Politics in the Crevices: Urban Design and the Making of Property Markets in Cairo and Istanbul offers an in-depth exploration of the intricate workings of property and real estate markets in İstanbul and Cairo – two large metropolises whose layered histories present both opportunities and challenges for social science research. To examine how struggles over property unfold in neoliberalizing cities in the global South, Sarah El-Kazaz deftly weaves together the trajectories of urban transformation in İstanbul and Cairo, drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2011 and 2012. Shedding light on heritage preservation and urban renewal schemes undertaken by international non-governmental organizations, corporate developers, and state agencies in six historic working-class neighborhoods, El-Kazaz situates urban planning and architectural design at the heart of urban class-based conflict.

At the intersection of political economy, urban studies and research on infrastructure, the book, at the broadest level, studies how the political is reconfigured at a time when marketization processes obscure the conventional lines between state and society. Remarkably, it does so by examining the multifaceted and highly volatile nature of “market value,” which is typically tied to purely economic dynamics. As such, the book, based on the author’s doctoral project at Princeton University, enriches the literature on İstanbul and Cairo where contemporary conflicts over urban space illuminate the convoluted nature of neoliberal marketization.

The book’s overarching argument is that despite prevailing interpretations, neoliberalization has not undermined political mobilization regarding redistribution; rather, it has displaced this politics onto subtler and ostensibly insignificant fields like urban planning and architectural design. El-Kazaz confronts the widely held assumptions of critical scholarship on neoliberalism, which diagnoses a total foreclosure of contentious spaces under neoliberalism, ultimately equating neoliberalization with depoliticization. Instead, the book traces how mundane conflicts over the miniscule details of urban transformation projects reflect the evolving nature of redistributive politics, suggesting that the politics of property markets is relocated to the crevices of urban life – hence the book’s title.

To substantiate this argument, El-Kazaz invites the reader to tour the alleyways and crooked houses in historic İstanbul and Cairo, and gives a textured analysis of negotiations over the design of electrical wiring, clothes lines, and water pipes. These negotiations reveal political motivations and imaginaries of experts, staff, and decision-makers involved in urban transformation projects. Moreover, they reflect broader shifts in the dynamics that eventually determine the market value of housing and property. As the traditional paths of twentieth-century welfare/developmental states’ redistributive politics centered on tools such as rent-control laws, public housing, or subsidies gave way to a novel state–society relationship based on formalized and consolidated market mechanisms, the circuits of markets through which value is set have assumed a more significant function in class-based struggles. However, the substitution of non-commodified practices with manifestly marketized relations does not annul the extra-economic dynamics underpinning property markets. As El-Kazaz identifies, in a city where redistributive politics unfolds from within market rationales, the battle for housing “is alive and well but is being displaced to the subtle, quiet machinations of careful urban design rather than manifesting as loud and overt class-based struggles over the city’s resources” (p. 209). In that sense, the cases of İstanbul and Cairo exemplify how the gravity center of redistributive politics shifts in the neoliberalizing cities of the global South. The book acknowledges that the shift’s axes are not identical in the two cities, since projects undertaken in İstanbul specifically sought to push working-class residents onto the city’s periphery. However, broader than that, its contention about two distinct – “overt” and “subtle” – modalities of redistributive politics begs the question of what extent of the “displaced” political realm is open to the voices of working classes under neoliberal urbanism.

The first part of the book, entitled “The Making of Property Markets,” comprises two chapters that analyze the historical construction of the property terrain on which struggles for housing unfold in the 2000s. Drawing on secondary sources, El-Kazaz traces changing “ecological, geopolitical, affective, and sensorial lived experiences [which] … transformed how urban dwellers valued property in central districts of both cities” (p. 14). This account does justice to the layered histories of these two metropolises whose physical and social spaces have (trans)formed in tandem with broader phenomena such as the collapse of empires, (de)colonization, nation-state building, the formation of developmental states, and the dissolution of state-led industrialization. By carefully dissecting the material, spatial, and affective aspects of such processes, this part illustrates the entangled condition of the current landscape of property markets.

Chapter 1 addresses how Cairenes experience, signify, and represent the city’s historic center through tropes such as “decay” or “collapse,” and thus explains why “the transfer of property of Egypt’s rising class of developers was not violently forced, nor … coordinated by the state” (p. 63). In contrast, the İstanbul case reveals state-led violence coloring urban transformation attempts and property markets. To explain this difference, Chapter 2 once again presents a historical account where we trace how the rural-to-urban migrants of the mid-twentieth century became propertied at the expense of non-Muslim communities forced to flee İstanbul. This account, albeit familiar to those acquainted with İstanbul, elucidates why the Turkish state has been much more aggressive to marketize historic neighborhoods. Read together, these two chapters provide a longue durée analysis of varying actors’ positions, imaginaries, and lived experiences in the making of property markets.

The second part of the book, “Redistributive Markets,” explores three themes in three chapters – heritage, community, and visible publics – that identify the particular dimensions of planning and design in the project sites. Building on ethnographic data, El-Kazaz shifts to the microscale, and examines how seemingly insignificant disputes between experts and residents actually showcase longstanding conflicts revolving around issues like identity, memory, and heritage. These conflicts constitute a prism through which market value is formed and recognized.

Along this line of argumentation, Chapter 3 discusses a European Union-funded rehabilitation project in the Fener–Balat neighborhood, once home to İstanbul’s non-Muslim communities. Although the contemporary heritage industry deliberately mobilizes an “environmental” approach to unhinge heritage from identity and nationalist politics, thus moving to depoliticize heritage, El-Kazaz shows that Muslim working classes that replaced non-Muslims continue to deal with this troubled memory in a way that constantly repoliticizes heritage. The chapter suggests that the valorization of heritage supposedly for the sake of social justice ultimately remakes power dynamics. Chapter 4 moves back to Cairo, and examines how the notion of community is engineered by the experts involved in a restoration project inaugurated by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture. While the project ostensibly aimed to mitigate the risk of displacement which is typical in such restoration projects, a particular understanding of community mobilized by experts to educate and responsibilize the locals as urban citizens created novel hierarchies. Chapter 4 demonstrates that such meanings invested in community, paradoxically, exclude residents simultaneously deemed undeserving of valuable historic edifices. Lastly, Chapter 5 examines the design of visible public spaces both in İstanbul and Cairo, to illustrate how “competing redistributive practices redraw public/private boundaries” (p. 16), given boosted touristic activities in historic quarters. Jumping scales from parks and streets to balconies and windows, this chapter investigates how the city’s accessibility and servicing are negotiated and contested. Underscoring the political importance of “visual topographies,” El-Kazaz suggests that power and resources are shared unequally along the lines of gender, age, and class in historic centers. The book ends with a brief concluding chapter, which points at the threads of possible further discussion on how the displacement of politics ultimately cultivates populist political tendencies.

Besides its engaging and stimulating narrative, a core contribution of Politics in the Crevices is its comparative take on the largest metropolises in the so-called MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region. Despite the manifest historical ties between these central cities of the former Ottoman Empire, and although their trajectories of twentieth-century modernization resemble each other in many ways, urban research that gauges İstanbul and Cairo together has been greatly exceptional. El-Kazaz embarks on this challenge, and eloquently ponders together the complexities of property markets in formally built historic neighborhoods, to deliver a comprehensive analysis of how urban politics has transformed under neoliberal urbanism. As such, hers is an intriguing contribution to the vibrant scholarship on comparative urbanism.

The research area of İstanbul studies is replete with accounts that either isolate the city from the rest of the world or locate it within a network of Northern/global cities. El-Kazaz’s book avoids rigid comparative analytics but still expands research on İstanbul by effectively relocating the city in Southern urbanism. However, the presentation of the ethnographic data compels certain criticism. El-Kazaz deliberately chooses cases without particular regard to “symmetry” in an effort to overcome the analytical narrowness of more conventional comparisons that tackle contextual differences. While commendable, this at times leads to shortcomings in terms of composition and analysis. Specifically, the over-reliance on a single case, Fener–Balat, in the discussions on İstanbul causes narrative gaps and occasionally makes the conclusions drawn for İstanbul appear unduly assertive. Since the power dynamics in Sulukule and Tarlabaşı show how recent state-led urban transformation schemes are more intimately infused with corporate interests and motives than the Fener–Balat case, the other two cases would have enhanced the book’s analysis. Relatedly, but more significantly, I recognize El-Kazaz’s inclination to concentrate on formally built historic neighborhoods, but I consider it an important drawback that there are no analyses of the broader, quantitatively, and politically significant processes of urban change in İstanbul’s former gecekondu neighborhoods.

Overall, Politics in the Crevices stands out among its kind. The combination of theoretical robustness, sharp on-the-ground observations, and meticulous analysis leaves the reader with a desire to engage further with the questions set throughout the book. I have no doubt that it will incite stimulating debates among scholars of urban and area studies.