“Cairo Past Futures,” on the city and the press
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“Cairo Past Futures” is an exhibition held at Kafein, a café in downtown Cairo, from 21 December until 31 January. The exhibition is a fundraiser for the production and printing of two issues of Cairobserver, an independent DIY magazine on architecture and urbanism in Egypt, with a focus on Cairo.
The exhibition includes twenty-four photographs, each combined with a headline extracted from the Egyptian press of the 1950s and 60s. Headlines such as “This is Tomorrow’s Cairo” and “Urban Planning in the Era of Revolution” are superimposed on images of contemporary Cairo depicting speculative informal housing properties on the edge of Giza and dilapidated social housing blocks in Bulaq. These two-layer montages combining text and image put to the test past promises about the city’s future pronounced in state-censored magazines and newspapers during the Nasser regime. When it comes to matters related to urban development and municipal affairs the press during the Nasser years performed the palliative task of creating false hope for a better urban future. While the regime undertook many significant development projects it failed to create economically and socially sustainable urban development and to establish effective municipal management systems. Today, not unlike the 1960s, the Egyptian press is saturated with uncritical pronouncements of large-scale development projects such as the building of one million affordable housing units. The postcard-like images of “Cairo Past Futures” present a double critique: on the one hand the images critique the contemporary condition of Cairo by way of appropriating the headlines from a previous era of revolution. On the other hand the images also provoke debate about the heroic language of the press in revolutionary times, namely its continued promotion of regime promises for a better urban future that rarely materialize.
After the 1952 coup d’état in Egypt, the new military regime sought to establish revolutionary legitimacy by implementing political and economic reforms and by expanding the state’s role in building and development. Large-scale projects such as the High Dam were promoted in the press along side state-built modern housing, new infrastructure and services. Planning in the age of revolution was promised to achieve social justice, one of the stated goals of the revolution as defined by the Free Officers. In the meantime the Egyptian press was a platform for the mediation of architectural visions drawn up by architects and bureaucrats seeking state patronage. Daily newspapers and weekly magazines were vehicles for the circulation and dissemination of political, cultural, and architectural ideas necessary in the process of shaping the built environment.
Members of the Free Officers, namely Gamal Abdel Nasser and Abdellatif al-Baghdady, claimed the optimistic endeavor of building architecture as a metaphor for nation building. In 1953 the well-established and widely read al-Musawwar magazine quoted Nasser saying, “Let us join hands and build.” The statement was made when members of the Free Officers attended the inauguration of a small self-funded community center in the Cairo neighborhood of Gammaliya. Attending such events was one way for the officers to introduce themselves to local communities in their efforts to build a popular base.
In the August 1963 issue of Binaʾ al-Watan (Building the Nation), which ran from 1958 to 1966, a column written by al-Baghdady was titled “Planning in the era of revolution.” In it he writes, “Since the revolution of 23 July 1952 Arab society has undergone immense transformations in all aspects of life,” he then adds, “In order to achieve the goals of the revolution it was necessary to plan the necessary steps including planning our economy, planning our society, internal politics and external affairs.” The public discourse around state planning proliferated in the 1960s as Egypt adopted the soviet 5-year economic plan and as the state sponsored large-scale urban planning visions such as Nasr City northeast of central Cairo.
Decades later after the initial euphoric days of the January 2011 revolt, government officials and military officers often used the phrase “Let us build Egypt.” Such statements about building and planning fail to articulate fundamental details such as: Build what? Build for whom and by whom? Build according to what plans and designs?
In order to expose the fallacy of slogans such as “Planning in the era of revolution” and “Let us join hands and build” I have placed them directly in confrontation with some of the government’s contemporary building interventions in Cairo. For example, in “Cairo Past Futures” Gamal Abdel Nasser’s quote from al-Musawwar in 1953, “Let us join hands and build,” is superimposed on an image of the concrete separation wall recently built around the pyramids of Giza to keep out the residents of Nazlet al-Simman who have been in the area for generations. In another example, Abdellatif al-Baghdady’s 1963 proclamation for “planning in the era of revolution” is superimposed on the concrete wall blocking Falaki Street in downtown Cairo since 2012 to protect the Interior Ministry. Thus, the images in “Cairo Past Futures” subvert the headlines and slogans produced during Egypt’s previous era of revolution in order to criticize the present condition of the city following the recent revolutionary struggle.
Visit “Cairo Past Futures” at Kafein located in downtown Cairo at 28 Sharif Street (in the pedestrian alley). Proceeds from the exhibition go towards funding the printing of new Cairobserver issues in 2015. In addition, there is a crowd funding campaign continuing until 2 January to support the production of the Cairobserver magazines.
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