Cairo between Traces and Liberal Re-foundation: Demographic Stabilization, Extension of the Metropolitan Area, and the Renewal of Forms

Lacunary perceptions, biased and partial, often anecdotal, and subject to an impression of anarchy, disorder and gigantism, commonly confer a comfortable illegitimacy on attempts to interpret a metropolis like Cairo. The impenetrable crowd, inevitably “clamorous,” ensures a cheap continuity for nostalgia about the mysteries of the Orient and about the romanticism of ruins. Immutable stereotypes abound: inhabitants of roofs, palaces or cemeteries, illegal quarters stretching boundlessly on, so many emblematic fi gures supposed to give material body to degradation, perdition and an invasion right from the countryside; to an explosion, or, better still, an implosion. These are convoluted interpretations, which have recently, in a single bound, and with a view to building up once more a totally distinctive Arab city, included the notion of an “Arab street” evidently on the verge of revolt: a kind of renegotiation of an idea that is in fact outworn, but conveys nonetheless the idea of the dangerous city. These stereotypes, cross-bred with Orientalism, lead us on to a universal element old as the oldest of cities, Babylon, that symbol of perdition and decadence constantly re-applied to the present of the largest metropolises. The fact that the Egyptian lands were the scene of a succession of empires, leaving monumental traces universal in their scope, notably in Cairo, with the Giza pyramids or the mosques and palaces of the old city, invites us to view the contemporary state of things as one of decline, to the detriment of narratives about the complexity of the present and the banality of daily life. Only splendours in ruin remain from the past; the despotism, and the wretchedness of the majority, together with the precarious nature of the majority habitat, has left barely a trace. Our aim here is to show that these stereotypes of Cairo will not bear analysis. The city’s contemporary evolution may be divided into