David Sims’ thoroughly researched and compellingly argued Egypt's Desert Dreams provides an analysis of the ideological and sociopolitical conditions that have propelled a “national imperative” to develop Egypt's deserts from the mid-twentieth century into the beginning of the twenty-first. The book has three central projects, the first of which is an accounting of what desert development projects have accomplished in terms of their stated aims: agricultural production, employment, sustainable economic opportunities, and the redistribution of population. Secondly, Sims examines why success in these projects has been so elusive. Finally, he examines why there has been such a dearth of evaluation of desert ventures and why this history of limited success is so rarely discussed. In each section, Sim addresses what the implications have been, and are likely to be, of the political changes in Egypt over the last six years. This text adds to a rich and growing field of research on the function of environmental projects to legitimate and extend state power in the region (see Jones, Toby Craig. 2010. Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water forged Modern Saudi Arabia, Cambridge: Harvard University Press; Mikhail, Alan. 2013. Water on Sand: Environmental Histories of the Middle East and North Africa, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Davis, Diana and Edmund Burke. 2011. Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa, Athens: Ohio University Press), and is unique in focusing attention specifically on the desert itself.

Partitioned into three sections, the first two chapters offer a geological and historical overview of Egypt's three main desert areas (the Eastern, Western, and Sinai Peninsula deserts) and a historical timeline of desert development projects. In the next section, Sims looks at land reclamation and agricultural production (chapter 3), desert settlements and new towns (chapter 4), tourist development along the coastlines and environmental protection (chapter 5), and industrial development and natural resource exploitation (chapter 6). In the final section of the book, Sims investigates the history of attempts to redistribute Egypt's population into the desert (chapter 7), the crucial issues of management and distribution of public desert land (chapter 8), and provides an analysis of the political economy and power dynamics that keep all of the related pieces in motion (chapter 9). In the final chapter (10), Sims looks forward to lay out a program of reform, centered on the proposition that desert land is and should be treated as a resource for all Egyptian citizens.

There are a few key insights from the text that are worth highlighting. Sims offers a slightly different angle of entry to the by-now-familiar arguments about the relationship between the Nile Valley and desert spaces in Egypt's development. As Timothy Mitchell eloquently lays out in Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), the distinct visual abstraction of Egypt as a narrow band of the Nile in a vast sandy expanse enables a kind of reductive description of Egypt's problems as geography vs. demography. In Sim's rendition, it is not so much the stark contrast between fertile Nile and barren desert that has driven development practice in the country, but rather the ecotones at the conjunction between the two. Unlike other countries in the region with large tracks of desert, Egypt's deserts stretch the periphery of the developed areas along the river valley and both coasts. This unique geography enables the Egyptian state to treat its desert area as a vast reserve of empty state-owned land available to endless piecemeal encroachment. In point of fact, however, Sims highlights that there are distinct limits to land open for continued expansion in Egypt, and that failure to adequately address the problems of desert development means that the limited space remaining will soon be depleted.

Through detailed accounts of the history of development projects in the desert, Sims ties the ideological and geographic possibilities above to the question of why success has been so elusive. The distillation of Egypt's challenges into the image of an overpopulated Nile Valley surrounded by vast reaches of empty desert implies the response of harnessing technology and new management techniques to turn desert land into productive agricultural spaces, industrial zones, tourist sites and housing possibilities. What Sims so eloquently points out, however, is that it was precisely the kinds of interconnection and conjunction made possible by density that has enabled the productivity of Egyptian farmland, the maintenance of social worlds, and relatively low rates of rural to urban migration in the last several decades. Failure to account for the values of connection and density has been a primary, though not exclusive, reason that the dream of rehoming millions of Egyptians in the desert has not come to pass. Sims argues that the putatively self-evident nature of the problem (density in the river valley) and the solution (expansion into the desert) has meant that questions about the failure of official desert development projects to achieve their aims are seldom asked. Conversely, he points to the relative success of small scale and informal land reclamation efforts carried out by small farmers, efforts that often escape notice in official realms. However, as Jessica Barnes demonstrates in her 2014 book on irrigation and water management practices in Egypt, Cultivating the Nile: The Everyday Politics of Water in Egypt (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books), these small informal reclamation projects can function to deprive already cultivated areas of the irrigation water that they need to survive.

Sims outlines the “unintended” consequences of many of these projects. Desert development is oriented towards resolving the issues of the “old” settled lands, rather than any real consideration of the possibilities that arid areas afford. That said, the intense focus on the desert expansion solution enabled the deferral or avoidance of meaningful action in already developed areas in the Nile Valley. While the logic undergirding desert development in Egypt has shifted in the more than fifty-year history that Sims reviews, in recent years projects have been particularly productive in windfall profits for a small group of political and economic elites. The scale, intent, management functions, and sheer extractive capacity have expanded significantly, as has the capacity to disturb land thought of as empty and awaiting redemption.

Looking forward, Sims presents eight central principles for desert development, centered on the belief that these lands should be treated as a resource for all Egyptian citizens. He follows these with explicit legal and institutional recommendations for how to accomplish this feat, along with a fairly stark projection of the fate of Egypt's desert land, and Egypt as a whole, if substantive change is not undertaken.

Sims' text provides both detailed information on particular historical (mis)adventures in desert development, and a broad analytical scope that lays out the internal logic of the desert development imperative in Egypt over the last sixty years. This book will be useful to a wide range of scholars interested in the history and political economy of Egypt and development, and those working on arid environments.