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ABSTRACT
This article analyzes a week-long workshop held in 2016 in the UNESCO World Heritage Site of ‘Historic Cairo’. Organised by an informal ‘heritage association’ known as the Cairo Heritage School (CHS), the event was part of a broader fluorescence of urban-focused initiatives that spread across the Egyptian capital after the so-called January 25th Revolution of 2011. Focusing on both the workshop, which generated proposals for the adaptive reuse of a fifteenth-century palace, and the government’s regulation of the event, I demonstrate how a symbiotic relationship developed between the CHS organisers and the local authorities. I argue that this relationship complicates analyses of heritage-making activities that dichotomise actors as ‘with’ and ‘without’ power and shows how heritage-work creates spaces for non-state groups to exercise agency in ways that can challenge structures of authority.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank both the founders of the Cairo Heritage School, for permitting me to attend their first workshop in 2016, and the event participants, for allowing me to observe and partake of their activities. In particular, I would like to express my deep gratitude to Waleed Shehata, who not only facilitated my participation but also shared his insights with me during a very hectic time. Finally, I would like to thank Claire Bullen, Cyril Isnart, Laurajane Smith, and the two anonymous reviewers at IJHS for their invaluable feedback on earlier drafts of this article.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Historic Cairo is an area of several square kilometres located to the east of the Nile. Registered as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979, it is home to numerous architecturally significant buildings spanning more than 1000 years of Egypt’s Arab-Islamic past (Antoniou et al. Citation1980).
2. This transliteration of the palace name comes from CHS’s ‘Workshop Preparatory Document’ (Cairo Heritage School Citation2016). Other commonly used transliterations include Qasr Bashtak and Qasr Beshtak.
3. The Ministry of Antiquities (also sometimes referred to as the Ministry of State for Antiquities) was established in 2011 and now oversees the management of Historic Cairo. Previously known as the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), the agency had operated as a department within the Ministry of Culture (MoC); however, in an attempt to gain greater autonomy, staff at the SCA/MoA lobbied to separate from the MoC after the January 25th Revolution of 2011.
4. Bayt al-Qadi (literally, ‘house of the judge’) is known formally as the Maq’ad Mamay al-Seify. A maq’ad (‘seat’) is an open-air loggia that usually overlooks a courtyard. The structure is all that remains of a fifteenth-century Mamluk-era palace (Williams Citation2008, 216–217).
5. Attendance at the CHS workshop was part of my dissertation fieldwork, which I conducted in Cairo from 2014–2016 and which focused on the fluorescence of ‘urban revitalisation’ initiatives in the Egyptian capital after the January 25th Revolution of 2011. During this time, I observed workshops, neighbourhood tours, lectures, conferences, and other public events. Additionally, I conducted structured and semi-structured interviews with local architects, urban planners, academics, and conservationists.
6. The waqf system, which dates back to the seventh century, was designed to ensure the physical and financial well-being of an individual structure or institution in perpetuity. This system was widely used in Cairo for both public and private buildings, and it functioned as the primary model of ‘preservation’ well into the Ottoman era (1517–1914). It is frequently cited as having ensured the long-term survival of so many historic buildings (El-Habashi Citation2001; Bakhoum Citation2011).
7. The term ‘historic preservation’ is distinct from both ‘conservation’ and ‘restoration’, each of which has its own genealogy and valences. In this article though, I will refer to spatial interventions intended to care for and protect Historic Cairo’s architecturally significant buildings as ‘preservation’ or ‘historic preservation’.
8. This project of spatial engineering dovetailed with the calls from Western travellers that had served as the impetus for the formation of the Comité–namely, to save Cairo’s ‘old city’ as an emblem of the ‘authentic East’ (Reid Citation1992; Mahdy Citation2001).
9. For an exhaustive review of the various state and non-state groups involved in the care and protection of Historic Cairo, see (Sedky Citation2009), 121–226.
10. One of the best examples of these approaches is the Aga Khan Trust for Culture’s (AKTC) work in Historic Cairo. Begun as a park project in the 1980s, the initiative eventually expanded to include a multi-faceted program of socioeconomic redevelopment in the adjacent Darb al-Ahmar neighbourhood. The organisation, which received the support of both municipal and state authorities, both adaptively reused a number of buildings in the district and also focused its efforts on addressing the socio-economic conditions of the neighbourhood as a whole. (For details on the project, see Sedky Citation2009, 196–206.)
11. Authorisation and oversight of preservation work in Historic Cairo ostensibly involves multiple state and municipal agencies–including, the Cairo governorate, the Ministry of Tourism, the Ministry of Housing, the Ministry of Awqaf, the Ministry of Culture (MoC), and, more recently, the Ministry of Antiquities (MoA). In practice, however, the MoC and the Cairo governorate have exercised the most power in Historic Cairo: either individually or in tandem, they have been responsible for authorising all non-state preservation initiatives and for spearheading state-led proposals and projects.
12. The Cairo 2050 Plan is the best recent example of this development paradigm: a massive government project announced in 2008 (and revived in recent years), it called for the razing and redevelopment of several districts–and, critically, the relocation of thousands of residents (Tarbush Citation2012).
13. This commitment to community participation is hardly immune to critique. As Michael Herzfeld and Chiara De Cesari have pointed out: ‘there are surprising affinities between neoliberal techniques and rhetoric on the one hand and some forms of progressive politics on the other; in particular, conservative neoliberal policymakers and local activists alike mobilise the language of “community involvement” and “participation” for their respective urban heritage policies’ (Herzfeld and De Cesari Citation2015, 172).
14. Shehata was well aware of the implications of his espousal of Western models of heritage management–and of the workshop’s European orientation more generally. He conceded that there was an element of ‘aqdat al-khawaga (foreigner complex–i.e. valuing foreign goods, ideas, and practices over their Egyptian counterparts) underpinning the event, but he told me that he felt there was still value in applying these models and ideas to the Egyptian context (Personal Interview, Waleed Shehata, 9 August, 2016).
15. This entailed meeting with the Assistant to the Minister of the MoA, Mohammed Abdel Aziz, and getting his support for the project and then eventually obtaining written approval from the ministry itself (Personal Interview, Waleed Shehata, 9 August, 2016).
16. Although only some of these partners provided financial support, their endorsement and/or non-monetary assistance was essential to the event–and may even have facilitated the securing of financial aid from other organisations.
17. The entire workshop–including the lectures, tours, preparatory document, and design proposals–was conducted in English.
18. Although the CHS organisers framed adaptive reuse as helping to ‘ameliorate local conditions and support local community development’, Shehata also made it clear that the group wanted to keep the workshop focus on the buildings themselves (Personal Interview, Waleed Shehata, 9 August, 2016). Interestingly, some of the participants appeared to agree: during one of his lectures, participants argued with Shehata that it was not the responsibility of the architect, archaeologist or heritage specialist to dictate how a given heritage project might affect local development–to do so would mean taking on the role of the government or NGOs.
19. In fact, the official himself was described in the workshop’s preparatory document as having contributed to the preparation of the ‘Guidelines of [sic] Reusing Listed Historic Buildings’ while also serving as the supervisor of the so-called Development and Heritage Reuse Unit for Historic Cairo.
20. According to Shehata, the MoA was particularly amenable to self-financed projects such as the CHS workshop because the MoC had retained control of the funding after the MoA broke away, leaving the latter without any financial resources. Similarly, the international character of the workshop–in terms of both participation and institutional support–also increased the appeal of the event (Personal Interview, Waleed Shehata, 9 August, 2016).
21. At the time of writing, Shehata was a PhD candidate at Bond University’s Abedian School of Architecture in Australia.
22. Indeed, the ministry’s efforts to monitor and regulate the CHS workshop suggest the authorities were–and are–well aware of this potential.
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Claire Panetta
Claire Panetta is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Pace University. Her research analyzes the intersection of politics and space in Middle Eastern cities, focusing on the role of grassroots urbanism in the transformation of political subjectivity in post-uprising Egypt.