for more than a century, and have been
responsible for the construction of gated communities as well (pp 272-303). These experts proved to be a great source of knowledge. They provided me with unpublished research papers, the latest maps of Cairo, and copies of land deal contracts. Moreover, their expertise enabled me to make sense of the things I observed during my other research activities. For example, one academic eloquently explained to me how the particular political economy of real estate in Egypt contributes to low occupation rates in
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gated communities and satellite cities at large (chapter 3). Finally, the interviews enabled me to ask relevant questions during my interviews with residents.
The interviews with experts took place in their offices or in a nearby Starbucks-like coffee shop, and were conducted in English. To my surprise (and disappointment) the first three experts I interviewed refused to have the interview recorded. Although, I did not ask for their reasons yet I assume it stems from strong state repression and the ongoing political and social insecurity in Egypt. Following these refusals, I no longer asked to record the interview as I did not want to induce pressure on any
interviewee. Instead I took notes both before, during, and after the interview (obviously with full consent of the interviewee). I used these notes to write an interview report in which I noted what was said, how it was said, and the context in which it was said. Despite these detailed interview reports I refrain from using direct quotations and instead paraphrase to do justice to the lack of recordings.
Interviewing residents
I conducted interviews with 21 gated community residents, 9 gated community residents-to-be, and 3 former gated community residents. In addition I had dozens of informal conversations with elite Egyptians of all these categories. These interviews were semi-structured to uncover how residents appropriate the gated community and how they experience and narrate their gated community
subjectivities. To introduce my research, I simply stated an interest in gated community life. From there, I asked residents to share their residential past and their experiences with me. In general, residents seemed to enjoy sharing this information with me. I met residents using the snowball method. Friends and family introduced me to people in Cairo. Some of them happened to live in a gated community while others were able to connect me to one or more gated community residents. The interviewees usually connected me with other residents to interviews. The interviews took at least one hour and sometimes much longer. In a few cases I spent a whole day with an interviewee and his/her family. Most gated community residents are fluent in English. Many went to international language schools, and it is not uncommon for them to feel more comfortable talking in English than in Arabic. Hence, almost all interviews were conducted in English, except for one interview conducted in German and one in,
admittedly broken, Arabic. Following my experiences with experts, I never asked to record the interview. Therefore, I do not use direct quotation. Towards the end of an interview I asked residents to meet another time. Everyone agreed to meet me a second time, and many promised to invite me to their home. Unfortunately, these promises rarely materialized despite repeated efforts from my side. Hence, it was often hard for me to meet residents for a second or third time. When I did, I always derived more
17 detailed and intimate image of life in gated communities.
In the beginning of my research I let residents decide where to meet. I was already afraid to be a burden on the residents and I did not want to increase that burden by making residents travel all over the city to meet me. In turn, residents seemed to anticipate that I was not able or willing to travel to New Cairo or Sheikh Zayed City. These residents consciously scheduled the interview with their larger central schedule. So, I usually met residents before, in between, or after their other activities in central Cairo. They simply asked me to show up at a specific place, usually a coffee shop in an upscale area like Heliopolis or Doqqi, at a specific time, usually around lunch. While this enabled me to experience how gated community residents schedule their day, I obviously wanted to experience their place of residence as well. Hence, I started to ask participants to meet in New Cairo or Sheikh Zayed City. Residents usually agreed and often offered me a ride on their way home from central Cairo. Unfortunately, interviews still did not take place at their homes, but instead in a coffee shop inside their gated community, in a nearby mall or food-court, or in their car while driving around the area.
Disclaimer: elite, high-class, or maybe rich?
Gated community residents in Cairo are certainly well-to-do when compared to the vast majority of their fellow Egyptians. Yet, I try to refrain from using the categories that others use to describe this group of people, such as ‘elite’ (e.g., Denis 2006), high-class (e.g., Abaza 2006), or rich (Sims 2014). My reluctance to use such categories stems partly from the fact that it is always awkward to attribute social categories to real people with complex identities. Earmarking gated community residents as elite, high-class, or rich, is meaningless without a profound analysis of the different meanings and identities that come together in being elite, high-class, or rich. The other part stems from the fact that the group of gated community residents is heterogeneous in basically all their characteristics, including socioeconomic status as illustrated by the vast difference in price for a gated community unit. So, while all gated community residents are relatively well-to-do, it is impossible and in fact counterproductive to see them as one group. Nevertheless, at several points in the text I need one category or another to distinguish between gated community residents and their imagined others. In these cases, I loosely refer to gated community residents as upper-class, and to their imagined others as lower or working class (notably chapter 2). In these cases, I use the notion of class (thabaqa) like Egyptians do: loose and imprecise, referring to different groups of people according to the discursive context. Although this is academically unsatisfying, in maintains some of the the fluid and diffuse ways in which Egyptians draw distinctions.
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Outline
The remainder of this study is composed of three chapters and a conclusion. Each chapter highlights the reciprocal relation between gated communities and gated community residents. The first chapter traces the imaginations that materialize in gated communities in Cairo, and links them to the sensory
experiences that gated communities in Cairo induce. These sensory experiences tune and retune gated community subjects. However, as it turns out these subjects enjoy the agency to effect the way in which they are tuned and retuned. The second chapter reconstructs the boundaries that demarcate the gated community from its outside world. These boundaries simultaneously induce fear, and promise to protect. However, some resident remain seemingly unaffected by the fear inducing boundaries. The third chapter understands gated communities in their capacity as products. As products, gated communities do not only generate profit but also consumers. These consumers are generally satisfied with what the gated community offers them. These positive experiences lead consumers to believe in neoliberal theories that see that market as professional and efficient while they see the government as inept, corrupt, and repressive. The conclusion ties the three chapters together to show how gated communities are constructed and how gated communities produce subjectivities. From these answers, the conclusion explores future avenues of Cairo and Egypt at large.
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1. In search of order
Cairo’s real estate investors typically hire urban planners and architects who graduated from top universities in Egypt and abroad. These highly educated, professional experts see order as imperative to a good urban environment. Gated community residents similarly adhere to this notion of order. In fact, residents mention the lack of order in central Cairo as one of the main reasons to move to a gated community. Hence, residents seek to preserve the gated community’s order as they appropriate the gated community. The order of gated communities engenders a sensory landscape that is presented and perceived as clean, silent, smell-free, and empty. Instead, gated community residents appropriate the gated community by actively subjecting to the sensory landscape in order to ‘order’ their sensory dispositions. This chapter elaborates on these observations. First, it elaborates on the discourse of order and the material form it takes in gated communities. The chapter then explores how both gated
community management and gated community residents preserve order. Finally, the chapter uncovers the formative powers of the sensory landscape engendered by the order of the built environment in order to explore how residents use these powers to form themselves.
Order and its others
Cairo’s urban planners and architects aim to create order as they design Cairo’s urban environment. In gated communities, this idea of order materializes by virtue of spatial zoning and uniform architecture. The spatial zoning involves the separation of residential areas from leisure and commercial areas, and of residential areas with villas from residential areas with apartments (Figure 6). This effectively
concentrates public life in leisure and commercial areas, while residential areas remain quiet and calm. The uniform architecture is achieved through the use of identical prototype units, painted in the same colors (Figure 7). Through their uniform architecture, gated communities supposedly radiate purity. The material order of gated communities in Cairo serves as a point of reference for a spatial discourse that distinguishes well-organized gated communities from Cairo’s unorganized settlements. This discourse of order is reinforced by stories of success told by investors, professionals, and residents. Investors tell such stories of success to attract more customers, professionals tell them to assert their own expertise, and residents tell them to justify their move to the gated community. In the following, I outline this
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The discourse of order refers to gated communities as munaththima, meaning well-organized or orderly. This notion of munaththima is derived from the notion of munaththim which Egyptians loosely translate as ‘organization’ but carries more the connotations of order than those of organization. As Schielke (2008; 2012) points out, an orderly urban environment is associated with morality and progress. As such, the notion of munaththima is routinely juxtaposed against the notion of ashwa’iyya meaning
randomness. In almost perfect contrast to the notion of munaththima the notion of ashwa’iyya is associated with immorality, backwardness, and notably Cairo’s informal settlements called ashwa’iyyat (e.g., Bayat and Denis 2002; Ismail 2006). These informal areas are considered the low point of urban development precisely because of their alleged lack of order (e.g., Bayat and Denis 2002; Sims 2011). According to the discourse of order, gated communities in Cairo are the exact opposite of these ‘random’ informal settlements.
In addition, the discourse of order distinguishes gated communities from upscale but ungated residential developments in central Cairo and especially in satellite cities. The upscale areas in Cairo’s satellite cities consist of single plots developed by their individual owners. Many owners took the opportunity to design a home that sets them apart from their neighbors. As a result, these areas feature extravagant buildings in a myriad of architectural styles ranging from neo-classical to modern and from post-modern to baroque. In some cases, these styles are even found in one villa. Both gated community residents, urban planners, and architects denounce this eclecticism to affirm the importance of uniform architecture. The urban planners and architects even refer to this eclecticism to assert their own
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expertise. The comments of Nour Mohamed2 illustrate how such professionals do that.
Nour Mohamed graduated from the department of Regional and Urban Planning at Cairo University with a dissertation on the production of space in post-2011 Egypt. Nour now works for UN-habitat and is involved in a grassroots organization addressing urban inequalities in Cairo. I was
introduced to Nour in early August 2012 by a common friend. Nour was happy to help me out, especially because of my ‘extremely interesting’ research interests (his words). He directed me to countless
resources and introduced me to many of his friends, some of whom live in gated communities in Cairo. One day in late August, Nour took me to see a friend in a gated community in New Cairo. As we entered New Cairo, Nour started to bash New Cairo’s architecture, ridiculing its eclecticism and the prevalence of features that according to him ‘do not make sense’. For instance, Nour laughed at the pitched roof with tiles, wittily pointing out that they serve no function in Cairo’s desert climate with less than 25 mm precipitation a year. He also laughed at all the office buildings with glass facades covered in a thin layer of desert sand. He got even more amused when he pointed out the Greek and Roman columns
decorating almost every villa in New Cairo. The abundance of columns show Nour that New Cairo’s population has no clue about architecture. Apparently, ‘New Cairenes’ think their house looks beautiful just because it has one or more columns.
According to Nour, New Cairo’s architecture makes no sense because it was designed by Egypt’s nouveau riche without any central supervision. Nour particularly blames the khalayga (gulfies). The term khaligi (gulfy) is a derogatory term referring to an Egyptian migrant worker who earned money working in the gulf. Sometimes, gulfies earned enough money to buy a plot of land in New Cairo or another satellite city. These particular gulfies have become rich Egyptians, but Nour still perceives them as lower class. According to Nour, this lower class status is manifest in the gulfies’ poor taste in architecture and their general lack of cultural capital, in terms of Bourdieu (1979). Paradoxically, the elements that Nour perceives as poor taste are common in gated communities too. However, pitched roofs, columns, and glass facades are aesthetic tools to create architectural uniformity in the context of the gated
community, while they lack any functionality elsewhere, at least according to Nour.
In his comments on New Cairo’s architecture Nour establishes himself as a professional expert, qualified to judge urban planning and architecture. Nour thus sets himself and his professional
colleagues apart from Egypt’s nouveau riche and especially from gulfies. So, the discourse of order distinguishes not only between well-organized and unorganized built environments, but also between those who know how to create order and those who do not. The case of social housing projects
2
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demonstrates that this former group includes not only urban planners and architects, but also gated community residents.
The construction of Cairo’s social housing projects is initiated by the state and carried out by urban planners and architects whose views on the built environment are similar to the views hold by the professionals who design gated communities. As a result, Cairo’s social housing projects are designed according to the same idea of order. So, there is spatial zoning and uniform architecture (e.g., Ghannam 2002; Elyachar 2005; Sims 2009). However, as Ghannam (2002) observes, spatial zoning and uniform architecture is undone by residents who appropriate projects according to their needs and desires. These ‘appropriating residents’ construct, amongst others, sidewalks shops, mosques, and even additional apartments. These constructions effectively disturb both spatial zoning and uniform architecture, and thus the project’s order. Unlike Cairo’s social housing projects, the order of gated communities in Cairo is usually preserved. This results partly from the fact that gated communities are strictly managed and partly from the fact that gated community residents share a class habitus with the urban planners and architects, and thus adhere to the same idea of order. Hence, these residents actively seek to preserve order. In the following, I elaborate on these observations.
The preservation of order
Gated communities in Cairo derive their identity from their orderly built environment. Hence, preserving order is a key concern for gated community management and residents alike. Gated community
managements seek to achieve this with a wide range of rules and regulations. These rules and
regulations differ according to specific gated communities but in general anything undoing spatial zoning and/or uniformity is not allowed. For example, in most gated communities residents are not allowed to dry their laundry outside, install satellite dishes, install sun shades, change the position of their air-conditioner, or change anything else to their home exterior. Likewise, the rules and regulations forbid any conduct perceived as unorganized, such as speeding. Residents tend to obey to these rules and regulations. This obedience is rooted in residents’ desire for order. This desire for order is rooted in residents’ perceptions of the past and present of central Cairo.
Gated community residents typically grew up in upscale neighborhoods of central Cairo. In their experience, these upscale neighborhoods used to be quiet and calm but became overcrowded and over-polluted as they were growing up. At some points, they have come to perceive their neighborhood as so random that living in them is highly unpleasant at best. Hence, they started to look for an alternative, which they found in the gated community. In a way, residents thus see themselves as victims of the
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randomization of central Cairo for which they blame population growth, mass rural-to-city migration, and especially poor city management. This sense of victimhood is nurtured by the annoyances that come with living in gated communities in Cairo such as being isolated and having to commute to central Cairo on a daily basis. These annoyances have led some former gated community residents to return to central Cairo. However, in general gated community residents claim to prefer such annoyances over the
annoyances that come with life in central Cairo. Nevertheless, coping with these annoyances constantly reminds residents of their loss.
Later on in this chapter, I introduce Soraya, a resident who indeed sees herself as a victim. For now, I want to point out that the experience of losing the order of Cairo has generated a fear for losing the order of the gated community. This leads residents to obey the rules and regulations, and even to correct their fellow residents who break the rules or whose conduct challenges order in any other way. This is usually done through Facebook groups where concerned residents come together to report violations and to educate those residents who apparently need education. For example, a concerned resident of Rehab posted an instruction video on how to use roundabouts hoping it would solve traffic issues at the roundabout in between the food-court, the market, and the office park. This resident apparently sees the traffic problems as a result of a widespread lack of knowledge on how to use roundabouts. As such, she blames her fellow residents instead of the poor planning of this roundabout which constitutes the center of the gated community but features only two lanes. This case reflects a strong belief in the professional expertise of gated community management found among residents. Residents rarely question this expertise, and hardly ever protest management’s decisions even if those decisions seem to be against residents’ interests. For example, there was no protest when Maxim management replaced the country club with additional residential units. According to Menna, a resident-to-be, the Maxim residents were disappointed. However, they realized that protest was pointless because management would never give up short term profit. According to Menna, this is legitimate because gated communities like Maxim are products. Hence, it is only natural for management to put profit over the interests of their residents.
The only cases of popular protest I know of are cases in which residents feared that
management’s quest for profit jeopardized the order of the gated community. The aforementioned Facebook groups operate as a vehicle for such protests. For example, Rehab residents mobilized on Facebook to protest against the construction of the City Square mall inside Rehab. This mall depends on customers from outside. According to Mona, a concerned resident, these customers from outside threaten the quiet Rehabi atmosphere. Inspired by the design of other gated communities, Mona and
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others proposed to position the mall at the border of Rehab and redirect the fence around it in such a way that it would exclude the mall from Rehab proper. In this way, visitors would not enter Rehab but nevertheless contribute to profit. In the end, the City Square mall was constructed at the border but the fence has not been redirected yet, so protest continues. Mona believes there is a good chance that management will eventually give in to the protest. If they do not, Mona will leave Rehab for another gated community, one that is still organized.
The case of City Square mall demonstrates how important it is for residents to protect order. Paradoxically, most cases in which residents disobey their management confirm this observation. Residents tend to leave the built environment of the gated community as it is, afraid to disrupt its order. However, residents often see room to improve that built environment and sometimes they take matters into their own hands. In the following, I describe the practices of residents who do so. As will be clear, most residents respect order even as they transform the built environment, although some purposefully disrupt order to distinguish themselves from ordinary residents. For these ordinary residents, the design of home interior is the only avenue for distinction.
The most visible construction built by gated community residents is the Rehab church. Rehab is home to a sizable Coptic community, many of whom left Rehab having experienced discrimination, exclusion, and sometimes even physical violence. Despite its Coptic community, Rehab did not feature a church. By contrast, Rehab has featured eight mosques since it was established. Naturally, the Copts felt discriminated against. The Copts voiced their discontent to Rehab management, but were met with indifference and sent away with vague promises. So, Rehab’s Copts decided to take matters into their own hands. First, they organized services and Sunday schools in one of their homes. Then, they relocated to an empty plot of land on which they constructed a little makeshift cabin to facilitate their services. In the meantime they successfully raised funds to construct a full church. For one reason or another, management was reluctant to interfere and so the Copts managed to construct an impressive Coptic church. The construction has not been fully completed, but the church already features several domes with the iconic Coptic cross proudly on top of the main dome (Figure 8).
Surprisingly, the remarkable history of the Rehab church is not well known among Rehab residents. I shared the story with dozens Rehab residents and they were all surprised. One of them even refused to believe me. Hence, she went out to conduct her own research only to find out that the Rehab church is indeed constructed by the Coptic community itself. She was amazed, especially since the church looks like it has always belonged to Rehab. This is indeed remarkable. The Copts consciously and purposefully broke Rehab rules to construct a church and yet they followed the logic of order. That is,
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they have built their church outside the residential areas, and have matched its architecture to Rehab’s architecture. This same pattern occurs in small scale constructions that individual residents build. I now turn to the practices of these individual residents.
Gated community residents rarely construct the built environment through collective action. In fact, the Rehab church is the only case I know of. By contrast, many residents build small scale constructions such as poolside shades, carports or even additional rooftop rooms. Naturally, gated community management actively seeks to prevent residents from doing so. For instance, management usually prohibits the importation of construction materials. However, determined residents always find a way to circumvent such policies. Salma is one of those residents. Salma was about to move to her villa in a gated
community in New Cairo when she found out her garden had no shade or patio. Enraged, she hired a construction company to construct one for her. To avoid security, she instructed the workers to climb. She then hid the workers in her villa for two weeks. In those two weeks, the construction workers constructed a modest poolside shade without management noticing. By the time management did notice the shade, they had no choice but to tolerate it as there is no legal basis on which to force Salma to take it down.
Residents like Salma generally style their construction according to the styles of both their home and the gated community at large. Moreover, they tend to hide their construction from view. This makes
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it easier to build without management noticing. More importantly, it is a way to preserve the uniformity in architecture. By contrast, a small minority of residents adopts the exact opposite strategy. These residents exercise their constructive powers to distinguish themselves from ordinary residents, usually by building a home that differs from the prototype units. This is not a standardized option listed in the gated community’s price list and it is only feasible for the rich among the rich or those with close connections to real estate investors. There are enough of these people to find one or even more customized homes in nearly every gated community in Cairo. These customized homes ostentatiously break uniformity. As such, the customized homes annoy both professionals and ordinary residents. Yet, there is nothing they can do to prevent the construction of customized homes. There will always be some whose money or social capital buys them the power to customize their home, and real estate investors will continue to facilitate them in order to gain money or social capital.
The rich among the rich and those with sufficient social capital thus use the built environment of the gated community as an avenue for distinction. Paradoxically, this avenue of distinction requires residents who are willing and able to preserve order, as a customized home only stands out when surrounded by prototype units. These obedient residents instead distinguish themselves from other residents through the design of home interior. Before moving, residents-to-be invest much time and money to design their interior in an attempt to express their sophisticated taste and knowledge on beauty. To impress each other, residents import goods from all over the world or have their interior handmade by local artisans. The case of Bassant al-Noury, a forty year old resident of a gated community in Sheikh Zayed, illustrates the depths of these efforts.
Bassant and her husband purchased a 360 m2 villa in a small and upscale gated community in Sheikh Zayed City in 2001. The villa was delivered two years later. Bassant had always wanted to furnish a home from scratch so the empty villa was a dream come true. She worked hard, yet it took her almost three years to prepare the villa. Apparently, decorating a 360 m2 villa is no sinecure. The result is both impressive and overwhelming. In her design, Bassant explores her fascination with Arabic heritage. She thus turned the reception rooms on the ground floor into an orientalist dream. They feature daggers from Yemen, pottery from Mesopotamia, woodwork from the Levant, carpets from Egypt, and even a stuffed falcon from Saudi Arabia. To top it off, the walls are decorated with paintings depicting
romanticized images of the pre-modern Orient. The rooms on the upper floors are designed according to the same romanticized image. However, the whole work is still in progress. Bassant continues to design and redesign, and to add more items to her already overwhelming collection.
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material order is preserved. In the following, I outline the formative powers of order. These formative powers arise from the sensory experiences that order induces. I introduce these sensory experiences with one of my own.
Sensing order
The interview is coming to an end as Hossam asks me to join him for a cigarette on the rooftop of his gated community villa. I am eager to follow him, yet I hesitate because it would require me to go beyond the guestrooms which could be intrusive. Hossam decidedly waives my concerns away so I follow him upstairs. The view from his rooftop is not very impressive. Inside the wall, I see identical villas painted in earthy colors, some greenery, and some pools. Outside the wall I see desert, only disrupted by real estate projects like malls, office buildings and other gated communities. In the distance, I see Cairo’s contours. From up here, the city seems serene. I find it hard to imagine what the city is like. The silence, cleanliness, and emptiness of the gated community seem to have erased my memory of Cairo’s noises, pollution, and crowdedness. I share my experience with Hossam, who is not surprised. He too finds it difficult to imagine Cairo from inside the gated community.
My sensory experience of the order of gated communities fits into a discourse of dichotomies that presents well-organized gated communities as silent, clean, smell-free, and empty and juxtaposes it against unorganized central Cairo which is presented as noisy, polluted, smelly, and overcrowded. Gated community residents use this discourse both to distinguish between gated communities and central Cairo, and between Cairo’s past and present. Soraya is a case at hand. I met Soraya through Facebook in early November. She immediately told me she saw herself as a victim of Cairo’s decay, and she felt it was important to share her story. So, we agreed to meet a few days later in her apartment in New Cairo. She has just moved, and her experiences are still fresh. I feel like a therapist when I ask her to share these experiences with me. She hesitates, stares in the distant deserts and starts talking.
Soraya recalls Abbaseyya, the neighborhood in central Cairo where she grew up. With a strong sense of nostalgia she describes a quiet and peaceful neighborhood. The people in Abbaseyya used to behave well. They looked out for each other and for the neighborhood. That quiet and peaceful neighborhood has long been gone. Soraya sounds bitter as she describes how rural migrants
transformed ‘her’ Abbaseyya. In her street alone, migrants opened a car repair shop, a food-cart selling bean spread and falafel sandwiches (fuul wi thameyya), a butchery specializing in intestines, and a coffeehouse (‘ahwa) where men sit and smoke shisha twenty four hours a day seven days a week. The myriad of noises and smells coming from the street distracted Soraya form her schoolwork and kept her
