City of the High Dam: Aswan and the Promise of Postcolonialism in Egypt

Abstract Aswan city grew rapidly in the 1950s and 1960s due to the building of the High Dam nearby. The “promising future” of the city involved an array of projects to reconstruct the built environment and modify socio‐spatial practices of exclusion that had formed in the colonial period. This article examines several new building projects of the 1960s, such as housing settlements, new riverfront thoroughfares, and transportation systems, as well as imaginaries of city living, expressed in fictional and journalistic writing and film, to excavate a history of the city. The emphasis on debris and cleanliness in these narratives demonstrates that small‐scale and local ruin‐making practices of residents modified the easy language of promise employed by the postcolonial state. This history reveals the insufficiency of the binary of coercion and consent most often used to explain relations of power and affect in postcolonial states. Provincial cities remain marginalized in Middle Eastern urban studies, and yet the intimate scale of heterogeneity of provincial cities can reveal stark urban geographies of difference. postcolonialism, dam, urban, ruin, housing, Egypt