Many have tried, many have failed. Cairo has layers within layers, stretching across centuries and millennia where to begin, where to end! According to Janet Abu-Lughod's foreword to ‘Understanding Cairo' by David Sims, published by the American University in Cairo Press in January 2011, the author succeeded, because he narrowed the period he investigated down to the last 40 years (he has been living in Cairo since 1974 and therefore knows this period personally). Maybe not such a bad decision, considering that Sims chose a sub-heading for the book's title: ‘The Logic of a City Out of Control'. This sounds rather illogical on the face of it; how can there be logic when something is out of control? On the other hand, erratic and disorganised people are often said to have a system in their madness, and Sims shows that there is logic in Cairo's chaos. So how to get a grip on things that appear to be so random and disorganised? Sims manages the task beautifully; his book is encyclopaedic in scope, structure and information and gives tremendous insight into a city whose name is often the same as that of the entire country or ‘the mother of the world'. But regardless of how well he succeeds in capturing the nature of Cairo and penetrating its infinite layers and secrets, Cairo or rather Egypt has the last word. There has just been a revolution, an event that will enter the history books across the globe, a revolution whose outcome is still as open and unknown as the future of Cairo itself. This epochal event has prompted David Sims to write an essay as addendum to the book: ‘Understanding Cairo in Revolutionary Times', published on the AUC website; http://www.aucpress.com/tDavidSimsNewIntroduction.aspx"http://www.aucpress.com/tDavidSimsNewI ntroduction.aspx. A quote from the essay: “The revolutionary spirit is so far focused on changing national political structures, and even if successful there is no guarantee that the manipulators and opportunists and bribers, so prominent in the past, will not still find fertile ground. Another, more complicated revolution is needed for fundamental reform of ministries and governorates, the courts, and economic authorities, so that real accountability and transparency begin to dominate urban development. A sea-change in attitudes is needed. Cairo's upper and professional classes are, with a few exceptions, still bewitched by the shining hope of a modern Egypt which somehow will materialise simply with more and more concrete. Call it the “Dubai-beautiful” complex. That most Egyptians are poor, that the economy remains stagnant, and that mundane needs must first be met are inconvenient truths that the “educated classes” ignore or, at best, perceive as a call for more of the top-down patronising. The hope is that the Tahrir generation does not buy into this, and that new attitudes will prevail which sweep away the pompous posturing of the older professional elites whose models for Cairo are London, Singapore, or Dubai.”(unquote) In order to understand where Cairo might be heading in the future, if public transport was given proper financing (to name just one aspect), we need to understand what led to the status quo. Sims breaks the structure of this gargantuan city down into three urban forms: ‘the formal city', ‘the informal city' and ‘the modern desert city'. Then he adds a forth form, ‘the peri-urban city' where “existing towns, core villages and hamlets expand progressively through informal subdivision outward into the surrounding agricultural plain”. Thank God Sims has added diagrams, photos and maps (I finally understand what the term ‘Greater Cairo' means). As for some of the photos, everybody has heard of Google Earth. I suggest you open the programme, and if you have not already done so find your house (wherever it is on the planet), then zoom down and go for an aerial walk across Cairo to get a minute understanding of what this book explains in such well-researched detail. Go to the Dokki Corniche (south of Tahrir Street) and move west. You will notice that you enter first an area that could be in Zamalek wide leafy streets with generously spaced buildings (if you were actually on the ground you would walk past the Spanish Cultural Centre, embassies, private clinics and the Dutch ambassador's residence). Then architectural style, configuration and pattern change all of a sudden; you enter (from above) a very densely built area surrounding Suleiman Gohar Street. Then please jump across the western part of Dokki, and you will come to Bulaq el-Dakrur (in the book on p.58) and realise that this is much denser than Suleiman Gohar, in other words an ‘informal' city. And even without having read anything about these urban differences, you will come to the conclusion that there is not only a context in terms of space but also in time. The leafy streets and grand villas off the Dokki Corniche are obviously much older than the dense adjacent sprawl; then beyond Dokki Street comes another leafy part, followed in western direction by an even denser sprawl. If you would like to know how all this came about, in the entire conurbation of Greater Cairo and viewed from every possible angle, it might be a good idea to read ‘Understanding Cairo: The Logic of a City Out of Control'.
‘Understanding Cairo', The Logic Of a City Out Of Control, By David Sims Published by the AUC Press, LE150 ($29), 304 pages
