Spatial and political agency in urban transformation: the erosion of Cairo’s middle-class neighbourhoods post-2011 revolution

Urban transformation of the built environment in Cairo’s middle-class neighbourhoods has been affected by a stream of immense socio-political changes which took place in post-revolution Cairo. Focusing on the urban politics of the middle class—investigating their agency, collective actions, and/or (dis)organized responses vis-à-vis state planning—this research explores how middle class agency, whether expressed through organization, disorganization, or even inaction, shapes the built environment. How do middle class citizens, through coordinated or loosely coordinated actions, co-produce and negotiate urban space? Cairo’s middle-class neighbourhoods represent an uncharted terrain in urban research. They remain understudied, in contrast to the extensive literature on informal settlements and new desert developments in Egypt. Yet, throughout the last decade, many of Cairo’s middle-class neighbourhoods have undergone significant changes, and their inhabitants have similarly evolved, outgrowing previous governing rules. Navigating a highly securitized environment—where a revolution has been countered and co-opted; civil action diminished; public liberties restricted; political rights granted on the basis of allegiance; and any organized action scrutinized by the state—investigating agency in its various forms becomes critically important for understanding the dynamics that produce the contemporary urban environment, as well as for informing future research paths and academic endeavours. Exploring empirical cases to analyse the order of space, its usage, and its users, two case studies—the neighbourhoods of Heliopolis and Nasr City—are explored and analysed through an urban-political lens, focusing on their urban morphology, spatial agency, and socio-economic factors that impact the socio-political tensions in middle-class neighbourhoods in Cairo. Despite being adjacent to one another, the two neighbourhoods carry different histories, display distinctive features, and are evolving into varied futures. As a locus for socio-political change, this dissertation studies the dynamics of urban transformation in Cairo’s middle-class neighbourhoods, using the framework of spatial agency as an explanatory tool to understand contemporary Cairo. In this context, I argue that the middle class, both as a social group and an urban space, has eroded as a result of a set of political and spatial dynamics that produced new social, economic, and political hierarchies in post-revolution Cairo.