Utopia or the Anti-Tahrir. The worst of all worlds in the fiction of A. K. Towfik

If there is a symbol par excellence of the socio-economic changes spurred by globalization in Egypt, it is surely the gated community. Since the middle of the 1990s, their unbridled proliferation in Cairo’s peripheries, on public land sold for a song to private developers, has generated abundant academic work showing how neoliberal logics have resulted in the city’s privatization and urban fragmentation (Bouhali, 2008; Denis, 2006; Florin, 2012). Egyptian author Ahmed Khaled Towfik makes use ..