Compounds of Modernity: National Order and the Other in Egypt (1940-present)

The dissertation Compounds of Modernity aimed at moving beyond meta-narratives and theoretical frameworks of neoliberalism and globalization to analyze the contemporary gated communities and spaces of exclusion. Instead of analyzing enclaves as products of neoliberalism and global culture, the dissertation looks at them as “processes of urban explosion” embedded in the history of power and control. Building new housing settlements on the periphery is not anew. The state technocrats, architects, and urban planners had always used these projects as instruments towards controlling population, hygienic development, and citizen formation. By looking at how the design of these compounds had changed with time, I generate a set of narratives concerning power, spatial governance, dealing with hygiene as a thing to control, the othering of citizens, and modernizing the nation-state. The changing rhetoric and underlying logic to manipulate the erection of these new compounds reveals how the state categorizes its citizens and invents the “other.” The construction of the “risk society” is a mere political and social construct in Egypt’s modern history. In the countryside during late colonial Egypt and early post-colonial time (1940s and 1950s), the humans and non-humans were objects of governance and control in the architectures of Hassan Fathy (New Gourna Village) and Sayyid Karim (the Manor). The inferior fellah and dirty animal were the infectious species to produce national crises of malaria, typhoid, and Bilharzia. Modernizing species and standardizing the built environment was part of building the state and maintaining national order. Later in the early 1950s, a housing initiative called the “Cordon-and-resettling” led to walling out old unhygienic communities and relocating villagers to the modern “Village of Tomorrow,” which included military training centers and new university villages. Under the social welfare state of Nasser, the housing mission in the city was to make new citizens, educate them through the state’s secular curricula, alleviate social class antagonism, build the “happy family,” and curb internal political struggles after the transition from monarchy to the Republic. The citizen and [his] experience was the main object of governance in the Villages of Tomorrow, such as Tahrir Province.In Cairo, a similar hygienic revolution occurred under the “Connect-fill-and-expand” housing initiative. One spatial outcome was the new compound on the periphery of Cairo, the “City of Tomorrow” experiment of Madinet Nasr or Nasr City (late 1950s and 1960s). In the new settlement of Nasr City, Sayyid Karim and Mohamed Riyad designed residential quarters, governmental buildings, Islamic university campus of Al-Azhar, wide roads for army parades and military zones were erected side by side. The notion of a “disciplined society” was emphasized through zoning and land use. A hierarchy of state institutions and power characterized Nasr City with high visibility. The production of a disciplined society was further emphasized with the state’s full control over the construction of housing after the rent control law that discouraged private real-estate developers from building new housing. The centralization of housing led to controlling the means of modernizing space, housing, and society. With Infitah or the open door economy developed under Sadat in the 1970s till the Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) of Mubarak in the 1990s, the object of governance and control became economic growth and desert land development. Technocrats experimented a set of new towns in the desert, which failed to attract population at the beginning until the erection of gated communities with new mechanisms and technologies of governance in the desert. Security and hygiene were used as underlying frameworks to attract residents as manifested in the gated community of “Al-Rehab City” in New Cairo. Using walls, gates, checkpoints, privatized security training, and the mapping of surveillance, together with private amenities and functioning infrastructure, gated communities started to attract residents. Turning those spaces into “zones of control” and surveillance became the new modern governing technology than simply enforcing citizens and disciplining them like the era of Nasser. The state security apparatus, however, still has its influence inside gated communities through partnerships and collaborations with the privatized security. The transformation of the society from a “disciplined society” in the Foucaultian sense to a “controlled society” in Nikolas Rose’s sense is parallel to the change in political economy from social welfare to the free market mechanisms. The disciplined society depends on a central agency such as the panopticon to watch, monitor, and correct the behavior of citizens is fundamentally transformed into decentralized nucleated agencies (private sector) working laterally with the state to maintain order. The decentralization of security and non-hierarchical forms of domination characterizes the “controlled society” and housing projects that is made possible under the free market economy. The decentralization of the design process also takes place. Architects and urban planners of gated communities such as Mahmoud Yousry of Al-Rehab, design together with marketing sales team, Hisham Talaat (developer), and the security design element is covered by retired military generals. By understanding the interactions of local forces, spatial growth, how these spaces are realized in reality, and society construction through history, I theorize the contemporary gated communities moving beyond meta-narratives and grand theories of globalization