Abstract
David Sims is cautiously optimistic about Cairo. One of the world’s most populous cities, Cairo currently houses over 17 million residents and is growing fast. Surprisingly, it is Cairo’s density that makes the city work, Sims argues. Its compact character creates transportation efficiencies, cost-effective extensions of infrastructure and close-knit informal business markets. City and state officials, so concerned to fight urban density by developing new settlements and satellite cities along the desert fringes of Cairo, have left alone the city’s vast informal neighbourhoods and older core quarters. This neglect has allowed informal areas to grow organically, with residents adding housing among villages adjacent to the city and avoiding the sprawling but largely lifeless suburbs promoted by formal developers and the state. Informal neighbourhoods remain only minimally governed or are beyond the efficient reach of the state. Given the poor planning and development decisions of the Egyptian state, this ‘failure’ has been the key to the city’s ability to ‘function and evolve’ (p. 251). These informal and ‘auto-developmental’ logics have rendered Cairo ‘a kind of success story’ among global cities (p. 267) because, unlike other cities of the Global South also dominated by informal processes, Cairo’s informal growth has generated a logic that works.
The book comprises eleven chapters and a foreword by Janet Abu-Lughod, masterful chronicler of Cairo in the mid-20th century. After several chapters deconstructing assumptions about the nature of Cairo, Sims turns to detailed analysis of the various aspects of the city, examining neighbourhoods, housing, transportation, work, governance and the development of the desert city in separate chapters. In Chapter 3, Sims chronicles the differential growth among what he defines as the three cities of Greater Cairo (Greater Cairo Proper, Peri-urban Greater Cairo and Greater Cairo’s Desert). Growth in the informal city since it first emerged in 1960 has been exponential, and it is estimated today to house 7 million people. In the same 1960–2006 period, the formal city has only expanded from 4 million to 5 million people, and the desert city by a mere 600,000 inhabitants (p. 86). Cairo’s recent growth results primarily from migrants from smaller Egyptian cities rather than from rural areas, and its informal neighbourhoods have also expanded as a result of residents moving out of older urban core neighbourhoods in Cairo. Nevertheless, Cairo is marked by low urban residential mobility; only 18.8% of the city’s families changed residence between 2003 and 2008 (p. 32). While these growth patterns suggest increasing separation among the different segments of the city, Sims notes that some new building activity to bypass the city’s congestion has had the unintended consequence of linking them: for example, Cairo’s Ring Road, built between 1985 and 2001, made informal areas of the fringes of Cairo more visible to elites who used the new road (p. 69).
Sims examines the various logics of the city’s differential growth in a number of strong chapters. Despite a lack of formal mapping of Cairo’s informal areas, Chapter 4 explores in detail the nature of informal building, demonstrating the perhaps surprisingly strong structural quality of its construction and high security of tenure for residents. By contrast, the eight new towns that comprise the desert city, subject of Chapter 6, have been built for Cairo’s middle- and upper-class residents trying to escape the intensities of the city proper. The gated communities and commercial compounds of these areas have generated huge public investments and intensive advertising, but have attracted relatively few residents. Sims attributes the extremely slow population growth in these towns to the absence and even active exclusion of ‘the vast micro and small informal business sector, which generates at least 40 percent of jobs in Egypt’ (p. 188). The new desert towns, initially developed by Sadat in the middle 1970s, remain at the centre of Cairo’s master plans despite evidence of their lack of appeal to residents. Even the state’s own plans to relocate large governmental and economic institutions to satellite cities to ease congestion were unable to be put in practice when the very ministries that had promoted the desert cities refused to move to them (p. 57).
In Chapter 8, Sims notes that the city’s transportation, with ‘its evolving mix of types of vehicular transport’ (p. 229), works reasonably well in the urban density and compactness of self-sufficient informal neighbourhoods. The role of the minibus, which by 1998 accounted for 28% of all vehicular trips in Cairo (p. 230), is significant in this aspect of Cairo’s success, ‘due to its individualistic, minimally regulated, market-oriented modes of operation’ (p. 230). Sims acknowledges, however, that this very characteristic also makes it a significant cause of traffic, albeit less so than the growing legions of private cars. Like all of the fragile informal successes of Cairo, transportation appears to teeter on the brink of complete failure. Without improvements to public transport to service high-density areas, Sims predicts ‘it is inevitable that Cairo will go the way of other major cities, and the private car will rule an increasingly dysfunctional and immobile metropolis’ (p. 249).
Cairo is, Sims notes, unique, and this condition limits the utility of lessons from Cairo’s urban history to broader, comparative discussions about global urbanism. A near-fringe rural plain and an enormous open desert hinterland have endowed Cairo with a singular location that has in large part shaped its patterns of growth. Sims calls Cairo a ‘minimalist city’ in contrast to megacities in the Global South such as Mumbai, Bangkok and Mexico City. Sims argues, however, that his book demonstrates that a deep understanding of how particular cities work – and how they work ‘as a whole’ (p. 4) – is crucial to thoughtful and effective developmental planning and can provide a methodological model for understanding other cities. He also suggests that other Egyptian cities adjacent to vacant government-owned land, such as the cities of the Suez Canal zone (Port Said, Suez, Ismailiya), may also be growing for some of the same reasons as Cairo (p. 34).
Written in 2009, the book makes extensive use of the results of the 2006 census and satellite imaging, in addition to recent studies and reports by planners, journalists and scholars. Sims, an urban planner and economist based in Cairo for more than 30 years, has conducted many of these valuable studies. Like most of Egypt, Cairo has been strongly affected in a wide variety of ways by the political and economic changes since the 25 January 2011 revolution. How these events have altered the success story of Cairo remains to be determined. The author expresses his intention to translate the book into Arabic, and this would greatly enhance its role in local conversations about urban development.
Although individual informal areas of Cairo have been well studied by anthropologists and sociologists, Sims aims for a more relational approach among different sectors of the city. This is a crucial methodological intervention and makes for engaging reading. Sims’s personal experience of the city enhances his analysis, and he brings a close, critical and yet compassionate eye to local innovations and the openings caused by the relative failures of elite-led development. For residents, urban planners and scholars of Cairo, this book is a welcome and very important addition to understanding the contemporary city. For urban studies scholars more generally, it is a model of understanding the role of local context in broader patterns of late 20th-century and early 21st-century urban growth.