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Cairo between the old and the new capital. A hopeless case ?

©Gülçin Erdi

SPACEPOL Report from the fieldtrip to Cairo – April 2025, written by Clara Rivas Alonso & Gülçin Erdi

 

From April 20 to 27, 2025, members of the Spacepol team (Gülçin Erdi, Vincent Delcourt and Clara Rivas Alonso) conducted an intense and wide-ranging fieldwork mission in Cairo as part of the ongoing SpacePol research project. The aim was to observe firsthand and photograph the transformations underway in the Egyptian capital, with particular focus on the intersecting dynamics of evictions, demolitions, and the construction of monumental new urban developments such as New Cairo and the New Administrative Capital (NAC). Alongside Professor Gülçin Erdi and photographer Vincent Delcourt, this journey offered rich visual and affective material for our final photographic exhibition and further dissemination.

What emerged was a striking portrait of urban violence and speculation on a scale that defies comprehension, marked by disjunctive spatialities—of ruins and erasure on the one hand, and eerie, over-scaled emptiness on the other. The trip allowed us to engage not only with landscapes of urban change, but also with the people negotiating or simply trying to live within these transformations.

We began with a series of exploratory visits across Downtown Cairo, from the iconic and over-surveyed Tahrir Square to the ghostly remains of the Maspero Triangle. Once a dense and historic working-class neighbourhood, the area has been radically emptied and replaced by gleaming towers of glass and steel1—a sanitised, investor- friendly version of what once was. These new buildings stand in brutal contrast to the city’s social history, and we were left wondering about the former inhabitants. This is where the work of our Cairo team of researchers becomes vital: a week after our trip The Vanishing Cairo seminar was held at CEDEJ (Centre d’études et de documentation économiques, juridiques et sociales), bringing together a range of scholars and practitioners to critically interrogate the ongoing erasure of Cairo’s historical and popular urban landscapes under the guise of development. Opening remarks by CEDEJ Director Frédéric Lagrange and an introduction to the SpacePol programme by Agnès Deboulet framed the discussion around spatial politics and state-led transformations. Ingy Higazy examined the Greater Cairo Ring Road as a symbol of mobility-led development that simultaneously destroys established communities. Dalia Wahdan and Yomna el Gendy traced the metamorphosis of Fustat from an early Islamic capital into a terrain of aggressive real estate speculation, while Yahia Shawkat offered a scathing critique of state expropriation policies, highlighting the financial logic that underpins displacement. A collective intervention by Ahmed Zaazaa, Salma Belal, and Agnès Deboulet contextualised Cairo’s urban frenzy as a capital-centric drive, rooted in spatial gigantism and dispossession, developed further in a forthcoming SpacePol publication. Zaazaa’s subsequent presentation introduced his “New Maps of Cairo,” a critical documentation of transformations between 2015 and 2025, mapping out the violence of invisibilisation. The seminar closed with Ahmed Mansour’s poignant reflection on heritage loss in Historic Cairo, showing how legal protections are routinely bypassed to facilitate demolition. Altogether, the day laid bare the extractive, speculative, and performative logics behind Cairo’s contemporary urbanism, and provided urgent tools to make visible what is being systematically made to disappear.

1For further information, you can read the article of Dina Wahba (2020) about the Maspero Triangle

***You read the 20 % of the article originally published in spacepol.hypotheses.org. Read the rest of the article on https://spacepol.hypotheses.org/3008  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

               
               
 
 
 

 


OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
gulcinerdi (9 juin 2025). Cairo between the old and the new capital. A hopeless case ? Observatoire Urbain d'Istanbul. Consulté le 13 mars 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/142rl


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