The New Administrative Capital of Egypt
Egypt’s Relationship with its Deserts and the Production of the New
Administrative Capital
Student: Joost Vintges Student number: 10343431
University: University of Amsterdam Study: Master Middle Eastern Studies Thesis supervisor: Dr. R. Woltering Second Reader: Dr. M. Voorhoeve Date: 1 July 2019
Word count: 21769
2 Table of Contents
Introduction ... 4
The development of the Egyptian deserts ... 9
1.1 The appeal of the desert ... 9
1.2 Managing the desert ... 11
1.3 The scramble for desert land... 17
2. The high modernist city ... 23
2.1 Le Corbusier, Henri Lefebvre, and Brasilia ... 24
2.2 Internal colonization ... 31
3. The New Administrative Capital ... 34
4. Justifying the New Administrative Capital ... 39
4.1 Congestion ... 40
4.2 Housing crisis ... 41
4.3 Jobs ... 44
4,4 The legitimacy of the current government ... 45
4.5 Safety ... 46
5. Financing the New Administrative Capital ... 48
6. Designing the New Administrative Capital: Constructing a new everyday life ... 52
6.1 Digital tools in urban planning ... 52
6.2 A fragmented design ... 54
7. The districts of the New Administrative Capital ... 56
8.1 The housing districts and the people that might occupy them ... 57
8.2 The government zone... 59
8.3 Central Business District (CBD) ... 61
8.4 Spaces of knowledge and expertise ... 62
8. The principles of the New Administrative Capital ... 63
7.1 A Walkable and Liveable City ... 64
7.2 A Connected City ... 64
7.3 A Green and Sustainable City ... 65
7.4 A Smart City ... 66
Conclusion ... 70
3 Abstract
This Thesis explores the function of the desert in the production of the framework for Egypt’s projected new capital city, the New Administrative Capital of Egypt. By analysing previous schemes in the Egyptian desert, we will create a better understanding of the appeal of the desert and the way it unleashed certain forces in the Egyptian society. Three forces and their
consequences on the ground will be discussed. First, the way in which Egypt’s unique desert ecology, the changing demography in the Nile Valley, and technological advantages changed the perception of the desert. As David Sims shows, the new image of the desert led to a hasty and ill-considered development of desert land. Second, the opening of the desert attracted certain economic interests and led to a rapid privatization of the its key location. In hindsight, however, these schemes were often dubious money-making schemes that enriched a few. The schemes only marginally contributed to the Egyptian economy and did not succeed in dispersing the Egyptian population horizontally (as promised). Third, the image of the desert as a clean slate for Egypt’s future played into the hands of ‘high modernist’ planners (as termed by James C. Scott). With the help of Scott, Sims, Henri Lefebvre, and a case study of Brasilia, I will show how their ideology was often out of touch with reality and followed problematic abstractions of natural and human relations. With these theoretical tools at hand, we will analyse maps, advertisement, news
articles, and additional reflections on the New Administrative Capital and critically reflect on the shape, the justifications, the financial pictures, the principles, and the objectives of the project. This thesis will show that the masterplan for the new capital often adheres to the problematic assumptions seen in previous desert schemes and is based on universalist high modernist notions that are out of touch with Egypt’s local contexts.
4 Introduction
“The New Administrative Capital city will provide outstanding services and a high quality of life for the citizens of Cairo and the surrounding area. The new city will also create a variety of job opportunities, as part of a comprehensive development framework. Once the capital is complete, it will be vital to continue to upgrade the infrastructure and provide constant maintenance, to very high standards, across the various projects, and to provide ongoing high-quality services for citizens, to guarantee a sustainable city.”
- Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, President of Egypt1
On the eleventh of October, 2017, president Abdul Fatah al-Sisi inaugurated the first phase of the project for the New Administrative Capital of Egypt in the brand-new Al Masah Capital Hotel, one of the largest hotels in the world. At that time, this hotel was the only finished and
operational structure in the city to be. Now, in 2019, constructions of the still nameless city have accelerated impressively and the contours of an actual city slowly appear.2 In an official video, we get a better sense of the objectives of this futuristic city-scheme in the desert of Egypt. Cairo ‘got old and overwhelmed with the crowd’ the video states and in order to ‘rise again as one of the most beautiful capitals in the world’, a new city, ‘a liveable city’, needs to be built in the desert hinterlands East of Cairo.3 The way in which these words disregard existing Cairo and its
19 million inhabitants is unsettling but also gives us a sense of the contrasting image between the desert and the Nile Valley. The new capital is the most important project of the current military regime led by Sisi and is presented as the shining future of Egypt. The video alludes to some of Cairo’s modern-day challenges (congestion, lack of adequate housing, and a deteriorating quality of life) and the new capital is put forward as a reasonable solution to some of these ills. The image of the desert as Egypt’s future is not new, as David Sims argues in his seminal study
Egypt’s Desert Dreams: Development or Disaster?. Decades of desert urban development has
established a self-evident idea of the desert as an answer to Egypt’s growing population and the decaying urban of modern-day Cairo.
In his book, Sims questions this rationale by taking a closer look at the incentives and
1 Sisi quoted in ‘The Smart Revolution: Reimagining Cities’, darmagazine i16 (January 2019) 48. 2 The city is sometimes referred to as ‘Wedian City’, however, this will not be its official future name. 3 Cube Consultants, ‘The Capital Cairo – al-ʿĀṣima al-ʾIdāriyya al-Jadīda’, Vimeo video, 30 August 2016.
5 achievements of fifty years of desert development in Egypt. He paints a different picture and comes to the conclusion that most of Egypt’s desert projects have failed in achieving their set goals and targets. When driving through the desert either East or West of Cairo, the many unfinished or empty structures, as seen from the road, attest to this image. The cities have been built but the people never came. Understanding these problems of desert satellite cities (and other desert schemes) is crucial in a study on the New Administrative Capital. In the first chapter of this thesis, we have a closer look at the way technological advancements and the unique Egyptian ecology and demography pushed the horizon of Egypt’s policymakers into the desert.4 With the help of Sims,5 Timothy Mitchell,6 James C. Scott,7 Jonathan Nitzan, and Shimshom Bichler,8 we try to understand the forces at work leading to the build-up of cities, reclamation schemes, factories, and tourist projects in the desert. The core purpose of these schemes (at least in the official rhetoric) was to create new lives for Egyptians in the desert. Also the New Administrative Capital adheres to this narrative. Through a dispersion of the Egyptian population, the Nile Valley will be relieved of the ever-more growing population pressure. In hindsight, however, the investments did not have this desired effect and, as Sims shows, were often sketchy money-making schemes that enriched a few but did not improve the productive life or collective wellbeing of the Egyptian population.9 The Egyptian desert turned into a playground for speculative capital and this resulted in a rapid corporate development of its key locations.
Desert projects were often framed as what James C. Scott would refer to as high
modernist ideology. Both the government and corporations obscured existing local societal and natural relations in both the Nile Valley and the desert with their attempt to control the desert and reengineer everyday life here. By grasping the commercial logic and the high modernist ideas depicting desert development, we will understand better why the desert has such an appeal to these dominant powers of Egypt and the way these forces shape the framework for the New Administrative Capital of Egypt. In Chapter Two, this thesis will provide a brief case study of
4 Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-politics, Modernity (University of California Press, 2002) 210. 5 David Sims, Egypt’s Desert Dreams: Development or Disaster? (AUC Press, 2018); Sims, Understanding Cairo:
The Logic of a City Out of Control (2012).
6 Mitchell, Rule of Experts (2002) and Mitchell’s later work on ‘capitalization’. Timothy Mitchell, ‘The Capital City’
in: The Arab City: Architecture and Representation, ed. Amale Andraos and Nora Akawi (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City 2016); Nasser Abourahme & Omar Jabary-Salamanca, ‘Thinking against the sovereignty of the concept’ (interview Timothy Mitchell), City, 20:5 (2016).
7 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed (1998). 8 Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, Capital as Power: A Study of Order and Creorder (Routledge 2009). 9 Sims, Egypt’s Desert Dreams (2018) xviii.
6 Brasilia in order to analyse the ideology of urban high modernisms. At the moment, the New Administrative Capital has not been built yet and is still just an idea on paper and in the minds of its planners. By analysing Brasilia, we can reflect on the possibilities and barriers of planned cities and with the help of Henri Lefebvre give a sense of what high modernist spaces try achieve.
From Chapter Three onwards, we will analyse the actual plans for the New
Administrative Capital. The first two theoretical/historical chapters gave us critical tools to interpret the way in which the desert, capitalization, and high modernism produce the new city. With these tools at hand, we will analyse maps, advertisement, news articles, and additional reflections on the new capital city and critically reflect on the shape, the justifications, the financial pictures, and the objectives of the project. In Chapter Three, we discuss some general information on the new capital in order to form a mental picture of the scheme. In Chapter Four, I have distilled the five most important justifications for the project; congestion, housing, jobs, legitimacy of the current government, and safety. Most of these justifications are supported by the official narrative on the new capital (congestion, housing, jobs, and safety). In this chapter, at the same time, we will reflect on the feasibility of these objectives (with the help of the
theoretical tools developed in the theoretical framework) and some of the ‘darker’ (unofficial) motives of the new capital scheme. In Chapter Five, the financial side of the project will be discussed and the consequences of this approach for the scheme’s feasibility and future. Chapter Six gives us a better sense of the ideology producing the fragmented shape of the new capital and the contrast of the design to some of the ‘older’ mixed-use neighbourhoods of Cairo. Chapter Seven will analyse some of the districts of the new capital; the housing district (and who might occupy them), the government zone, the Central Business District, the Smart Village, and the Knowledge City. And in the last chapter, Chapter Eight, we will critically reflect on the official principles of the new capital; Walkable City, Liveable City, Connected City, Business City, Smart City, Green City, and Sustainable City.
Besides the secondary literature presented in the theoretical framework, the sources for this thesis are official maps, advertisement (pictures and videos), news articles, and other critical reflection on the New Administrative Capital (Sims and the master thesis by Mirette Khorshed).10 In the new foreword of the paperback edition of Egypt’s Desert Dreams (published in 2018),
10 Sims, Egypt’s Desert Dreams (2018); Mirette Khorshed, ‘Cairo’s New Administrative Capital Wedian City:
7 Sims shortly discusses the new capital and this was a helpful start for this thesis. We have to understand that the build-up of the new capital is still in an early stage and as I will better explain throughout this thesis, most of the news articles, advertisement, and maps follow the official rhetoric of the project. News agencies like al-Ahram, Egyptstreet, Egypt Independent, and Egypt
Today are often just spokesmen for the state (especially when it comes to a sensitive subject like
the New Administrative Capital) and this limits the scope of this research. In addition, the Egyptian state only releases limited information on the project and many vital matters (like its budget) remain obscure. However, as we will see in this thesis, we will also learn from the intransparancy of the state and the interests it tries to protect, especially when it comes to financial matters. This thesis tries to overcome some of these limitations, first, with the help of some sources that do offer critical reflections on the new capital (Sims, MadaMasr, and news agencies outside of Egypt like al-Jazeera, the Guardian, the Independent) and second, by looking at previous desert projects in Egypt and the project of Brasilia.
8 ‘Today, brethren, we turn to the Western Desert to establish there a new valley, parallel to the valley of the Nile.’
- Gamal Abdel Nasser
,
Figure 2: The Nile Valley and the Egyptian deserts,
9 The development of the Egyptian deserts
1.1 The appeal of the desert
During the turbulent 1950s, Egypt’s relationship with its desert started to change. Heretofore, this vast and inhospitable space had only captured the imagination of (both Western and Arab)
trailblazers.11 From this point forward, the desert entered the minds of Egypt’s new revolutionary nation builders. Gamal Abdel Nasser declared in 1958,
‘today, brethren, we turn to the Western Desert to establish there a new valley, parallel to the valley of the Nile. We are endeavouring to utilize the water of the wells in order to create new land extending from the southern borders, 150 kilometers west of Aswan, and running northwards through Dakhla, Kharga, Farafra, and Bahria Oases. There are cultivable lands there estimated at 3 million feddans which are being left without cultivation.’12
Development of desert land was not something completely new. From the rule of Muhammad Ali Pasha onwards, various schemes in the desert materialized, most notably Port Said, Ismailia (both next to the Suez Canal), and Baron Empain’s Heliopolis. Nevertheless, Nasser instigated
something bigger, the idea of the desert as a solution and as a new way forward for the future of Egypt. Nasser was mostly rhetorical when it came to developing the desert.13 However, he
planted a seed that came to bloom during the reign of Sadat, Mubarak, and the post-Mubarak regimes (Morsi and Sisi).14 From Sadat and his infitāḥ (open door) policies onward, the desert became the main site for development schemes and the ‘new place’ for future Egypt, at least in the fantasy of its planners.
Egypt’s population is growing and it is growing fast. Between 1952 and 2013, the Egyptian population quadrupled to 85,8 million and is still growing 2.03 percent annually.15
11 Apart from the Bedouin tribes that roamed the desert for centuries.
12 With these words Nasser instigated his New Valley plan, which was aimed to reclaim around three million
feddans. Sims, Egypt’s Desert Dreams (2018) 37.
13 Nasser was responsible for both the Tahrir Province (reclamation scheme) and Nasr City (important part of the
urban core of Cairo today).
14 Muhammad Morsi election campaign speeches promoted megaprojects in the desert. Sims, Egypt’s Desert Dreams
(2018) 59.
15 ‘Population, total: Egypt, Arab Rep.’, The World Bank
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL?locations=EG; Sims, Egypt’s Desert Dreams (2018) 248. The Egyptian government expects this population to double in 2050.
10 Almost all these people are ‘cramped [in the words of the World Bank, JV]’ 16 within the Nile
Valley, which constitutes around five percent of the land of Egypt. Naturally, Egypt has a high population density (especially the metropolitan areas), or in the more threatening words of the World Bank ‘higher than of Bangladesh and Indonesia’.17 From the seventies onward, the
growing Egyptian population within this small piece of land struck fear into the hearts of many Egyptian and international observers (the Egyptian state, World Bank, and USAID). According to a World Bank report, ‘these two themes—the relatively fixed amount of usable land and the rapid growth of the population—will be seen as leitmotifs in the discussion of Egypt’s economic problems.’18 How can the valuable fertile soil of the Nile Valley be protected against urban encroachment? And how can the growing population be housed and fed (with only limited space for crops and houses)? These fears, bolsteredby new technological possibilities, contributed to the appeal of the desert. Only by developing the desert surrounding the Nile Valley could this looming ‘ecological-demographic narrative of crisis’19 be warded off.20
Development plans in Egypt have been backed by this rhetoric for the past fifty years. As David Sims elaborates so vividly in both Understanding Cairo and Egypt’s Desert Dreams, the idea of the ‘old’ and ‘congested’ Nile Valley in contrast to the limitless possibilities of the vast Egyptian deserts became a ‘force of its own’,21 that seemed unstoppable. Since time immemorial,
the striking sharp boundary (in comparison to other deserts) between the Nile Valley and the desert had an end of the world feeling but with this changing perception, it became the site of a bright new future. This chapter shows the consequences of this rhetoric by analysing some of the desert schemes that rolled out from the seventies onwards. It shows how the rationale for these developments obscured many deeper relations embedded in Egyptian society and is based on false assumptions. Fuelled by speculative capital and high modernist rhetoric, this led to disastrous development schemes. Instead of a gradual and balanced expansion into the desert,
16 Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt (2002) 209.
17 Mitchell rightly questions the comparison with Bangladesh and Indonesia. ‘The World Bank might equally have
mentioned Belgium, say, or South Korea, where population densities were respectively three and four times higher than Indonesia— but where the comparison would have had a less negative implication.’ Mitchell, Rule of Experts (2002) 212.
18 Mitchell, Rule of Experts (2002) 210. 19 Sims, Egypt’s Desert Dreams (2018) 65.
20 Obviously, other proposals have been put forward to deal with the lack of fertile land in Egypt. These ideas relate
mostly to raising the productivity of agriculture by technological innovation. However, planners and executers face many difficulties and resistance with their attempts to tackle these questions in the highly-populated Old Lands. This is one of the reasons why the clean slate of the desert is so attractive.
11 most prime locations of Egypt’s desert were claimed by dubious investments in a short period of time. As I will discuss, Egypt’s new relation with the desert, in a way, closed instead of opened the desert for the average Egyptian. By placing the new capital of Egypt in this historical context, we can better understand the logic underpinning the city and make some projections about its future.
1.2 Managing the desert
Technological innovations like a map or a microscope change our interaction with the nonhuman natural world. These tools both open and close ways we relate to this world. Scott in his book
Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed helps us
understand this process. With his example of the disastrous experiment of ‘forest science’ in Prussia and Saxony, we will open up new ways to look at Egypt’s relation to its deserts. As Scott argues, Europe’s relation to its forests rapidly changed in the second half of the eighteenth century (quickly followed by other continents) due to new technological innovations of forest management. In order to overcome the shortage of available wood in Prussia and Saxony, new techniques were developed to better plan and maximize the production of wood. This forest science recommended certain types of wood and effective ways of planting and cutting trees. The implementation of these techniques meant a complete transformation of the national approach to forests. The ‘old forests’ were cut down and replaced by an orderly pattern of the same type of trees. The newly arranged forests now became a site that seemed manageable from the state’s perspective and the systematic pattern established a certain aesthetic that pleased its planners. These new techniques, managed by state and commercial institutions, ‘revealed’22 new
perspectives on nature and society. However, this science, at the same time, obscured many deeper relations embedded in the forest, both human and nonhuman. The ecosystem of the forest was completely destroyed by the new relationship between man and nature and this destruction eventually materialized into a crisis on the ground. The generations following the successful first
22 The ways in which technological innovations ‘reveal’ certain societal and natural relations is described in Karl
Marx’s Capital. The way he puts it, ‘technology reveals the active relation of man to nature, the direct process of the production of his life, and thereby it also lays bare the process of the production of the social relations of his life, and of the mental conceptions that flow from those relations.’ David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital (Verso 2010) 191-192. Marx makes us attentive to the entanglement of a larger network when talking about technology. Technological tools not only change the way we interact with the nonhuman (nature) but also our relation to each other, our daily life, modes of production, and our own mental conception of the world.
12 harvest, matured more slowly and in some cases even stopped growing.23 The symbiotic
relations, keeping the ground fertile, were crucial to the forest’s survival, however, the simplifications of the technical scope had concealed these relations.24
The forest science was a disaster for the local peasantry, many of whom relied on the ecosystem of the old forests for medicine, food, shelter, etc. The monoculture of these new forests completely concluded this man-nature relationship. The forest became exclusively a concern for the state and commercial institutions, carefully managed and controlled. With the example of German forests, Scott tries to illustrate the problematic relation between
administrative systems (and their technological tools) and the complexities of living systems on the ground. The top-down scope of the state and commercial institutions always rely on
problematic simplifications and abstractions to manage these systems.25 Regarding Egypt and its management of the desert, we can also see how certain technical tools disclose a new relation to this landscape and how, at the same time, bureaucratic, technical and commercial logic (these terms will be better explained later) simplified many technicalities and deeper social relations when it comes to creating a new world there.
Although this thesis acknowledges the power of technology in changing our relation to the world, we have to be cautious not to develop a technological determinant argument here. Technological innovations never occur in isolation and have to be seen through a wider web of human and nonhuman relations. The techniques used for ‘greening the desert’ (as discussed in the next section) have been developed in a specific context and it took time (and specific social circumstances) before these tools entered the scope of Egypt’s planners. Before the 1952 coup, some reclamation experiments had already materialized in the Egyptian deserts, however, it was the Malthusian fear, the dream of a modern Egypt, and most importantly, the construction of the Aswan Dam that truly incorporated the desert into Egypt’s horizon. Whereas the Prussian peasantry had already a specific relation to the forest, the relation between Egyptians and the desert was at a new stage.
Obviously, the desert is a dry place. Management of water is, therefore, crucial when trying to create life here. Almost all of Egypt’s water enters the country through the Nile. When talking about diverting water into the desert, we are inevitably talking about the water from the
23 In German called Waldsterben (forest death). Scott, Seeing Like a State (1998) 20. 24 Scott, Seeing Like a State (1998) 11-22.
13 Nile. There are a few exceptions of desert schemes where either groundwater or desalinated seawater is used but both sources of water are controversial because groundwater in the desert of Egypt is a non-renewable source and the desalination of seawater on a large scale still faces limitations and comes at a high price. The vagaries of the water of the Nile determine Egypt’s limits of development and is a constant source of worry.26 These worries have surfaced recently, with the controversial project of Ethiopia to build a large dam upstream. As we saw in the fragment of the speech of Nasser, with the construction of the Aswan Dam under his rule, Nile water became controllable and measurable, this opened up new ways of redirecting this water for new development schemes, among which in the desert.
As Sims argues in Egypt’s Desert Dreams, land reclamation (turning desert land into fertile ground for cultivation) has been the most extensive and lengthiest desert development. What seemed to be impossible a few decades ago (except maybe on the desert fringes) has been made possible, in theory at least, by a few technical inventions. Large dams, strong pumps (to redirect Nile water), pivot or drip irrigations systems, and a selective choice of crops create the possibility to reclaim and cultivate the desert.27 These techniques broaden the scope of Egypt’s possibilities to ‘control’ and exploit nature. In combination with the perceived demographic threat and new profit-making schemes (explained in the next section), this led to a powerful cocktail to turn the desert green.
However, just as with the forests in Prussia and Saxony, these ‘new tools’, handled by bureaucratic and commercial institutions, oversimplified cultivating the desert and to this day, the governmental and corporate cultivation of the desert has been a failure. Millions of government funds have been spent on reclamation schemes without barely any returns.28 Sims shows that several problems, both technical and societal, have led to this scenario. To begin with the technical problems, three issues were overlooked. First, the amount of energy that is required to pump Nile water to the designated lands was not taken into account. In contrast to the Old
26 The construction of the Aswan Dam has made the Nile much more predictable, however, the Nile still faces many
limitations. Between 1980-87, the Nile faced a major drought and this almost led to a forced shutdown of the Aswan Dam. Naturally, this drought posed a great threat to the lands upstream. Nevertheless, also today, ‘there are good indications’ as Sims puts it, ‘that limits to Egypt’s increased use of both Nile and groundwater have been reached and that a zero-sum situation has arrived or will soon do so, and that supplying sufficient water for new desert projects can only be made at the expense of Old Land irrigation.’ Sims, Egypt’s Desert Dreams (2018) 67 and 70.
27 Sims, Egypt’s Desert Dreams (2018) 73-77. 28 Sims, Egypt’s Desert Dreams (2018) 281-283.
14 Lands,29 where water flows to the government irrigation system by gravity, the reclamation
schemes in the desert require massive government pumping stations in order to redirect the water into the designated canals (and often need additional booster stations). This process uses a
significant amount of energy and is, therefore, costly.30 Second, policymakers underestimated the technical difficulties and costs of conveying the Nile water to the end users. Chiefly due to bad management, poorly constructed canals, and leakages, problems occurred in redirecting Nile water to the farmers and led to vagaries in their access to water (especially at the end of the schemes).31 And third, most reclamation schemes lacked a central built drainage system. While the Old Lands were provided with a comprehensive drainage system, this was not deemed necessary for the reclamation schemes (due to a misunderstanding of the necessities in desert reclamation schemes). The absence of drainage systems can cause a salt build-up in the irrigation water to such a point that it becomes harmful to the plants. Often, it was left to the end user himself to deal with this problem. Still, even with this new knowledge at hand, in some of the new (from 1997 onwards) reclamation schemes (Toshka and East ‘Uwaynat), drainage is given a low priority, eventually leading to problems on the ground.32
Next, to the profits and food promised by the reclamation of the desert, it also ensured new jobs and lives for Egyptians that would work on these lands. As we saw before, according to the official consensus, spreading the population of the Old Lands horizontally (in the desert) is still the imperative reason for developing desert land. By creating opportunities in the desert, people would want to build their lives there. However, a few problems were overlooked. First, many of the reclamation schemes were set up by private capital and were, therefore, highly capital intensive. These projects only created limited job opportunities of which many were seasonal. Second, the harsh conditions and the insecurity of life in the desert did not really attract the target group of unemployed graduates.33 By moving to the desert they had to leave behind a system of social capital, that secures many basic needs, in exchange for an insecure future in the desert. The government enthusiasm of conquering the desert was not always shared by the Egyptian population (especially not the unemployed target population).
29 The terms ‘Old Lands’ and ‘New Lands’ are generally used when talking about Egypt’s agriculture. The Old
Lands represents the agriculture in the Nile Valley and the New Lands the agriculture in the desert.
30 This problem was already recognized by a USAID research in 1980. Sims, Egypt’s Desert Dreams (2018) 71. 31 Sims, Egypt’s Desert Dreams (2018) 70-72.
32 Sims, Egypt’s Desert Dreams (2018) 72 and 77-78. 33 Sims, Egypt’s Desert Dreams (2018) 40.
15 The misjudgement of the local circumstances in the Old Lands and the significance of these elements in the life of Egyptians, not only created problems for reclamation schemes but for almost all schemes in the desert. The strong social connections that are so vital in Egypt, the knowledge of local actors, and the way people are dependent on the (urban) informal economies, have been completely obscured in the minds of Egypt’s politicians and technocrats when it comes to conquering the desert. The numbers don’t lie. In the past fifty years, many lands have been reclaimed but these lands only produced marginal revenues. As Sims puts it, it seems as if the government is more occupied with the ‘feddan game’, counting the numbers of lands that have been reclaimed, than it is with actually creating productive lands.34 When it comes to moving people out of the Nile Valley, the government has made huge efforts and has built twenty-one cities and neighbourhoods within the desert (and is still announcing new schemes),35 however, yet again the accomplishments are negligible, especially compared to the costs and efforts by the state to realize their ambitions. In a 2006 census,36 it was revealed that around 800.000 people had moved to these desert cities, which represents a bit over 1 percent of the population at that time. Embarrassingly, the self-set target of the new-town schemes was not met and the
achievement rate reached only 3.8 percent, according to the census. In contrast to the on-ground achievements, this is even a harder blow. Complete neighbourhoods can be classified as ghost towns and between 61 and 79 percent of the buildings are left vacant.37
Where the formal rhetoric identifies the congestion and over-crowdedness of the Nile Valley (especially in the metropolitan areas) as Egypt’s main problem, Sims argues instead that this is one of her greatest strengths. The way Cairo has grown from four million to seventeen million people in the past fifty years without ever developing into a city where
inhumane/unliveable conditions prevail, as some apocalyptic prophesies predicted (e.g. Planet of
Slums by Mike Davis) is a miraculous achievement and its success can mostly be ascribed to the
informal dynamics of Cairo that have flourished in the urban density of the city. ‘Land is subdivided, housing is built, properties are exchanged, business operates, and public transport
34 Sims, Egypt’s Desert Dreams (2018) 281-283.
35 Between 2014 and 2018, the plans for twelve new desert communities have been released. Sims, Egypt’s Desert
Dreams (2018) xliii.
36 Every ten years (1986,1996,2006), the population of Egypt in each census district of the country is calculated.
According to Sims, this is the only reliable source for population statistic in Egypt. Sims, Egypt’s Desert Dreams (2018) 140.
16 moves in the shadows of illegality.’38 Where a ‘minimal government’ has done a fine job in
providing Cairo with crucial basic public services like water, electricity, roads, and sewage,39
Cairenes have filled the void left by the minimalist government approach. Without a centralized or corporate logic, they built their own neighbourhoods and created a highly sophisticated system of public transport. Today around 63 percent of the inhabitants of the Greater Cairo region live in the informal neighbourhoods and most of these people make (to a certain extent) a decent
living.40 In addition, the reclamation schemes on the fringes of the desert organized by informal actors have been very successful (estimated at between one and two million reclaimed feddans).41 This so-called waḍ’ al-yadd (‘hand claim’) process started somewhere in the eighties and since then has made considerable headway. The failure of state and corporate reclamation schemes absorbing millions of Egyptian pounds is underlined by the success of these local (often illegal) initiatives.42 The achievement of local initiatives in dealing with the quadrupling of the
population with only minimal state support deserves praise and much more academic attention. It is ironic that the government formulates their logic of desert development completely on a misreading of this success.43
By putting the map of Egypt on a drawing board and determining its future challenges, many questions were overlooked or simplified. The question of space and numbers became a force of its own, fuelled by technical, commercial and high modernist logic (better explained in the next chapter). These powers set in motion a hasty government and corporate development of the desert. In a short period of time, all the prime vacant lands in the desert had been given a purpose. However, as Sims argues, these developments did not initiate the dispersion of Egypt’s population into the desert, instead, this valuable land became a site for failed reclamation
38 Sims, Understanding Cairo (2012) 268.
39 As Sims describes, the government has been quite successful in providing basic services to most of the inhabitants
of Cairo. Especially if we compare Cairo to other megacities in the Global South, Cairo has done considerably well. Sims, Understanding Cairo (2012) 257.
40 This in no way implies that the life is easy inside these areas. Many informal areas are in dire need of
improvements.
41 Sims, Egypt’s Desert Dreams (2018) Iii. 42 Sims, Egypt’s Desert Dreams (2018) 100-104.
43 At the same time, we could also consider this negligence a blessing, for it has redirected the state’s attention
towards the desert and has saved most informal areas in Cairo from government/corporate restructuring. Time and time again we see how the main response of the government towards informality is one of eviction and destruction. The recently bulldozed Maspero Triangle attests to this. Farid Farid, “How can a proud country kill its heritage?’ Cairo calls time on oldest watch shop’, The Guardian, 7 August 2019.
17 schemes, gated communities, ghost cities, abandoned hotels, and empty factories. I want to put emphasis on ‘valuable land’ because potentially it offered many opportunities for the public good (and still does). Instead, as I will describe in the next chapter, desert development schemes only benefited a privileged few. Many prime locations (around Cairo and along the coast) have been allocated to dubious investors. The loss of ‘public land’ (previously owned by the government) decreases the possibility for (informal) expansion into the desert for the average Cairene and, therefore, gradually realizes the image of the Egyptian locked inside the small strip of the Nile Valley.
1.3 The scramble for desert land
‘To say that these minerals, plants and animals are meaningful – in other words, that they are economic goods – means that they have been brought within the sweep of the community’s knowledge of ways and means.’
- Thorstein Veblen44
The relation between the Egyptian state and the Egyptian ecology is unique because almost the entire Egyptian desert (Western Desert, Eastern Desert, and Sinai) belongs tostate institutions. Egypt’s frontier demography for development is not privately owned, it is the state who has the power to allocate land for public development or sell it to private investors. Whereas before 1952, there was only minor interest in buying pieces of this (perceived) useless land (for instance Baron Empain and his project of Heliopolis), a run on securing the most valuable lands by private investors unfolded after the 1973 October War with Israel and the infitāḥ policies of Sadat.45 Two
important conditions instigated the scramble for publicly owned land. First, because of the growing state interest in the desert, Sadat’s policies were aimed at encouraging investors (both national and international) to invest their capital outside of the Nile Valley. Land was sold extremely cheap (for instance LE1 per square meter in 10th of Ramadan46) and under easy payment conditions.47 Because this land was suddenly opened for development (both public and private initiatives), it started to attract the attention of many investors not wanting to miss out on
44 Nitzan and Bichler, Capital as Power (2009) 222. 45 Sims, Egypt’s Desert Dreams (2018) 121. 46 Sims, Egypt’s Desert Dreams (2018) 124.
47 ‘a typical purchaser faced a down payment of only 10 percent of the total price, with the remainder spread over
18 these attractive investment opportunities.
The historical context of the seventies was the second important catalyst in the scramble for desert land. These days were the heydays for oil-rich countries in the Arab World. Given that Egypt is closely located to these fellow Arab-speaking countries, many Egyptians during this period moved to these oil-rich states and prospered. On their return to Egypt, they looked for opportunities to invest this ‘oil-money’ and after years of living in the well-organized Gulf states, many wanted to maintain the luxurious lifestyle. The desert was the answer to both of these demands. 48 This new class of Egyptians started buying land and property in order to invest their capital and create future streams of income. Land investments and real-estate have a special allure in Egypt because bond and stock markets are not trusted due to the vagaries of the Egyptian pound and economy.49 Buying property is seen as a clever move because these investments are written in stone and are considered low risk. This means that property does not need to be of any use value for the investor, it can be a structure to secure capital and, at the same time, create durable structures of revenue for the future.50
For the investor, the commercial motive determining the scramble for desert land is chiefly speculative. The value of the property is established by its durability, the way it will generate future flows of income from example, the future revenues of land reclamations, resale of land, touristic related investments, or rent. This forward-looking gambling game in economic terms is called ‘capitalization’. In the calculation of capitalization, expected future earnings of present-day investments are discounted to today’s value (also called net value). Capitalization ‘tells us’, as Nitzan and Bichler put it, ‘how much a capitalist would be prepared to pay now to receive a flow of money later.’51 Marx, in Volume III of Capital, refers to these revenues as ‘fictitious’.52 ‘The forming of a fictitious capital,’ as Marx argues, ‘is called capitalising. Every
periodically repeated income is capitalised by calculating it on the average rate of interest, as an income which would be realised by a capital at this rate of interest.’53 Marx considers this form of
48 Or in the words of Mitchell, ‘and that’s why real estate investment always appears alongside oil revenues. It is the
most logical and straightforward way to take extraordinary revenues from oil and turn them into a long-term future that can be capitalized in the present.’ Mitchell, ‘The Capital City’ (2016).
49 In November 2016 the Egyptian pound devalued around 50% to the Dollar after the Central Bank of Egypt floated
the Egyptian pound
50 This also partly explains the high number of vacancy in Cairo. Sims, Egypt’s Desert Dreams (2018) 151. 51 Nitzan and Bichler, Capital as Power (2009) 153.
52 Abourahme & Jabary-Salamanca, ‘Thinking against the sovereignty of the concept’ (interview Timothy Mitchell),
(2016) 741.
19 capital fictitious because its value is related to an insecure future and cannot be rooted in any ‘material basis’ (labour, modes of production, and commodity money). David Harvey (along with many other neo-Marxists, as shown by Nitzan and Bichler54) follows Marx’s argument, ‘the
money capital advanced [in future appropriation, JV] has to be regarded as fictitious because it is not backed by any firm collateral [rooted in production, JV].’55 According to Harvey, this form of capital is crucial for the ever-more growing accumulation in our modern economy because it captures the changing and complex flows of circulating capital into a ‘fixed form’.56 However, both Marx’s and Harvey’s ideas of fictitious capital are not particularly helpful in understanding the unique relations (of time and power) embedded in this form of capital. By stressing its fictitiousness, we overlook its real value in the present and the way this value tries to ‘order’ our future world.57
The corporation is central in the logic of capitalization. The history of the corporation is much older than the idea of capitalism but the base for its power can best be traced back to the days of colonial expansion. In order to share the risk of overseas expeditions, corporations like the Dutch East-India Company (VOC) and the English East-India Company (EIC) were founded and established a monopoly on trade routes. These companies always had their eyes on the future. This future mirrored the expected revenues and it was this calculated future that had to be sold to present-day investors. Managing the future became crucial in safeguarding these calculations and it did not take long before political powers protected these companies (with violence if necessary) in order to safeguard their investments and to discipline the future. Over time, other similar institutions (e.g. the oil firm and the railroad company) were able to create durable structures generating profits for generations. Corporations are not only responsible for the physical structures but have to protect its durability as well (in order to keep its present-day value), or as Mitchell puts it, ‘the apparatus equally required the control of territory, the displacement or elimination of native populations, and command over labour forces. New technical and political powers engineered a new temporal relationship: the future as a durable revenue structure.’58
54 Nitzan and Bichler, Capital as Power (2009) 84-124. 55 David Harvey, Limits of Capital (Verso 2018 [1982]) 267. 56 Harvey, Limits of Capital (2018) 267.
57 ‘Creorders’ as Nitzan an Bichler would stress. This highlights its ongoing process and construction. ‘To have
history is to create order – a verb and a noun whose fusion yields the verb-noun creorder.’ Nitzan and Bichler,
Capital as Power (2009) 305.
20 Because the corporation depends on his ability to predict and control the future, Nitzan and Bichler stress the role of power/sabotage in today’s accumulation. Capital is inherently political and related to power. By organizing and safeguarding the future, corporations are inevitably entangled in nonmarket and socio-political relations, like taxes, zoning laws, property laws, patents, and debt/rent related legislation. Bringing future profits into the present demands shaping the social order.59
In 1980, military restrictions on the Red Sea Coast were revoked and the desert along the long strip of the sea was opened for development. Investment for touristic purposes was in line with the government’s intention to create job opportunities for Egyptians and moving them out of the Valley. Tourism could create a livelihood for thousands of Egyptians in the desert. After the opening, most land close to Hurghada was allocated and became an area of development in a short period of time. The government encouraged corporations to invest in this land by keeping the price of land fixed at $US 1 per square meter (below local market prices), regardless of the location. Also, the terms for down payment and taxes were particularly advantageous for the investor. Because of the endorsement by the government to allocate the land for tourist
development and by providing it with basic infrastructure, this previously worthless land (from the scope of investors) became extremely valuable. The land allocated for private development exceeded its original value of $1 by 10000%. In addition, banks estimated the value of the land at $100 per m2. Thus, by buying 100.000 square meters for $100.000, investors had a prospect of
gaining access to a liquidity of $10 million, just by signing the land deal.60 This money was then
used to construct hotels and bungalow parks along the coast, that would ensure these investors with future revenues. By calculating the prices, the future revenues, and the risks, Egyptian investors made a calculation of the durability (in providing future revenues) of these enterprises (that were clearly favourable to the capitalist).61 Obviously, the government lost money on these deals. The cost of providing services to these remote locations far exceeded the price for which land was sold. Or more bluntly described by Sims, ‘it seems almost as if the whole process is a
59 Deen S. Sharp, Corporate Urbanization: Between the Future and the Survival of Lebanon (CUNY Academic
Work, 2018)
60 I used exactly the same example that was presented in Thomas Richter and Christian Steiner, ‘Politics, Economics
and Tourism Development in Egypt: insights into the sectoral transformations of a neo-patrimonial rentier state’,
Third World Quarterly, 29:5 (2008) 955.
61 For a better explanation and overview of the elementary particles in the calculation of capitalization, see Nitzan
21 kind of enormous charity scheme aimed at benefiting certain political classes, especially the rich and the influential.’62
The consequences of this approach were huge. For investors, this deal was a no-brainer. By signing these land deals, they could easily and almost riskless create structures that would ensure them of revenues extending far into the future. In the nineties, tourism-investments involved very low risks. Under optimal circumstances, investors were able to pay off their investments within two years and even during ‘troubled times’ (for instance after the 1997 attack in Luxor), it would still take them only six or eight years to be able to repay their loans. Tourism has proven to be a very profitable business in Egypt, not only for investors. The government also benefited from these investments due to the foreign currencies that stabilized the trade deficit. As Thomas Richter and Christian Steiner argue, ‘the political decisions to expand the tourism sector in Egypt were not primarily driven by economic needs, but instead have deep roots in the neo-patrimonial structure of the country, which they aimed to stabilise.’63 The combined power of both the private and the public sector backing the development of Egypt’s coastal land resulted in the complete privatisation of certain areas along the coast that were filled with hotels and
luxurious resorts, mostly aimed at all-inclusive/package deal tourism.
The example of land allocations around the Red Sea Coast is only the tip of the iceberg of desert investment schemes. As Mitchell puts it in the Foreword of Sims’ Egypt’s Desert Dreams, ‘the main economic benefits [of desert development, JV] came not from improvements in productive life and collective wellbeing, but from land deals, contracting opportunities, and speculative profits enjoyed by the small group of well-connected entrepreneurs and regime insiders who were the principal beneficiaries of desert development.’
From the perspective of this ‘productive life and collective wellbeing’, tourism-investments did create a considerable amount of jobs. However, most of these people (mostly men) did not move to these areas instead stayed in dormitories close to their work instead. Their families never moved out of the crowded Valley. 64 The disadvantages of moving to these areas still outweigh
62 Sims, Egypt’s Desert Dreams (2018) 267. This quote relates to desert development in general, not specifically to
the desert development along the Red Sea Coast.
63 Richter & Steiner, ‘Politics, Economics and Tourism Development in Egypt’ (2008) 940. 64 Sims, Egypt’s Desert Dreams (2018) 200-203.
22 some of the hardships of the Old Land.65 On the last note, the desert developments along the
coast were a disaster for the environment and the future of tourism in Egypt. Especially along the Red Coast and the Sinai, tourism has done unavertable damage to the coral reefs and on the North Coast, a huge concrete wall of privatized bungalow parks has taken complete ownership over the sea and beach.66
The desert was the ideal landscape for investors to extend their (oil) revenues into the future and to consolidate a system of power as to who has access to the land. Because of the unique demographic situation in Egypt, where public institutions control the desert hinterlands (almost all the land of Egypt), these institutions are innately entangled in the process of
capitalization. The state has the power to allocate or withhold land for development and is, therefore, crucial for the forward-looking capitalist. Through a complex system of government favouritism,67 a select privileged few gained access to prime locations and made huge revenues.68 Because these investors were backed by government institutions (and because investors
supported governmental plans), these lands and projects became extremely valuable.69 However, this did not mean that the investors had well-developed plans for these lands that would benefit the common good (creating jobs, revenues, and productive lives for Egyptians of all social classes in the desert). Instead, their investments only provided revenues for a selective few. It is remarkable how the Egyptian government did not learn from past failures and, instead of reviving
65 The main reason for this is hard economics. As Sims and El Miniawy put it (quoted in Sims’ Egypt’s Desert
Dreams), ‘the average worker . . . simply cannot afford the family housing and high consumption and service costs
related to new areas. And opportunities in these areas for supplementary household income, so common and important in the large popular areas of the Nile Valley, are extremely limited. The Egyptian wage workers, faced with this reality, make what is a rational economic decision to keep their families in their established homes where costs are considerably lower, preferring to work as individuals in the new desert areas, keeping personal costs to a minimum, and remitting their savings directly to their families.’ In addition, displacement means a loss of social capital and social safety nets. Sims, Egypt’s Desert Dreams (2018) 202-203.
66 These parks are mostly aimed at Egyptians who want to spend the summer along the North Coast. The rest of the
year, these houses remain empty. Sims, Egypt’s Desert Dreams (2018) 199-200.
67 Mitchell, Rule of Experts (2002) 282; Sims, Egypt’s Desert Dreams (2018) 261.
68 As Stephan Roll argues, especially after the financial reforms during the 1990s, a new financial elite established
their power in the economic/political landscape of Egypt. ‘Financial reforms were for the benefit first and foremost of members of the entrepreneurial elite and therefore for those with close connections to the political regime. Whilst other members of the business community gained hardly any advantage from the expansion of credit to the private sector or the opening of the banking sector for foreign capital and stock market development, a few members of the entrepreneurial elite were able to expand their businesses and consolidate their position within the Egyptian economy.’ : Stephan Roll, ‘Finance Matters! The Influence of Financial Sector Reforms on the Development of the Entrepreneurial Elite in Egypt’, Mediterranean Politics 15 no. 3 (2010) 367.
69 ‘Corporate capital is a symbolic crystallization of power exercised over large-scale human organizations, typically
by a small group of large absentee owners intertwined with key government officials.’ Nitzan and Bichler, Capital as
23 failed schemes, kept allocating new lands for development. This illustrates the real interests of the Egyptian dominant powers (corporations and the state). The New Administrative Capital of Egypt also has to be discussed in this context. While the majority of the newly built houses in the past fifty years are still left vacant, the government decides to build a huge city that has to house around six million people. In a better way than theories on ‘commercialization’, ‘neoliberalism’, rentier state, and fictitious capital, thinking from capitalization gives us a deeper insight into the history and present of Egyptian desert development. At the same time, it opens new ways to discuss the future of which the new capital will be part. According to Egyptian officials, the New Administrative Capital in Egypt will chiefly be finance with private capital. These investors, naturally, expect that their invested capital will generate future incomes.
2. The high modernist city
‘In Brazil it was Rio and it became Brasília – we need this. It costs billions, we know, but we need it’
- Khaled El-Husseiny, ACUD Chairman
The idea of the desert as a clean sheet, one that can be completely modified to the wishes of a planner is a powerful image. This image was an important impulse for the build-up of the desert in a high modernist fashion. In this chapter, I want to take a closer look at the ideology of high modernism. Just as in Scott’s Seeing Like a State, I will assess of a case study on Brasilia to exemplify ‘high modernism’, as this ideology seemed to have inspired so many desert
development schemes in Egypt (including the new capital). However, I will not articulate these critiques alongside Jane Jacobs (as Scott does), instead, I will make use of Henri Lefebvre, who in my view brings forward more powerful tools to dissect the city and its inhabitants. Lefebvre’s idea of the city as a condition for capitalism, rather than an outcome of its flows unveils critical tools to better understand the role of space, the state, and the everyday in the logic of capital. Especially his dialectical approach towards space helps us to better locate the actors in ‘the production of space’. Brasilia was one of the first cities to be built completely from scratch inspired by a high modern vision. There has been extensive research on the city, especially the book The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasília by James Holston is helpful to better understand the ‘human reaction’ to the high modernist scheme and helps us to articulate some of the problematic assumptions in building a new city.
24
2.1 Le Corbusier, Henri Lefebvre, and Brasilia
In 1956, two Brazilian architects, Lúcio Costa, and Oscar Niemeyer, joined hands and embarked upon the realization of a
revolutionary project, a new capital for Brazil, Brasilia. Four years later, on April 21, 1960, the new city was founded and Brazil’s governmental institutions on the coastal lands of Rio de Janeiro were moved into the
centre-west region of the mainland of Brazil.
Brasilia was built from scratch, and was to become the new face of Brazil and the new regime, led by Juscelino Kubitschek. The task given to Costa and Niemeyer was a dream for every modern urbanist at that time. Out of empty space, a new man-made landscape could be created, completely to the liking of its planners. With Brasilia, its architecture and cityscape, a new society was envisioned that would constitute the modern future of Brazil. These utopian modernist visions were largely inspired by the Swiss-French architect/urbanist Le Corbusier. Corbusier is an important figure in the theorization and professionalization of urban planning. Next to his architectural work, he left behind a large oeuvre of books on planning and
architecture. Corbusier looked for ways to free the modern man from historical and social space confining the modern spirit in its search for ultimate freedom. The traditional and classist city with its inefficient use of space had to be abandoned. Clean spaces, without any historical or social baggage, needed to be erected in order to create an efficient and equal society. With
Brasilia, Costa and Niemeyer were given the perfect opportunity to put some of Corbusier’s ideas into practice on an empty, tabula rasa space.70
Brasilia was built in the shape of an airplane and had to house around 600.000 people. Corbusier foresaw the revolution of the automobile and proposed that future cities should be built in service of the car. Also, Brasilia followed Corbusier’s vision and automobile transport was prioritized. This attention to (automobile) movement is seen in Brasilia’s road-plan. Highways in
70 James Holston, The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasília (The University of Chicago Press
1989) 1-98.
Figure 3: The Conceptual Masterplan for Brasilia. Wikipedia,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bras%C3%ADlia#/media/File:Brasil ia_-_Plan.JPG
25 straight lines without traffic lights or stop signs cut through the city’s modern structures and deliver people and goods directly and efficiently to the building of destination. Sidewalks are a rare sight in Brasilia and the wide highways without pedestrian crossings make walking a troublesome task. Street-life is therefore almost completely absent, except for some preordained public spaces. Life is concentrated inside live- and workspaces.71 Space in-between is ruled by cars, a necessity in Brasilia, making it first and foremost a middle/upper-class city.
One of the key aspects of a modernist city, according to Le Corbusier, is repetition. Repetition eradicates differences and brings order in the flow of people, commodities, and information. Order within a city optimizes the efficient use of space and mass-production. This abstract way of looking at space is not only visible in Brasilia but also in many other places (especially North-American cities). It seems hard to escape this modernist logic or, in the words of Max Weber, ‘iron cage’ of instrumental rationality.72 Acceleration of movement within cities
is fetishized and only constitutes to a faster flow of subjects and objects, ‘increasing the circulation of traffic as an end in itself’.73 As a consequence of this rational approach to space, non-places materialize. These places are completely stripped of any human relation, their only function constitutes to the enhancement and satiation of limitless flows. The Motel, the petrol station, and the highway restaurant
‘are constructs devoid of the particular, built to honour a repetitive and instrumental logic. Their sterile enclosures offer ‘safety’ from contamination from any localized culture and/or nature, from anything that is different, but this is achieved only at the cost of making the person concerned subject to the efficient ordering of the production line and endless queues to consume.’74
Brasilia’s lifeless streets, encircled by empty grass and orderly flats, non-places, are the natural product of this technoscience.
In the high modernist city, repetitive spaces often come across as ‘neutral’ and lacking a clear ideology. Abstract space strives for the eradication of difference and is based on a perceived
71 Holston, The Modernist City (1989) 101-136; Edward Cornish, ‘Building Utopia: Lessons from Brasilia’ The
Futurist 25 no. 4 (Jul/Aug 1991) 30-31.
72 Mick Smith ‘Repetition and Difference: Lefebvre, Le Corbusier and Modernity's (Im)moral Landscape’, Ethics,
Place & Environment 4 no. 1 (2001) 33.
73 Smith ‘Repetition and Difference’ (2001) 32. 74 Smith ‘Repetition and Difference’ (2001) 33.
26 scientific/rationale concept of order and repetition. It, therefore, presents itself as ‘clean’ and ‘empty’. Only, as Mick Smith argues, modern urbanism does serve certain forms of moralities (or immoralities). A certain ‘sameness’ is imagined by the eradication of difference. Objects and individuals nonconforming to this sameness are excluded within this space. Only in a
rationalized, orderly city can the modern subject be truly free so in the end, also these ‘Others’ need to be freed by the means of normalization and homogenization. Smith dissects three main features of the (im)morality in Corbusier’s modernist space: ‘mass-production’, ‘repetition’, and ‘efficiency’. However, according to Lefebvre, this morality misses ‘any frame of reference or horizon’75 and just serves the biopolitics of ‘normalization’ in an industrial society. In the words
of Lefebvre, ‘Le Corbusier ideologizes as he rationalizes’, the consequences of his quest for ‘freedom’,
‘is a fracturing of space: the homogeneity of an architectural ensemble conceived of as a 'machine for living in', and as the appropriate habitat for a man-machine, corresponds to a disordering of elements wrenched from each other in such a way that the urban fabric itself - the street, the city - is also torn apart.’76
In the eyes of Lefebvre, Le Corbusier was not a ‘revolutionary’; on the contrary, he drew the blueprint for state control and the advancement of capital accumulation in the city.
To fully understand Lefebvre’s critique of spaces of modernity and of capital, we have to evoke his theory on the production of space, the spatial triad. Just as Marx tried to theorize the deeper social relations mystified in the commodity in Capital, Lefebvre follows this argument and tries to grasp space as a product(ion) of social actors, that cannot be seen as a timeless given. Space is a tempo-spatial process that is better understood divided into three interconnected concepts; perceived (spatial practice), conceived (representation of space), and lived space (representational space). These three elements in the production of space are in a constant
dialectical relationship. Perceived space relates to the material and physical aspects of space. It is the extension of the human body into space and the way human senses (seeing, smelling, hearing, feeling, and tasting) encounter its surrounding. The way we perceive space is determined by the way space is conceived and lived. Conceived space is the space of the planner or the professional,
75 Smith, ‘Repetition and Difference’ (2001) 36.
27 it relates to the presupposed idea around space and is, therefore, linked to the production of knowledge. The last dimension of space is the space of the lived experience and the
everydayness. It tries to encompass the way humans change their surroundings in their everyday activities and rhythms, by the use of symbols. Representational space gives meaning to the conceived and perceived landscapes. Although we have a sense of the lived experience around us, it is the hardest aspect of social space to study and comprehend. According to Lefebvre, this unimaginable aspect of the lived experience integrates art, revolution, and other irrational wonders of life into the social dimension of space.77 With the use of Lefebvre’s spatial triad, ‘space is to be understood in an active sense as an intricate web of relationships that is
continuously produced and reproduced. The object of the analysis is, consequently, the active processes of production that take place in time.’78
Returning to Brasilia, we see how everyday life is crushed by the rational abstraction of the city. Commenting on the city of Niemeyer, Lefebvre argues that in the production of the
‘space of Brasilia…there is an almost self-consciously comic aspect to the process… The person who sees and knows only how to see, the person who draws and knows only how to put marks on a sheet of paper, the person who drives around and knows only how to drive a car — all contribute in their way to the mutilation of a space which is everywhere sliced up. And they all complement one another:…’79
Abstract space tries to control and discipline the lived space and thereby tries to impose a form of
ideology/morality on the production of space. For Lefebvre, Le Corbusier’s urbanism and architecture served both state power and state capitalism. The clean
77 Christian Schmid, ‘Henri Lefebvre’s Theory of the Production of Space: Towards a Three-Dimensional Dialectic’,
in Space, Difference, Everyday Life: Reading Lefebvre, Ed. Kanishka Goonewardena, Stefan Kipfer, Richard Milgrom, and Christian Schmid (2008) 39-40.
78 Schmid, ‘Henri Lefebvre’s Theory of the Production of Space’, Space, Difference, Everyday Life, ed.
Goonewardena et al. (2008) 41.
79 Lefebvre, The Production of Space (1992) 312-313.
Figure 4: Construction Brasilia,
https://www.archdaily.com/303639/the- construction-of-brasilia-photos-by-marcel-gautherot
28 and efficient space in the city was the perfect breeding ground for state-led capital accumulation and tried to overshadow the human everydayness in the modernist city. The city of Corbusier reminds us of the factory of Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford. Every aspect of the complex social systems of work and everyday life was dismembered and reorganised in a more ‘efficient’ way. Brasilia was the personification of this new state capitalist city, concealed in Avant-Garde
rhetoric. All barricades to optimal productivity were dismantled (inefficiency, difference) and the city was employed as a loyal servant for the enhancement of state and capital control. Lefebvre’s critique is controversial because Corbusier (and also Niemeyer and Costa) were fervent anti-capitalists and important members of communist parties. Lefebvre’s critique gives a good insight in his dubious position within the Marxist tradition. In 1958, he was expelled by the French Communist party because of his rejection of authoritarianism and his support for the anticolonial cause in Algeria.80 One of the important elements that distinguish Lefebvre’s open Marxism from classical Marxists is not only his extension of Marx’s critique of capitalism into the urban but also the way he understands the modernist state and its role in the survival of capitalism. The modern state organizes ‘a unitary, logistical, operational and quantifying rationality which would make economic growth possible and draw strength from that growth for its own expansion to a point where it would take possession of the entire planet’.81
From the moment the construction of Brasilia started, tensions rose over the accessibility of the new city. President Kubitschek mobilized a huge workforce coming from all over Brazil to work on the city. These people, drawn by economic opportunities and the patriotic call of this project, needed accommodation. This immediately posed a problem for the planners because it threatened the planned purpose of Brasilia. The huge cubes in the wings of Brasilia, the
superquadra, were built to house the administrative heart of the government so there was no
space for the heavy influx of workers. A settlement outside the airplane-shaped centre was built to house these workers. This way, the new capital retained its image as a ‘clean city’, where the
80 Lefebvre’s attempts to better theorize the experience of ‘everyday life’ and alienation under capitalism was met
with scepticism. Literature on Western Marxism remains strikingly silent on Lefebvre’s contribution to current Marxist thought. Marx had never really aimed his attention to the city, only Friedrich Engels wrote on the urban question of housing the working class, but according to Lefebvre only touched the surface of dooming urban future. Marie Huchzermeyer. ‘Humanism, creativity and rights: invoking Henri Lefebvre’s right to the city in the tension presented by informal settlements in South Africa today.’ Transformation: Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa 85 (2014) 68; Lukasz Stanek, ‘Space as concrete abstraction: Hegel, Marx, and modern urbanism in Henri Lefebvre’ in Space, Difference, Everyday Life, ed. Goonewardena et al. (2008) 69.
81 Lefebvre quoted in Neil Brenner, Stuart Elden, ‘Henri Lefebvre on State, Space, Territory’, International Political
