City Margins and Exclusionary Space in Contemporary Egypt : An Urban Ethnography of a Syrian Refugee Community in a Remote Low-Income Cairo Neighborhood

Drawing mainly on Lefebvre’s, Soja’s and Smith’s theorizations of space in order to understand the spatial dynamics of social inequality, this study investigates how a low-income Syrian refugee community negotiates its precarious location in a neighborhood on the periphery of one of Cairo’s desert ‘New Towns’. It also examines the way in which urban spatiality shapes the everyday lived reality of this particular community of Syrians. Through an ethnographic focus, I explore how Syrian people living in Cairo are marginalized through broader processes of neoliberal capitalist development which in turn give rise to socio-spatial disparities within cityspace. By developing the concept of socio-spatial exclusion imbued with defiant (hyper)locality, I argue that although these Syrian refugees lack access to transportation and other types of social services, they nevertheless manage to disrupt the spatial status-quo by devising creative solutions to problems concerning amenity availability in the neighborhood where they live. The investigation of these urban trajectories are guided by the notion that spatiality is at once a social product as well as a force in shaping social life. Research for this project draws on multiple sources, including conversations with neighborhood residents, interviews with NGOs and Cairo-based specialists on refugees and urban development, as well as ethnographic observation, an online questionnaire, satellite imagery and social media content