Umm MustafaFootnote 1 and her family paid a monthly rent of 9 Egyptian pounds (henceforth, LE) (about US$1.45Footnote 2 ) for the one-bedroom, rent controlled apartment they had lived in for over thirty years in the neighborhood of Darb El-Ahmar in Islamic Cairo. Her landlords, who earned almost nothing from the five tenants in their building, left it unmaintained and gradually decaying from the inside out. When a 5.8 Richter earthquake hit Cairo in 1992, the building's structural beams visibly cracked. From then on, Umm Mustafa and her neighbors lived with the daily fear that the building would collapse over their heads, as had several others in their neighborhood after the quake. It proved fruitless to appeal to their landlords, who saw no reason to repair a building that brought them no revenue. In fact it was not far-fetched to believe that, as tenants living in the neighborhood told me over and again, landlords wanted their buildings to collapse, since according to Egypt's rent control laws, building collapse was one of the exceptional circumstances under which inheritable rent control contracts could expire.Footnote 3
In 1996 the Egyptian government reversed rent control laws that had been in place since 1947. Under what came to be known as el ’eigar el gedid (the new rental system), they eliminated rent control restrictions for any property newly rented after the law's adoption, but kept them in place for property rented before the law's adoption, under el ’eigar el qadim (old rental system). By 1996, 42 percent of all formal housing in Cairo was rented under old rent control laws.Footnote 4 The new law allowed those tenants, like Umm Mustafa, to keep their rent control contracts, but the opportunity costs of those contracts for their landlords skyrocketed overnight. Before 1996, had the landlords managed to vacate their property of rent-control tenants, new rentals would have been covered by the same rent control laws. Now, they would be allowed to continuously adjust the rent to reflect market prices. Landlords became desperate to vacate captive property.
Unfortunately for Umm Mustafa, her landlords soon acted upon that desperation. In the early 2000s, the Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC), an international NGO, offered Umm Mustafa and her neighbors a grant to restore their building and repair the earthquake damage as part of a larger home restoration program. Because the building's core beams were damaged, they needed to demolish and reconstruct the building. Aware of the legal risks of such demolition, they reached an informal agreement with the building owners that they would not report the AKTC's work as building collapse. The landlords had other designs, and as the building was being demolished, one of them appeared at the construction site and declared that he would bring a municipality representative the next day to declare the building collapsed and nullify the tenants’ rent control contracts. Owners did want their buildings to collapse, after all. Luckily for Umm Mustafa, the AKTC managed to bring together the resources necessary to reconstruct the building's core structures through the night and, the next morning when the representative arrived, demonstrate that it had not been demolished. Umm Mustafa had survived her landlords’ desperate legal maneuvers. Her case was not the exception. In Darb El-Ahmar alone the AKTC dealt with many such disputes with building owners, and on at least two occasions members of their team spent a night in jail on account of them.Footnote 5 The pressures on Cairo's mostly low-income tenants to vacate their rent control units had multiplied overnight.
The reversal of rent control through the 1996 law was a textbook example of the policies that are driving transitions to market-driven economiesFootnote 6 across the developing world. It would gradually dismantle one of the most significant subsidies the state had guaranteed to its urban poor, albeit at the expense of wealthier property owners, and would unleash a “captive” market. The expectation was that once Egypt's real estate market was deregulated from state interventions that distorted market transactions, the logics of supply and demand would reign supreme. Owners would start to rent vacant units to the highest bidder. The market would determine the right price for the key money—the compensation given to tenants in return for voluntarily forfeiting their inheritable rent control contracts—at which tenants with old rent control contracts would be willing to forfeit them and vacate. The right price would put Cairo's long-captive real estate back on the market. Reality on the ground defied that expectation, however. The 1996 law did provoke movement within the real estate sector, but its largest movers were working not to “liberate” the market but to re-regulate it. They strove to corner real estate markets and limit the exchange of property to two tightly bounded groups: a luxury clientele on the upper end, and low-income residents on the lower end. Rather than revel in the market's “liberation,” non-state actors worked to re-regulate it both upwards and downwards.
These actors did not turn to legal mechanisms or patronage networks, but rather invested considerable resources in the development of community in central Cairo's neighborhoods. They mobilized urban planning and redesign techniques to engineer local, particularistic, communal ties within the neighborhoods where they sought to distort real estate markets. In what follows, I argue that their efforts to foster community as they sought to re-regulate these markets were not coincidental. The spatial and othering dynamics created through fostering local, particularistic community are particularly affinitive with a project to re-regulate markets and limit property exchange to a tightly-bounded group. The re-regulation of markets is re-regulating the political around local, particularistic communities.
To build this argument, I draw on ethnographic fieldworkFootnote 7 I conducted in Cairo in 2011–2012 to compare how two heavily capitalized actors, with different relationships to the real estate market, reacted to the reversal of rent control. I find that both fostered particularistic community as they worked to re-regulate the market. At the upper end of the market, I studied the Ismailia Consortium,Footnote 8 a private corporation working to capitalize on the opportunities created by the 1996 law and create new real estate value in downtown Cairo. At the other end, I studied the AKTC, an international organization working to stem the displacement of the urban poor from Cairo's center after the reversal of rent control by stifling gentrification in Darb El-Ahmar in Islamic Cairo. Both actors funded and implemented large-scale urban transformation projects in the two neighborhoods. Although they hoped to change the real estate market in ways that were diametrically opposed, both projects invested tremendous resources to foster a local, particularistic community in each neighborhood. In particular, both saw urban planning and architectural design as powerful tools of societal engineeringFootnote 9 and mobilized them in different ways to engineer community in the two neighborhoods.
In downtown Cairo, the Ismailia Consortium mobilized the symbolism of the “authenticity” of downtown Cairo's aesthetics and commercial environment in order to foster what I call a “community of strangers.” Fostering a “community of strangers” produced dynamics that would ensure the exclusivity and security necessary to attract a high-paying clientele without resorting to physical and visible barriers that detract from the attraction of living within the seeming urban messiness of the city's center.
Meanwhile, in Islamic Cairo the AKTC mobilized physical architectural design to foster an autonomous, collaborative community in Darb El-Ahmar. A collaborative community would ensure that local residents would service their own neighborhood. Yet because such services were contingently provided by local residents, they would make property more lucrative for existent residents but less attractive for potential gentrifying outsiders. The latter could not be guaranteed such services would continue once local residents left, and this would stem gentrification in, and out-migration from, the neighborhood. The dynamics created through fostering local particularistic communities in both downtown Cairo and in Islamic Cairo were closely aligned with these actors’ projects to re-regulate real estate markets.
Capitalizing on those affinities, both the “winners” and “losers” of legal deregulation invested heavily in the development of local particularistic communities as they worked to re-regulate the unleashed market. They thus worked to re-organize the political around community in ways that mirror the transformations in market-driven economies presciently described by Nikolas Rose: “[Under advanced liberal rule] individuals are to be governed through their freedom, but neither as isolated atoms of classical political economy, nor as citizens of society, but as members of heterogeneous communities of allegiance, as ‘community’ emerges as a new way of conceptualizing and administering moral relations amongst persons.”Footnote 10
“Community” could be envisioned and configured in a variety of ways, however. Both the Ismailia Consortium and the AKTC aimed to re-regulate the market so as to corner real estate markets and limit the exchange of property to one tightly bounded group. Both therefore fostered communities that clearly demarcated the physical and symbolic boundaries between desirable consumers of that real estate, be they a high-end clientele or threatened low-income tenants, and outsiders. They cultivated communities that were particularistic, with shared sets of tastes and common fates working to attract members to that market and keep outsiders out, and that were spatially situated around the real estate and would physically demarcate its boundaries.
The Ismailia Consortium worked to ensure that a group of Cairenes who shared a distinct set of high-end tastes would come to see the spaces of downtown Cairo as a secure and exclusive hub for those tastes. In Darb El-Ahmar, the AKTC worked to ensure that a group of residents who were already situated in the spaces of Darb El-Ahmar would identify as one community with a shared set of vulnerabilities and a common fate. In short, it is a community's particularism that produces its affinity to markets and their re-regulation, not the trust or the welfare support that it might produce. In Cairo, the unleashing of the real estate market stimulated a variety of actors to work to distort and re-regulate the market rather than celebrate its unfettered liberation. As they worked to produce those distortions, they were attracted to the particularism that characterizes community. In re-regulating the market, therefore, these actors are not simply reorganizing political relations around community rather than society; they are also nurturing difference among communities of particular destinies, tastes, and values. Market re-regulation in transitioning economies is not only accentuating the local over other forms of political allegiance, but also cultivating political differentiation and particularism.
As market re-regulation accentuates difference and particularism among communities in market-driven economies, it also transforms power dynamics within groups, which have now become identified as communities. Engineering spatially situated, particularistic communities develops from a belief that “community” is a technical field that planners can identify as an object of intervention that they themselves are external to and can transform. Drawing on Timothy Mitchell's (Reference Mitchell2002) insights about the politics of the expert production of such objects of intervention, I will conclude the paper by interrogating the assumptions that urban planners in Cairo made about community, its coherence and preexistent nature, the contradictions inherent to interventions based on those assumptions, and their ramifications for political and power dynamics in each neighborhood.Footnote 11 Before turning to the two case studies, let me provide a brief orientation to the legacies that produced contemporary property rights regimes in Egypt.
LEGACIES OF PROPERTY REGULATION AND DE-REGULATION IN EGYPT
The history of the legal regulation of property markets in contemporary Egypt can mostly be traced to the development of rent control laws after World War II. In 1947, the Government of Egypt enacted Law no. 121/1947, which froze rents at 1941 rates and forbade tenant evictions. This was intended as a temporary measure to alleviate the pressures created by the economic crisis resulting from the dismantlement of wartime industries.Footnote 12 The original emergency mandate of this law took on a newfound permanence during Nasser's reign (1954–1970). During the first years of the Free Officers’ rise to power, it was unclear what the fate of the rent control restrictions would be, as the new regime experimented with various constellations of political alliances and ideological commitments.Footnote 13 By the early 1960s, the government had adopted several sweeping socialist reforms, including rendering the rent controls permanent in order to redistribute wealth from property-owner classes in urban centers to tenants, who were mostly new migrants to urban centers. These reforms were embroiled in politics not only of wealth redistribution but also of decolonization. Modern private property regimes, abetted by colonialism, were seen to have arbitrarily distributed rights to private property to a modern landed class that had violated long-held land use, ownership, and sharing arrangements.Footnote 14 Ultimately, six different rent control laws were adopted during Nasser's time in office, which systematically lowered and fixed rental rates. In 1969, tenants were given the right to inherit rental contracts without limits on the number of inheriting generations.
Unlike other subsidies, rent control laws were seen to provide a valuable source of subsidies to potentially rebellious urban residents at no cost to the government. Nasser's successors, Anwar El Sadat and Hosni Mubarak, kept them in place for another thirty years, even as they liberalized other aspects of the economy. In the words of David Sims, they realized that “the surest way to commit political suicide is to champion the removal of rent controls” in Egypt.Footnote 15 Only in 1996 did Mubarak venture to curtail rent controls. With the rise of a new business coalition within the ranks of the ruling National Democratic Party, rent control laws had become costly to the business elite at the heart of the country's ruling regime.Footnote 16 In 1996, these pressures resulted in Law no. 4, which eliminated all rent controls for newly rented units. The government would no longer rely on creating new subsidies at the expense of property owners. However, that coalition was neither ready nor powerful enough to remove old and existent subsidies. With 42 percent of Cairo's housing units rented under old rent control laws,Footnote 17 there was too great a risk that an instantaneous reversal of rent control would spark urban riots. The state thus adopted a gradualist approach, with two parallel systems for the regulation of rent. These systems put tremendous pressure on existent tenants, like Umm Mustafa, but did not revoke their rent control contracts outright. This was the legacy through which Umm Mustafa came to live in a near-collapsing building, paying a mere 9 LE for a one-bedroom apartment in central Cairo, and also the origin of the developments that threatened to take it away from her.
AN INVESTED COMMUNITY: THE AGA KHAN TRUST FOR CULTURE
In Darb El-Ahmar neighborhood in Islamic Cairo, rent control laws were especially consequential. In 2003, 68 percent of neighborhood residents were tenants in possession of rent control contracts.Footnote 18 For most of those tenants, like Umm Mustafa, the 1996 laws only compounded the insecurities of living in deteriorating buildings, which became especially vulnerable after the 1992 earthquake. The AKTC's arrival created one more source of insecurity for Darb El-Ahmar's tenants: the Azhar Park. The AKTC initially came to Cairo to fulfill a pledge that the Aga Khan himself had made to gift the city a massive green space in 1984. This later materialized as the 74 acre Azhar Park, built in place of a five hundred-year-old garbage dump on the edge of Cairo's historical center and in one of its most densely populated areas.Footnote 19 Darb El-Ahmar was one of the neighborhoods bordering the park, and property that had been on the lowest rungs of the market because it overlooked a garbage dump came to overlook one of Cairo's largest green spaces. Owners who had written off that property as worthless saw its value skyrocket. The AKTC recognized that the park created a new threat for tenants in a post-1996 environment. The neighborhood's urban fabric was threatened as well, as owners with control over their land started to bring down Mamluk-styleFootnote 20 three- or four-story buildings and replace them with high rises that would capitalize on their view of the park.
In response to these compounding threats to the neighborhood's urban and societal fabric, in 1997 the AKTC implemented an urban rehabilitation project in Darb El-Ahmar neighborhood to “preserve its urban qualities, as well as the potential to regenerate its economy.”Footnote 21 More precisely, the project was dedicated to two interrelated objectives: to stem disinvestment and outmigration from the neighborhood and to stifle an organic process of gentrification on the park's borders. Samy, an urban planner on the AKTC's team, described the threat they were working against by citing the changes that accompanied the creation of Fustat Garden in Cairo. He explained that there are “tall apartment buildings overlooking the Fustat Garden. There was an urban fabric there that was demolished in its entirety to make way for the high-rises that overlook the park.”Footnote 22 The AKTC combined its interest in preserving the neighborhood's urban fabric with a commitment to stemming outmigration. In Samy's words, “Our goal was to create a suitable environment for the people to invest and feel that there is hope in the neighborhood; defeating the salient insecurity that stopped people from investing in their neighborhood, and led them to leave as soon as they could afford to.”Footnote 23 A publication by former members of the team made clear what was at stake for the AKTC in curtailing such disinvestment: “If the present pattern of disinvestment [from Darb El-Ahmar neighborhood] persists, it can only pave the way for further deterioration and the eventual loss of irreplaceable social, economic and cultural assets.”Footnote 24
In its mission to quell both disinvestment and gentrification, the AKTC was on a quest for mechanisms that would reverse the deterioration that pushed residents out of the neighborhood while simultaneously ensuring that the improved conditions would not attract new gentrifiers to displace the neighborhood's “social, economic and cultural assets.” Tracing the ways in which they designed their urban rejuvenation project, I find that the AKTC saw that producing that balance required engineering an autonomous community that collaboratively cared for shared spaces and infrastructures in the neighborhood without resort to the state. Cooperating to provide public services would provide much-needed services that had long been absent from the neighborhood because of state weakness that predated the dismantling of the welfare state. These services would also strengthen residents’ emotional ties and psychological belonging to a neighborhood that they had worked so hard to improve, with people with whom they now felt a special bond. This made the neighborhood irreplaceable and more costly to leave.
At the same time as building a collaborative community makes the neighborhood more valuable for residents, it makes it less attractive to gentrifiers. When services are provided by a place-based community rather than a non-contingent political entity like the state, then those services become contingent on that community's physical presence in the neighborhood. Gentrifiers have no guarantees that they would have the same services in the neighborhood if they replace current residents, and moving there thus becomes less attractive for them. We should read the AKTC's commitment to fostering a collaborative community not simply as their working to replace a retreating (or never-existent) state but also as their intervening in market dynamics to re-regulate them. This they would accomplish by achieving a delicate balance of providing services that increase residents’ investment in the neighborhood without attracting new gentrifiers.
The AKTC's report claimed, “No all-encompassing projects and no far-fetched social engineering agendas are required [to stop the downward spiral of disinvestment and deterioration]; rather, what is needed is an incremental improvement of what is already in place, and a strengthening of the available social capital and positive economic trends.”Footnote 25 However, I found that the project was in fact premised on “social engineering.” If we trace the AKTC team's justifications for the urban designs they implemented, we find that they expected careful urban design to engineer the community necessary to keep neighborhood property off the market.
Collaborative Communities
I turn now to tracing how the AKTC mobilized urban planning and architectural design to produce collaborative communities that were invested in their neighborhoods. By the time it left in 2012, the AKTC and its partnersFootnote 26 had invested 86 million LE in the restoration of 121 residential buildings and the hundreds of apartments within those buildings.Footnote 27 As I discussed the AKTC's project with four young men who worked in a furniture workshop in Darb El-Ahmar, I discovered that two of them, Waleed and Amir, and their families had joined hundreds of the neighborhood's residents in applying for grants to restore their buildings. Under the grants, the AKTC would design and execute a full rehabilitation of homes and fund 70 percent of the cost, with the residents paying the remaining 30 percent. Ultimately, Amir's family's application was accepted while Waleed's was rejected.
The AKTC required residents of a building to apply as one unit, with the full agreement of all residents, whether tenants or owners, that they would pay their 30 percent share of the costs. When Waleed's mother-in-law, who also lived in the building, would not agree to the restorations, everyone else in the building lost access to the grant. Amir ran into a similar issue when his family applied to restore their building. Their downstairs neighbor, who was renting a small room, refused to pay the 5,000 LE that would have been her share of the restoration. Because they could not get this tenant to agree, Amir's family tried to find a way to restore their apartment through a private contractor rather than the AKTC, but found that it would cost them 25,000 LE to simply restore the interiors of their apartment, while it would only have cost them 17,000 LE to have the AKTC completely rebuild the foundations of the building and rehabilitate both its interiors and exteriors. They therefore decided to pay the tenant 6,000 LE as compensation for giving up her room, and the AKTC awarded them the restoration grant.Footnote 28
When I asked Samy, the AKTC urban planner, why the AKTC required that all building residents agree to the restorations and to shoulder their portion of the cost, he explained, “The idea behind the project wasn't that we fix Darb El-Ahmar.… Darb El-Ahmar has more than 5,500 residential buildings and we fixed a little over a hundred of those. It was a drop in the ocean. Rather, our goal was to develop a successful mechanism…. We produced a very successful module for dealing with the neighborhood. First of all, we engaged people not just financially but also emotionally and there developed a very strong sense of ownership through the project. People gained hope from investing and took from their pockets to invest in the public good.”Footnote 29 Thus for Samy and the AKTC team, the restoration of the buildings was about not simply “preserving” the neighborhood's urban qualities, but also engineering a community that took from its “pockets to invest in the public good.” In relation to housing restorations, in particular, he explained, “Even if residents had the money, they couldn't just come and restore the building on their own. That wasn't what we were aiming for at all. Our purpose was that you get to know your neighbors.”Footnote 30 Furthermore, the calculation of building shares was not straightforward. The AKTC only allowed building residents to divide shares of their financial responsibility into increments of 0.5 of a share, and so they could not resort to smaller fractions to gain perfect equality. Samy described the AKTC's reasoning behind the approximation of building shares:
We didn't divide their shares very accurately, so there would be debates where residents would say, “your apartment is a little bit bigger and mine is a bit smaller,’ and so on. We worked to make sure that people at the end of the day felt that they were one unit and that the unit was not their apartment…. We wanted to instill in them the concept that the community is made up of interconnected units and that it is not the apartment that is the home. Rather it is a residential building all connected and that they have to see it as a residential unit. Then, after a while we would start to talk to them about public spaces and the fact that they are living around open spaces that they have to start taking care of. So, you create larger and larger units and larger networks connecting the community”.Footnote 31
Again, the AKTC saw urban planning as engineering community. What is remarkable about Samy's description of the units that would coalesce into community is their relationship to neighborhood spaces. A sense of community will develop from a shared sense of investment and ownership in private spaces that are now connected in their fates. Eventually, communal connections will multiply as property owners realize that the fates of their connected private properties are linked to the fates of the shared spaces, public or private, that surround them and the community members who share those spaces. That is, a community is born from a shared sense of responsibility for spaces in which its members have invested. It is only through strong communal ties that this shared responsibility can be shouldered and neighborhood spaces cared for. Ultimately, the experience of collective care for neighborhood spaces evokes emotional bonds of belonging to both place and people that make the neighborhood not only more livable but also a source of irreplaceable bonds. It is this entanglement of community and the spaces linked to its fate that make it ideal, in an era of property deregulation, for providing public services without the threat of population displacement.
Once the AKTC started to physically restore buildings, the process of fostering communal cohesion influenced the design of building features as basic as water and sewage infrastructures. During my visits to restored homes in Darb El-Ahmar, building residents often explained to me that they had to coordinate with their neighbors to use their water pumps since only one apartment could be pumping water through the pump at a given time. In our interview, Samy's justification for this design for the water pumps again displayed the AKTC's commitment to engineering community through careful architectural design: “Our purpose was that you learn to coordinate with your neighbors. So, for example, when we installed water pumps we would find that in a building with six residents, each of the residents wants to install their own water pump. We would refuse such requests because if they can't resolve issues around using a water pump or water pipes, then there is no sense in them restoring the house altogether. In other words, they have to talk to each other.”Footnote 32 Installing shared water pumps and pipes was designed to increase coordination between building residents and thereby strengthen community in Darb El-Ahmar.
The AKTC's commitment to communal cohesion also shaped their design of one of the most important communal spaces in Cairo (especially in low-income communities)—the rooftop. I employ here the tales of two rooftops I encountered during my fieldwork to illustrate their importance to these communities.
“In the winter, everyone would go up to the roof in the morning and spend the day there. We would have breakfast together, and if one woman has something sweet she would add it, and if another woman has something she would add it. In the summer, we would go up to the roof at night after sunset, and the girls would play together, and the men and youth would play cards together, and the older women would sit together chattering away,” remembered Umm Hassan nostalgically as we climbed the stairs up to the rooftop of Beit El Kharazaty (built ca. 1881) in Gammaliya neighborhood in Historic Cairo. Umm Hassan's was one of twenty-five families living in the building at the time.Footnote 33 Sadly for them, they were evacuated from the house during a restoration project and lost access to their rooftop.
By contrast, climbing up the stairs to see Haga Samia's new rooftop was a more joyful experience. She stood by with pride as I took in views of Azhar Park to the east and Cairo's “thousand minarets” to the west. She then walked me to the other side of the roof to show me the vegetable garden she had cultivated with her neighbors, and now defunct solar panels in the corner. She explained that the AKTC had newly built and installed the rooftop's vegetable basins and the panels when they restored the building, where she has lived for decades as a tenant.Footnote 34
Haga Samia's roof was not the only one like this; the AKTC created more than a hundred. Samy explained that the decision to create accessible roofs was a complicated one, and the architectural team was originally divided on the issue. Some worried that the rooftops would turn into dumpsters and chicken coops that would harm the rehabilitated buildings, while others argued that they would provide coveted communal space and be valued by residents. The team experimented with building a few rooftops and found, “When the rooftops became accessible … a lot of people would take up living room furniture and spend their evenings there, and some even pitched sun canopies. It was in buildings where the roofs were not accessible that people threw their rubbish on the rooftop. It was rare that anybody would ruin their rooftop…. There were those who would raise chickens. They still raise chickens but the situation is so much better than it used to be.”Footnote 35 Vibrant rooftops came to light up Darb El-Ahmar's nightscape.
Umm Hassan's lamentations about her lost rooftop and Haga Samia's joy at hers emphasize the rooftop's importance as a communal space in Cairo, and how attuned the AKTC team was to that as they worked to mobilize architecture to produce collaborative communities. Their commitment to fostering collaborative communities was not the only thing that drove the AKTC to invest in rooftops, however; they were also devising mechanisms to protect the buildings they had designed so carefully. In creating accessible, shared rooftops, they ensured that a larger contingent of residents would be invested in their maintenance, and minimized the likelihood that they would be misused or trashed. As they cooperated to care for their rooftops, building residents not only became a more tightly knit communal unit but also maintained the value of their newly restored buildings. Accessible rooftops ensured that residents remained both financially and emotionally invested in their building and neighborhood, and that in turn made it more costly to buy them out. This entanglement of community with the caring for shared spaces ensures that it remains the ideal societal unit for servicing the neighborhood while keeping residents in place and their homes off the market.
Fleeing the Predatory State: A Shared Fate
Not only would carefully designed buildings produce cohesive collaborative communities, but they would also serve as a physical barrier to save residents from the predatory state. In a published interview, one of the AKTC's team leaders described how she spent hours visiting residents in their homes to convince them to invest in urban rehabilitation. One of her tactics was to show them panoramic pictures that she took of their run down homes from the grounds of Azhar Park and tell them, “‘If [the First Lady] Susan Mubarak is invited to the opening of this park, which she will be, and she stands there, during construction or something, this is what she will see of you guys. These are the backs of your houses; they gave their backs to a garbage heap for hundreds of years. Would you blame her if she said, “Poor people, we have to move them to new cities, to better housing?” You can't blame her.’ And they were convinced.”Footnote 36
With these pictures, she impressed upon residents that the aesthetic that their homes produced when seen from the park put them in a position of shared vulnerability to a state obsessed with imagery. But from that shared fate would emerge their salvation. To fend off the threat, they would need to identify as a community and work together to beautify not one or two of the houses but all the homes and public spaces that produced that aesthetic vulnerability. To counter their shared vulnerability to a predatory state they had to maintain the aesthetic beauty of their buildings and autonomously care for their shared spaces as one communal unit. Community that was both collaborative and autonomous would ensure that the neighborhood was serviced without the displacement of its residents. The contingent services that residents provided would fend off both the gentrifiers and a predatory state.
Community and Real Estate
As the AKTC team strove to encourage residents’ investment in their neighborhood and simultaneously stifle market forces of gentrification in Darb El-Ahmar, they worked to foster a spatially situated, particularistic community. Fostering a collaborative, autonomous community was not simply about shifting the burdens of the dismantled distributive state onto a co-responsible community. Cooperating to care for shared spaces would provide much-needed services but would also strengthen residents’ emotional bonds to each other and to the neighborhood as a place. The psychological and material investment that residents make as they cooperate to improve their neighborhood fosters feelings of belonging to place and the people that make the neighborhood and its community irreplaceable, and more materially and emotionally costly to leave. It is this entanglement of community and shared spaces that ensures that building an autonomous collaborative community makes the neighborhood more attractive to neighborhood insiders and less so to gentrifying outsiders. When the community provides services, services are contingent on that community's physical presence in the neighborhood, but when the state provides them people can come and go and these services will still be guaranteed. Having a community cooperate to provide services contingent on their presence makes the neighborhood less valuable to would-be gentrifiers, who would want guarantees of continued services regardless of the neighborhood's composition. Building community is a matter of not simply replacing state-provided services, but also producing mechanisms of belonging and contingent services that ensure residents become invested in their neighborhood. The AKTC is not correcting for the absence of state services, but rather for the removal of state regulations on property markets that once ensured tenant stability in the neighborhood.
A COMMUNITY OF STRANGERS: THE ISMAILIA CONSORTIUM
On the other end of the market, the entrepreneurial Ismailia Consortium saw the 1996 rent control laws as an opportunity rather than a threat. Funded by Egyptian, Saudi Arabian, and Kuwaiti investors, including the Egyptian real estate tycoon Samih Sawiris and Saudi real estate tycoon Sulaiman Abanumay's family, the Consortium saw reviving downtown Cairo's (Wust El-Balad) real estate market as a lucrative investment. In 2008, when most real estate developers were developing desert lands they acquired cheaply on Cairo's suburban periphery,Footnote 37 the Consortium decided to forego the quick profit windfall of suburban development and turn instead to the city's center. They invested around 400 million LE in Wust El-Balad, where they tried to capitalize on the market's official deregulation to create a real estate market unparalleled in the city.Footnote 38 As more suburban, gated communities sprang up on the city's periphery, marketed for their exclusivity and security, Cairo's affluent residents faced a difficult choice between the comforts of security and exclusivity in the suburbs and the convenience (especially given the city's horrendous traffic) and attractive dynamism of living in the city's center. The Ismailia Consortium embarked on an ambitious project to provide both. They designed a luxury real estate project that would provide the exclusivity and security of suburban enclaves within the dynamic, urban messiness of central Cairo. To achieve that balance they fostered what I term a “community of strangers” downtown. They worked especially hard to attract a group of Cairene strangers, who shared a set of high-end tastes and were scattered around the city, to move downtown to form a secure spatial hub for their exclusive tastes. It was this particularistic community of strangers that would elevate real estate values in Wust El-Balad.
The 1996 rent control laws had created a new opportunity for owners to rent out their units. Yet it was still quite costly to get units that were still tenant occupied under old rent control contracts onto the open market, especially given that most buildings were now owned by over a hundred owners through inheritance laws. Moreover, for a variety of reasons including but not limited to rent control laws, downtown Cairo had undergone a long transformation from being an upper-middle-class residential neighborhood in the 1960s to one with ailing infrastructures dominated by rented commercial offices and workshops within debilitated buildings. Given the high costs of vacating existent tenants, and the relatively low value of downtown's units, few people saw investment in downtown's property as immediately lucrative, even after the reversal of rent control laws. As others shied away from the downtown property market, however, Ismailia Consortium saw it as offering the perfect opportunity for their real estate project.
Their project was to buy and renovate at least forty downtown buildings clustered in such a way that the Consortium would be able to upgrade and manage the infrastructural foundations and commercial activity that surrounded them. Ismailia took on the challenges and costs necessary to rejuvenate ‘emarat Wust El-Balad (downtown buildings), in particular, because they saw that those buildings were uniquely situated to perform the cultural work essential for attracting Cairenes with high-end tastes downtown. Karim Shafei, the Consortium's CEO, provides the first clue as to what that cultural work is when he explains why the Consortium chose downtown to rejuvenate:
A very important development took place in the last five to seven years, and that was the Egyptianization of Egypt. Until about eight years ago, all the new brands that were created would be called Daly Dress, or Mohm, but in the past few years brands have started to adopt [Arabic names] like El Diwan, Alef Bookstores, and Makani. In other words, there was a move toward a more national, more Egyptian, identity and not the confused, mutated, Westernized identity of Egypt. Part of that identity was represented in Wust El-Balad. For example, most TV ads from the past two years have been filmed in Wust El-Balad…. So, I think [Wust El-Balad] represents a certain nostalgia for better times, when Egyptians lived a much better life, when everyone was respectable, and people were classy/cultured (kol el nas kanet nedheefa). All of these were factors that made downtown attractive to us.Footnote 39
Ismailia chose the downtown area because the materiality of ‘emarat Wust El-Balad had become associated with a new project of cultural production, a cultural revival working for the “Egyptianization of Egypt” and its purification from a “mutated, Westernized identity.” Interestingly, the very same spaces of Wust El-Balad associated with that cultural revival evoke for Shafei a nostalgia for a time when people were “nedheefa,” which literally translates in Arabic as “clean,” but colloquially in this context has strong class connotations. It refers to a class of people that is both wealthy but also cultured and civilized. Shafei sees the materiality of Wust El-Balad as evoking a nationalist cultural revival, but he believes this revival is especially important because it is linked not only with purification from Westernized identity but also with a socio-economic cleansing or purification that will bring “el nas el nedheefa” back to the downtown area.
At the end of the day, Ismailia's profit-making scheme will only work if the wealthier clientele feels at home and safe downtown and decides to migrate back there.Footnote 40 The amenities promised to wealthier clients in peripheral suburbia include isolation from other socio-economic classes in day-to-day life. This is often materially enforced through erecting walls that are high enough to restrict entry and exit, but low enough, as Denis (Reference Denis, Singerman and Amar2006) insightfully observed, to show off the compounds’ luxury to outsiders.Footnote 41 Shafei reminds us, “We are not building a compound in the desert.”Footnote 42 Ismailia cannot and actually does not want to build walls to control who their clientele interact with downtown. What sets luxurious living in downtown Cairo apart from life in suburbia is not only its central location, but more importantly the experience of engaging with the lived messiness of the city, in contrast to the stale, manufactured life of the compound. Ismailia needs to reassure its clientele that they will be surrounded by civilized “nas nedheefa” and maintain that exclusivity while also selling them the promise of a messy and exciting urban experience in the city's center.
Instead of physical walls and barriers, or an “aesthetics of security” that Caldeira (Reference Caldeira and Huyssen2008) astutely argues develops in neoliberalizing cities to produce segregation and safety in lieu of the state providing them, they seek new modalities of exclusion. These must resolve the tension between maintaining the illusion of urban disorder and ensuring the security and exclusivity that their clientele expects. For Ismailia, there were two ways to achieve this. First, they aspired to produce a cultural and artistic environment that would self-police against those lower-class populations that, they presumed, would be uninterested in and incapable of engaging with that environment. Second, they worked to foster an “authentic” or “organic” commercial space that mirrored the commercial environment that Jane Jacobs and the “new urbanism” school saw as key to producing the “eyes on the street”Footnote 43 that give neighborhoods safety and rootedness in the midst of the bustling city.
Shafei discussed the centrality of producing cultural revival to Ismailia's project:
We think that downtown, like all downtowns around the world, should be accessible to all socio-economic segments of the society…. What we are trying to do is bring all of these people together around positive activities. The key focus for us is art and culture. We believe that art and culture is non-discriminatory and attracts people from all segments of society, but with a positive reason to come downtown. We don't believe that shopping is a positive activity…. Cultural spaces like El-Sawy Cultural Wheel and Azhar Park's El-Geneena Theater are good examples of how a space can bring together a wide diversity of people.… There are very specific coffee shops in Wust El Balad, for example, that we want to keep, and we don't want them to [become too expensive] because that would drive away a segment of artists that we think are very enriching for the place.”Footnote 44
Fostering cultural spaces produces the “diverse” urban experience that Ismailia's clientele is seeking without breaching the neighborhood's exclusivity. This cultural space will only welcome the specific “segment of artists” and people who are cultured enough, even if from the lower classes, to be nedheefa and desirable fellow dwellers of Wust El-Balad. In order to accelerate the production of this cultural space, Ismailia invested in subsidizing the arts and controlling commercial activities so that they would be attractive to and affordable for those artists.
To achieve that control, they suspended the “invisible hand” of the market in the buildings they bought and refurbished. Ismailia's plan was that refurbished units in their buildings would only be available for rent but never resold to owners outside the Consortium. Renting units through short-term contracts would allow the Consortium to control how each unit was used. They then decided to forego the immediate profits they might earn from wealthier tenants and set aside spaces within their building clusters for artists and cultural organizations who would rent them at subsidized rates.Footnote 45 For example, Ismailia purchased Townhouse Gallery, an arts and theater space that had operated for a decade previous, and then offered the artists continued residence in the building at reasonable rental rates.Footnote 46 They also ensured that some spaces would be set aside for services that would attract the right “segment of artists” to the neighborhood, such as affordable coffee shops.
As part of their cultural program, the Consortium sponsored cultural events staged in downtown streets and buildings. The most notable of these is the Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival, or D-CAF, that completed its sixth annual program in March and April of 2017. The festival lasts for about two weeks and hosts both local and international theatrical, musical, and artistic performers.Footnote 47 The event's website explains that its sponsors chose to hold D-CAF downtown because, “One of the main aims of D-CAF is the revival and reclamation of downtown Cairo as a vibrant cultural center, capitalizing on its unique architectural and social heritage.”Footnote 48 Here, cultural production is identified as a performative as well as a spatial practice. The authentic aesthetics of downtown's buildings generates a particular cultural revival. Cultural production is seen to be specific to its spatial configuration, and not reproducible just anywhere. Authenticity as a spatial-cultural practice thus becomes a soft rather than physical modality through which Ismailia polices its boundaries. In describing how culture operates here both to attract gentrifiers and to produce a particularly spatial modality of exclusion, I build upon work that highlights how important an interplay between authenticity and culture is to the neoliberalization of cities (e.g., Zukin Reference Zukin1995; Reference Zukin2009). But here I emphasize the specifically spatial modalities through which culture and aesthetic authenticity operate to physically demarcate exclusivity in the city.
D-CAF provoked considerable controversy in 2015 since most of its performers were international theater and dance companies that were allowed to perform in downtown streets under D-CAF's auspices, while “El Fan Midan's” (Art is a Square) monthly festival that was born with the Egyptian revolution in 2011, and also took place downtown, had been banned.Footnote 49 The D-CAF controversy makes it clear that the cultural revival Ismailia is sponsoring downtown excludes some groups that may see themselves as part of the movement Shafei characterized as the “Egyptianization of Egypt.” Clearly, this cultural project is being shaped not only by socio-economic exclusivity but also by political agendas of the security state.
In addition to investing in cultural revival as a modality of exclusion, Ismailia sought to engineer an “authentic” or “organic” commercial environment. Karim Shafei describes these commercial activities:
I would like it to be cosmopolitan from a completely different perspective than, for example, City Stars [a shopping mall built on the outskirts of Cairo in 2003–2004]. City Stars is a very American mall-like experience, which is completely different from what downtown can offer. I would like it to be cosmopolitan in the sense of having a pizzeria, for instance, operated by an Italian living in Egypt or an Egyptian who lived in Italy for thirty years and married an Italian woman. I am not interested in Pizza Hut…. I'm not interested in having Zara and Mango [international chain clothing stores]. I am interested in having Azza Fahmy [an Egyptian high-end jeweler specializing in silver products], or Mounaya who sells items from Morocco, Lebanon, and Turkey, and all over the region, but not mass produced products like those from Zara and Mango.Footnote 50
On one hand, controlling the commercial environment to produce the intimate and “authentic” experiences found through Azza Fahmy or the Egyptian-Italian family-run pizzeria can be seen to also foster the cultural revival evoked by the aesthetics of Wust El-Balad's buildings. The commercial environment could be seen to produce a unique cultural experience that attracts both a clientele interested in urban disorder as well as the exclusivity and the artists needed to create the neighborhood's soft spatial-cultural boundaries.
More importantly, though, the “organic” and intimate commercial environment produces another dynamic crucial to the Ismailia Consortium as it tries to produce a luxurious oasis in downtown: the need for security. To provide the illusion of urban messiness, the Consortium must find soft modalities that go beyond the state's security presence or physical barriers. Unlike the suburban compounds described by Denis (Reference Denis, Singerman and Amar2006), or individual efforts to produce protective physical barriers or “aesthetics of security” in Sao Paulo, as depicted by Caldeira (Reference Caldeira and Huyssen2008), Ismailia needs to find non-physical modalities that produce for its clientele familiarity and a sense of security within the allure of urban immersion and disorder. The solution is to create a “community of strangers” that provides a sense of rootedness and familiarity in the city but also the stable communal surveillance mechanisms of a neighborhood without reliance on state surveillance.
The key to building this “community of strangers” is to cultivate the right commercial environment. For Jane Jacobs and the “new urbanism” school, an urban street's “eyes on the street” are anchored in its commercial culture.Footnote 51 It is through the small shops (“mom and pop stores”) or intimate restaurants and bars that neighborhoods gain onlookers on the streets. These are either the known owners of establishments (like an Italian-Egyptian pizzeria owner) or their clients who regularly frequent these intimate establishments and maintain a level of familiarity and surveillance of outsiders on the street. Intimate stores can in this way provide spatial mechanisms to guarantee a stable group of onlookers on the street, and also a regular, familiar group that frequents those streets and gives the anonymous city a sense of rootedness.Footnote 52 Anonymous, mass marketing establishments with rotating clerks and irregular customers cannot accomplish this. The “authentic” cosmopolitan-yet-Egyptianized commercial environment may serve to elicit a unique cultural experience in downtown, but it also, and more importantly, creates a spatial modality of a “community of strangers.” That is essential to guaranteeing safety to high-end consumers in suburban enclaves without the physical trappings of security gates and walls. A cultural revival and “authenticity” of the commercial environment are mobilized to produce a “community of strangers” that resolves the tensions between providing both the comforts of exclusivity and the security required within the disorderly city.
CONTRADICTIONS OF ENGINEERING COMMUNITY
Engineering such spatially situated, particularistic communities as Ismailia and AKTC hoped to foster develops from a belief that “community” is a technical field that planners can identify as an object of intervention that they themselves are external to, and can transform. The process of rendering community a technical object requires numerous assumptions about the coherence of an entity called “community,” who belongs to it, and how. In this final section, I interrogate contradictions that are inherent to constructing community as an object of intervention and their implications for power dynamics in the neighborhood. I will focus on the AKTC project since it was the one fully implemented by the time I conducted my fieldwork. I start by examining the assumptions about community that the AKTC's team brought to the table.
Existent Community: Real or Imagined?
Although the AKTC team's urban designs seemed to work to foster autonomous collaborative community, there was wide variation among team members as to whether they thought they were fostering communal cohesion from scratch or rather were building on preexistent cohesion and social capital. One team leader agreed with the project's official line that “what is needed is an incremental improvement of what is already in place, and a strengthening of the available social capital.”Footnote 53 In a published piece, she argued that communities in Cairo's “popular neighborhoods” like Darb El-Ahmar were quite cohesive and much stronger than ones in “new cities” built on the periphery of Cairo as large social housing projects.Footnote 54 Moreover, in a published interview she asserted, “When [community members in Darb El-Ahmar] are sure they are getting the benefit there is this positive collaboration. They do a lot of positive collaboration together. At the smallest scale in order to clean the building or share the rooftop. Workshops do it all the time to bring new raw material or even share power tools.”Footnote 55 An exact opposite view was held by Rania, who worked within the “community liaison” division of the AKTC's project. She had been born and raised in Darb El-Ahmar, held a BA, and had joined the team as a community liaison at its inception in the late 1990s. In her view of neighborhood relations, “The community in Darb El- Ahmar is considered a bit different from any other, even the community in Gamaliyya that lives directly adjacent to it…. You feel that they have this trait of being arrogant and feel that there is no one else quite like them…. The other thing is that [the community members] don't like each other, and this in itself is a problem.”Footnote 56 For Rania, positive communal ties were virtually non-existent in the neighborhood.
Mounir was another member of the AKTC team, and unlike Rania, saw himself as an outsider to the community. Yet he shared Rania's perspective on communal cohesion in Darb El-Ahmar. He explained, “You'll find people here very strange in that they all fear each other. In other words, he'll come say that it was so and so who transgressed, and when we ask why he didn't stop him, he'll say ‘I don't want any trouble.’ And that is the main problem.”Footnote 57 He goes further and argues that mistrust is a trait common to all Egyptians.Footnote 58 Hence, for Rania and Mounir, the AKTC was not building upon a wealth of social capital in Darb El-Ahmar; it would have to cultivate most of it from scratch. Samy, the urban planner we met earlier, straddled the two extremes. He believed that social ties existed between Darb El-Ahmar's residents, but not a culture of collaboration and cooperation of the sort that would be necessary to create a community. He argued that micro-credit and rotational savings mechanisms to finance housing restorations would be ideal for Darb El-Ahmar because “people know each other and trust one another.”Footnote 59 As I explained earlier, however, he saw that people in the neighborhood were not “talking to each other” or cooperating in resolving their neighborhood's problems, and he thought it was the AKTC's job to cultivate such cooperation.Footnote 60 In other words, he thought the AKTC had a role to play in transforming latent social ties into active communal networks. These divergent perceptions held by AKTC team members lay bare the fallacy that there is a shared imaginary of what “community” is, even among those working to produce it.
Reifying Hierarchies
As they put their diverse perceptions of community into practice, the AKTC grappled with, and to some extent reified, existent power dynamics in the neighborhood. The AKTC team's encounters and negotiations with these power dynamics is clearest in the participatory exercises they devised to plan public spaces such as Aslam Square and Tablita Market. As they tried to include the community in fashioning public spaces, the team quickly learned that participatory planning was more complicated than simply gathering community members for a planning session. Power dynamics had a major impact on whose voice was heard in these sessions. Trying to work around that in planning Tablita Market, the team divided the planning process into two sessions, one including powerful vendors in the market and the other less influential, mostly female, vendors. In a publication, they argued that the idea behind stratifying the process according to power hierarchies “was to give an opportunity for the less influential vendors to express their opinion and not be dominated by the more powerful leaders of the vendor community.”Footnote 61 That is, the team did not try to disrupt existent hierarchies, but to work around them.
The planning of Aslam Square was similarly layered. Samy explained that the sessions were organized according to stratified layers of children, women, men, store owners, residents of buildings overseeing the square, and service providers (in particular the man who owned and operated for money a children's swing set in the square).Footnote 62 Mounir elaborated that the planning sessions were not only stratified according to these layers but also that the people invited within the layers were deliberately chosen according to their influence in the neighborhood: “We would have to invite the people that they call ‘community leaders’ or heads of the neighborhood (kebar el manteqa) and gather them together either in the square itself or in our offices and discuss their requests.”Footnote 63
Eventually it became clear that even identifying community leaders was complicated and would generate a lot of controversy around the process. Mounir describes the challenges this created: “That didn't stop the people with whom we negotiated from arguing with us as we implemented [the designs], because it was exactly as we saw with the [25th of January] revolution with personal agendas and factional demands…. We would implore the supposed community leaders to intervene and some would succeed and some wouldn't … because even if you resort to the community leaders, we don't follow the notion of a head (el kebeer) of a place anymore here in Egypt, and especially in these neighborhoods. That is, in the past you would go and reach an agreement with the head and nobody would contradict it, but now they bring you someone and say that he's the head and as soon as they turn around someone else shows up and you try to convince them that you had an agreement, and they say, ‘Who told you he was the head?’”Footnote 64 The AKTC sought mechanisms for organizing Darb El-Ahmar's autonomous communities that clearly relied on existent, or what they thought were existent, hierarchies. Fostering community did not operate in vacuum. It required a structure of hierarchies to succeed. Mounir lamented that the Egyptian mentality that would have once facilitated following the village or neighborhood head or “kebeer” was disappearing, and this made producing autonomous communities more challenging.
The ways in which the AKTC reified existent communal relations, and especially gender dynamics, can be seen in their physical design of Aslam Square. The team found that women felt particularly unsafe passing through the square since they were threatened by youths loitering around nearby coffee shops who often made inappropriate remarks and harassed them as they passed by. The AKTC team devised a new walkway for the women to use that was parallel to the mosque and on the other side of the square from the coffee shops.Footnote 65 What is notable about this design is that, although the pathway for women most likely increased their ability to navigate the square and interact with a wider variety of neighborhood dwellers, it was also designed to work around existent practices of male-female interactions rather than disrupt them. The design removes the women beyond earshot of the harassment, but men around the coffee shops will continue to harass women. The AKTC was not interested in molding new values for neighborhood gender relations. Rather, they were working to produce self-governing community that would stem out-migration from the neighborhood, working with the neighborhood's extant power structures and values.
New Communal Hierarchies
While it reified some of the existent power dynamics and communal hierarchies in the neighborhood, the AKTC disrupted others. When cooperation amongst building residents becomes a key selection criteria for deciding which homes receive rehabilitation grants, the result is visible differentiation—some buildings are beautifully restored and others remain debilitated. The unintended consequence of such visual differentiation is the transformation of communal hierarchies in the neighborhood. First, it is known that the residents of any renovated home contributed financially to the renovation. In phases two and three of the project, people contributed 30 percent of the cost.Footnote 66 Thus, renovated homes came to provide a visual marker of those financially able to contribute to the restorations, and so the AKTC brought a new marker of wealth to the neighborhood.
Second, given their structural superiority, renovated homes came to be known as those that were safe and accommodating to visitors. Almost all my respondents said that after renovating their homes they became much more comfortable inviting guests into them. For Haga Samia this was especially true after the governor of Cairo himself visited her home during a tour to see the AKTC's achievements in the neighborhood. If her home had become aesthetically beautiful and safe enough to be visited and celebrated by the governor, she reasoned, then it must be safe and inviting to all of her acquaintances.Footnote 67 Visual hierarchies signaled which homes had become safer and more inviting for women and men to gather and share gossip and neighborhood news as they cooked, sewed, looked after their children, or watched football matches together. Over time, hosting such gatherings could have far reaching implications for the hosts’ power over the dissemination of information, the setting of community agendas, and neighborhood dispute resolution.Footnote 68 Slowly but surely, the new, differentiated, visible aesthetic translates into new communal hierarchies.
CONCLUDING DISCUSSION
The AKTC and the Ismailia Consortium are engineering particularistic communities through urban design as they work to re-regulate the real estate market in the aftermath of the reversal of rent control in Cairo. On the market's upper end, the Consortium is fostering a “community of strangers” as it works to create new market value in downtown Cairo through its luxury real estate project, which guarantees its clientele both the exclusivity and security found in gated compounds and the dynamism of living in the midst of the city's disorder. On the market's other end, the AKTC is fostering a collaborative, autonomous community with a sense of shared vulnerability and common fate, which cares for the neighborhood's shared spaces. Rather than reading the AKTC's investment in community as simply an attempt to replace a retreating state, we can see community here as re-regulating the market by striking a careful balance between providing much-needed services to neighborhood insiders invested in their neighborhood and deterring gentrifiers. Attracted to the particularism of communities as they work to re-regulate markets, these actors challenge existing scholarship on the relationship between fostering communities and transitioning to market-driven economies. In particular, they contest the celebratory claim that fostering communal ties generates the trust crucial to thriving market economies, and also the critical claim that communities are fostered in market-driven economies to produce a co-responsible citizenry that replaces a welfare distributive state.
In Making Democracy Work (Reference Putnam1993) and Bowling Alone (Reference Putnam2000), Robert Putnam argued that strong communal ties and networks are crucial to thriving market economies and democracies because of the trust they generate. A strong associational life fostered through sports clubs, music groups, or volunteer associations creates cross-cutting ties and generalized trust amongst strangers who would not previously have met through family or religious networks. For Putnam, such generalized trust, or “social capital,” is essential to sustaining repeated market transactions that rely on mutual respect for contracts and property rights among strangers. Putnam's alluring argument spurred a long line of scholarship investigating the politics of trust (e.g., Uslaner Reference Uslaner2002; Jamal Reference Jamal2007), and several critical theorists (see Joseph Reference Joseph2002; Elyachar Reference Elyachar2005; Li Reference Li2007) saw it to be generating the growing investment in communities or the social capital that accompanied transitions to market-driven economies.Footnote 69
Mobilizing piercing ethnographies of community development across market-driven economies, this critical scholarship (e.g., Elyachar Reference Elyachar2005; Li Reference Li2007; Muehlebach Reference Muehlebach2012; Zencirci Reference Zencirci2015) argued that Putnam's (and similar) work had obfuscated the dispossessive politics of fostering community and social capital. Rather than benignly cultivating more efficient markets, fostering community shifts the burden of provisioning public goods from a distributive welfare state to co-responsible citizens, and paves the way for the dismantlement of the official safety net. In Muehlebach's words, “As the state shifts the burden of the reproduction of solidarity onto a citizenry conceptualized as active and dutiful, solidarity is outsourced … onto citizens, every one of which is now coresponsible for the public good.”Footnote 70 This scholarship has argued that communities are being fostered to replace a disappearing welfare state, and draws attention to the fact that the centering of market logics as the engine of development in fact shifts the economic burden of development onto those most reliant on the very non-market safety nets now being dismantled. In other words, investing in social capital rather than safety nets further entrenches that equation by imposing the responsibility for providing public goods on those who are most disadvantaged by the shift.
In Markets of Dispossession (Reference Elyachar2005), Julia Elyachar takes that critique still further. Based on her work in Egypt, she argues that the valorization of social capital as the key to efficient markets has produced a different mechanism for the dispossession of the poor: cycles of indebtedness. Rather than this process having fostered social capital where none existed, she found that the poor, or the informal economy, have for decades relied on social capital to survive in the face of inept states. Formalizing the informal economy through loan infrastructures can multiply the impact of such “indigenous” social capital, or in the words of Hernando de Soto, unearth “dead capital,”Footnote 71 as it becomes incorporated into the logics of the formal market and the multiplying effect such logics have on capital. In Elyachar's words,
The notion of social capital helped to effect the movement of programs about the empowerment of marginal individuals in the informal economy to the center of debates about the economy at large. It was discovered that the informal economy, and the important ability of the poor to survive without help from the state, had at their core social networks built around community reservoirs of trust. The social networks that lay behind the entity called “the informal economy,” it had been found, were a form of “capital.” Giving loans to support this reservoir of social trust thus became a way of investing in the economy.Footnote 72
Elyachar importantly moves the conversation about the larger political economic, and potentially dispossessive, implications of the valorization of social capital from one that focuses exclusively on replacing nonmarket, public goods provisioning to one that interrogates the inner workings of market logics themselves. For her, the market's logics of accumulation rely on incorporating the “indigenous” social capital cultivated by an economy's most vulnerable populations and works through dispossessive cycles of indebtedness to unearth that “dead capital.”
However, like scholars who argue that community replaces a welfare state, Elyachar's work remains wedded to seeing community as being strictly valorized for the relational trust networks it may create. As we saw, though, the AKTC and the Ismailia Consortium were not working to foster communities because of the trust networks they may produce. As they sought to corner real estate markets, they accentuated the particularism and spatial tactics of boundary setting that local communities cultivate. In the case of the AKTC, relational networks of collaboration did play an important role, but the ways in which those relational networks were linked to specific spatial tactics of boundary-setting, as well as to a shared fate particular to neighborhood residents, emphasized that for them it was not generalized trust as an abstract concept that was most valued. Far from it. Both the AKTC and the Ismailia Consortium were cultivating the particular, and not generalized, communal networks that Putnam saw as the bane of efficient markets.
Their interest in particularism is reminiscent of Miranda Joseph's insight about the relationship between consumption and particularism: “Consumption … can only occur within a particular social formation, in which particular desires for particular commodities, produced by particular acts of labor, are operative…. [T]he particularities of historically and socially determined use values, which include particular social relations and ‘values’ supplement the discontinuous circuit of abstract value, enabling its circulation. In this structural account, ‘community’ is quite crucial to capitalism” (Reference Joseph2002).Footnote 73 That particularism was not necessarily produced through the family or religious networks that Putnam derided, but could emerge from a shared set of consumer tastes or positions of vulnerability that were nonetheless particularistic and antithetical to generalized trust. Transitions to market-driven economies are cultivating not trust and relational networks of support, but rather difference and an accentuation of what sets communities apart from one another within the city.
The key to understanding the cultivation of communal particularism is to realize that actors like the AKTC and Ismailia Consortium are not interested in the efficiency of markets per se. Their reaction to the unleashing of markets is not to maximize their efficiency but to distort and re-regulate them. The Consortium's main concern when the real estate market was “liberated” was to try to corner the market so that only the highest paying clientele would be attracted downtown. Similarly, the AKTC's reaction to the vulnerability of low-income tenants was to corner the market so it would be attractive only to low-income residents and to ensure that they invest more rather than less in their neighborhoods as their vulnerability increases. Put another way, transitions to market-driven economies, in Egypt and beyond, provoke market-distorting behavior even on the part of those who stand to gain the most from it. The logics of capital accumulation inherently incentivize market distortion and not just, or even mainly, efficiency, as authors such as Putnam or the school of new institutional economics would suggest. Communal particularism is being mobilized as a soft, and undetectable, modality for producing such distortion.
Empirically speaking, the most natural affinity between communities and markets is one that fosters division and communal particularism in service of market distortion and re-regulation rather than relational trust networks for the sake of market efficiency. Only by recognizing the strength of the incentives created by capital accumulation toward market distortion can we understand the multiplying forces at work in reorganizing politics around local, particularistic communities that accentuate difference and profoundly transform power dynamics in cities transitioning toward market-driven economies around the globe.
