Damiette, une ville prospère d’Égypte au péril de la mondialisation

Damietta, a medium-sized city at the edge of the Nile delta, one of Egypt’s windows on the sea, enjoys a personality asserted since Ancient times. It developed varied economic ventures, such as the furniture making, which granted it well being and opening to the outside world. It is in that sense an exception in the Egyptian context; but it went since the 1952 Revolution through the fate of those provincial centers, faced with successive and contradictory country planning policies. The city has now become a pawn on the Egyptian and Mediterranean exchequers of global integration, at the expense of its locally rooted activities, which structure its economic and social fabric. Its new, from outside and even abroad impulsed vocations, induce the settling in its surroundings of disconnected industries, infrastructures and urban models. As a result, an unseen before mobilization has emerged against the negative effects on environment and social cohesion, pointing the State’s collusion with foreign interests. That neglect of the State regarding regional and local interests ends up in frustration and inefficiency of development policies. Those will only be solved through a free expression of the population through representative local powers