Who Shapes our Cities? Urban Egypt between Grassroots Initiatives and State Control

The current drive towards betterment that Egypt is going through is the culmination of developmental efforts on the grassroots level that started many years before the 25th January revolution and were instrumental in its inception. Issues of empowerment and governance transcend politics and are manifested in aspects of everyday life especially within the urban setting. These grassroots efforts take on many forms and are implemented by a variety of agents of development – NGOs, citizens’ groups, developmental consultancies, intergovernmental organizations – some working with the state, and some in spite of it. Despite a seemingly chaotic setting of duplication of some efforts, futilities of others and general mal-communication and poor coordination, these initiatives collectively act as propellers for empowerment within the built environment. They also provide a much-needed alternative to the top-down policies of the state which continue to misinform the public and conceal information about policies and projects that are of direct relevance to their everyday life.
This panel will present the work of five such initiatives, not as best practice or to showcase their efforts, but to open up a candid discussion on the effectiveness of these efforts particularly from the perspective of scope, coordination, dissemination and inclusiveness. These initiatives all work on reform within the built environment but within different frameworks and mechanisms.
The first, an NGO, functions through a cultural space that acts as a hub for architecture and urbanism. Within its primary goal of professional capacity building and networking, it initiates projects of training, research and development within the built environment. The second organization is a professional practice that designs and implements integrated projects of urban development. The third initiative is more research driven and theory based, concentrating more on observation and analysis of existing situations. The fourth represents a more hybrid or inter-disciplinary approach. It is a professional collective that attempts to change from within, using bottom-up approaches that were developed within the grassroots tradition to reform the state apparatus.
The structure of the panel will be deliberately performative because it recognizes that it is attempting to convey a fluid situation in a country that is in a state of flux. It also recognizes that it is impossible to give a definitive account of this kind of approach to changing the urban face of a country because its history is not well-documented, its present is fragmented and inconsistent and its future is unclear. Furthermore the organizations taking part in the panel cannot in any way claim to represent the grassroots trend in urban planning and participation, they can only claim to represent themselves as part of it and as such they too are unclear as to the efficacy of their work and its relationship to the current wave of urban change that is transforming Cairo’s cities.
Accordingly the panel will be structured in a tri-partite manner into three ‘acts’ each designed to open up a discussion concerning the dynamics of urban change between state and non-state actors;

Act One
Past: 2 timelines.
A selective and subjective timeline of grassroots urban initiatives in Egypt set within the official history of state-sponsored planning and urban action.

Act Two
Present: 4 Post-revolution Days
Vignettes of 4 post-revolution days in which political action and urban change are inextricably linked. Example: Friday March 30, 2012; Islamist rally in Tahrir – Ultras sit-in at the parliament (no women allowed after dark) – Mahatat stop and dance event on Qasr el-Nil Bridge – Tearing down the concrete barriers at Qasr al-Ainy Street – Charity Taxi roaming the streets of Cairo to collect donations.

Act Three
Future: 3 scenarios
Projections into the future of possible scenarios for urban change shaped within and outside the state