The Egyptian military regime of Abd al-Fattah el-Sisi has announced as part of its Vision 2030 its intention to eliminate informal urban areas. The regime has identified these areas – commonly known ...by the Arabic term ‘ashwa’iyyat (which means haphazard) – as a threat to the nation. The Egyptian state, however, has no clear conception of what urban informality constitutes or what exactly it is eradicating. To understand how and why the state has placed urban informality as central to its politics, I contend that we have to examine the political processes through which this uncertain yet powerful concept is produced. Urban informality, I argue, is a political intervention that is always fleeting and geographically specific in an otherwise haphazard context. Haphazard urbanisation points to the complex power struggles by a range of actors, both within and beyond the state, through which the formal and informal divide can mark urban life. In a critical reading of the first major study of informality in Egypt, I show how the urban was divided into the formal and informal through outdated laws. I detail, by engaging sources in English and Arabic, how the Egyptian state militarised urban informality from the 1990s onwards. I argue that it is through this historical framing that we must understand el-Sisi’s current war against urban informality. In turn, I argue that the regime’s attempt to eliminate informality has not resulted in greater control over what and how urban informality appears but has deepened the hazardisation of urban life.
After decades of geography and area studies drifting apart, I argue there has been an area studies turn in geography. The long divergence between the two, however, has resulted in a certain ...misunderstanding by geographers of what area studies scholarship is and what this field can contribute to the discipline. Area studies should not be considered as an approach that merely concentrates on the representation of difference but rather as a milieu in which difference is practiced and geographical concepts can be ‘diffracted’. Area studies can offer geography new ways to think about its place in, and entanglement with, the world.
Open Gaza Sorkin, Michael; Sharp, Deen; Roy, Sara ...
12/2020
eBook
Sorkin is well known to the architecture/urban design community
in the USA with a strong publishing track record
Book includes contributions from leading voices on
Israel-Palestine, including Sara ...Roy, Tareq Baconi, Helga
Tawil-Souri, and Salem Al-Qudwa
All contributions are original pieces not published
elsewhere
Will be of interest to scholars and activists concerned with
Gaza and the IP conflict
Direct marketing to Terreform email list to drive sales to
bookstores
Cutting-edge analysis on how to improve life inside the
Gaza Strip through architecture and design, illustrated in
full-color
The Gaza Strip is one of the most beleaguered environments on
earth. Crammed into a space of 139 square miles (360 square
kilometers), 1.8 million people live under an Israeli siege,
enforcing conditions that continue to plummet to ever more
unimaginable depths of degradation and despair. Gaza, however, is
more than an endless encyclopedia of depressing statistics. It is
also a place of fortitude, resistance, and imagination; a context
in which inhabitants go to remarkable lengths to create the
ordinary conditions of the everyday and to reject their exceptional
status. Inspired by Gaza's inhabitants, this book builds on the
positive capabilities of Gazans. It brings together
environmentalists, planners, activists, and scholars from Palestine
and Israel, the US, the UK, India, and elsewhere to create hopeful
interventions that imagine a better place for Gazans and
Palestinians. Open Gaza engages the Gaza Strip within and
beyond the logics of siege and warfare, it considers how life can
be improved inside the limitations imposed by the Israeli blockade,
and outside the idiocy of violence and warfare.
Contributors Affiliations
Salem Al Qudwa , Harvard Divinity School and
Harvard Kennedy School, Cambridge, USA
Hadeel Assali , Columbia University, USA
Tareq Baconi , International Crisis Group,
Brussels, Belgium
Teddy Cruz , University of California-San
Diego, USA
Fonna Forman , University of California-San
Diego, USA
M. Christine Boyer , Princeton University,
Princeton, USA
Alberto Foyo , architect, New York, USA
Nasser Golzari , Westminster University,
London, UK
Yara Sharif , Westminster University, London,
UK
Denise Hoffman Brandt , City College of New
York, USA
Romi Khosla , architect, New Delhi, India
Craig Konyk , Kean University, Union, NJ,
USA
Rafi Segal , Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Boston, USA
Chris Mackey , Payette Architects, Boston,
USA
Vyjayanthi V. Rao , Terreform, New York,
USA
Sara Roy , Harvard University, Cambridge,
USA
Mahdi Sabbagh , architect, New York, USA
Meghan McAllister , architect, San Francisco
Bay Area, USA
Deen Sharp , London School of Economics,
UK
Malkit Shoshan , Harvard University, Cambridge,
USA
Pietro Stefanini , University of Edinburgh,
Scotland
Michael Sorkin (1948-2020) , City University
of New York, USA
Helga Tawil-Souri, New York University,
USA
Omar Yousef , Al-Quds University,
Jerusalem
Fadi Shayya , The University of Manchester,
UK
If you look today at the skyline of downtowns throughout the Middle East and beyond, the joint-stock corporation has transformed the urban landscape. The corporation makes itself present through the ...proliferation of its urban mega-projects, including skyscrapers, downtown developments and gated communities; retail malls and artificial islands; airports and ports; and highways. Built into these corporate urban structures are edifices of politics, ideology and certain forms of socio-spatial and temporal organization. The corporation, however, has largely escaped critical scholarly analysis in Geography and/or Urban and Middle East Studies. In this thesis, I argue that the corporation is far more than a mere business enterprise and is in fact one of the most important apparatuses in the organization of our socio-spatial relations. Through an analysis of the 19th-century French joint-stock corporation, Compagnie Impériale Ottomane de la Route Beyrouth-Damas, and Solidere the corporation that led the reconstruction of Beirut following the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1991), this thesis considers and explores the force of the corporation in assembling socio-spatial relations and certain urban futures. Drawing on work in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Geography, I consider the process of capitalization, which is central to how the corporation organizes its operations. Capitalization represents the present value of a future stream of earnings. I argue that capitalization is now central to the urbanization process and that the urban fabric has provided the corporation with a durable structure to guarantee a stream of income. Capitalized urbanization, I contend, is the building of a certain future into the urban present - also understood as the extension of time (the future) through the concentration of space (urbanization). It is therefore not only an economic proposition but one that necessitates broader socio-political and spatial control. In the case of the Compagnie, I argue, through its capitalization this corporation established a new power network that not only generated great profits for its shareholders but also contributed to the rise of Beirut as a central trading hub and facilitated the French domination of the Levant. The establishment of Solidere would once again create an urban corporate imposition that greatly altered the socio-spatial relations of Beirut and Lebanon more broadly. Solidere, I contend was central to the formation of the Second Lebanese Republic. Through Solidere’s corporate socio-spatial apparatus and its capitalization of the built environment, the company was able to build a certain future into the urban present, foreclosing other possible futures and socio-spatial formations.
INTRODUCTION Michael Sorkin; Deen Sharp
Open Gaza,
12/2020
Book Chapter
At the Fun Time beach café located on the Khan Younis seafront in Gaza, a small group of Palestinian men were watching the 2014 World Cup semifinal between the Netherlands and Argentina. Bilal ...al-Astal and the soccer fans gathered with him were not given the chance to find out which team would proceed to the global spectacle of the World Cup final. As al-Astal stated in his testimony to the Israeli NGO B’Tselem: We watched the first half of the match together. We drank tea and coffee and there was a relaxed mood. We didn’t hear any airplanes nearby. Suddenly,
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