The People of the City: Unraveling the How in Ramlet Bulaq

Abstract

In 2008, government policies in Egypt began to use notions of planned and unplanned, and safe and unsafe settlements to define the built environment shown in the maps of cities. The official discourse in the media began to describe the urban poor as Ashwa’yaat, which means chaotic neighbors. Social discourse began to criminalize the residents or urban poor who lived in so-called slums. In this article, I analyze one of these neighborhoods labeled as a slum from an urban anthropological perspective. I analyze the different relations in this neighborhood to understand the city and its people. I argue that people in Ramlet Bulaq construct their relationship to space in terms of their labor or what they are doing every day, and through this process produce the very space named Ramlet Bulaq. My inquiry also explores how structural violence may change individuals’ relation to the space and its construction. Labor is at the heart of political and social relations of power that produce the space of Ramlet Bulaq and shape the making of the people of Ramlet Bulaq.

Keywords:

• Cairo
• labor
• urban anthropology
• people
• place
• violence
• slums
• social change
• space

Notes

Personal interview with a young girl, September 2012, Ramlet Bulaq, Cairo, Egypt.

“The ruling neoliberal ideology pretends that the benefits of high growth trickle down automatically to the poor, but this proposition is not only empirically dubious; it is politically foolish in a parliamentary democracy, because the speed of trickling down remains unspecified while the government has to maintain a minimum degree of legitimacy to win elections” (Bhaduri 2007).

“It certainly benefits the urban elite population, and leads to uncontrolled urbanization and mega cities with growing hunger for energy, water and urban housing space. We are told that world class cities are our goals, so slums have to be cleared without providing resettlement. Livelihoods of both urban and rural communities have to be destroyed for expanding and modernizing the cities. In the process the modes of transports we are creating with ore flyovers for cars, bigger airports, the shopping and housing complex we are promoting become increasingly energy intensive, and the majority of our ordinary citizens who do consume them also have to pay directly or indirectly for this pattern of consumption” (Bhaduri 2007).

The Friday of Anger was the first Friday within the 18 days of the strike in Egypt to oust ex-president Mohamed Hosni Mubarak. The demonstrations started on January 25th, 2011, against police brutality and the day ended with massive numbers of demonstrators in Tahrir Square in Cairo. The police actions to dismiss January 25th, 2011 demonstrations caused more numbers of demonstrators in January 28th, 2011, which turned the day of January 28th to be a massive social movement against Mubarak’s regime. The police and all the security forces retreated from the streets on Friday, January 28th, 2011, after they killed thousands of the demonstrators.

Personal interview with Fares. January, 2014 in Ramlet Bulaq.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Official newspaper Al Wakae’ Al Masreya, no. 142, June 20, 2012.

The Informal Settlement Development Fund is a governmental facility formed by the ex-president of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak in 2008.

El Horreya Wal Adala (Freedom and justice) is the newspaper owned by the Muslim Brotherhood party, the ruling governmental party in the period June 2012 to June 2013.

The Maspero building housed the official government media and television.

Personal interview with A’m Gaber, January 2014, in Ramlet Bulaq.

Personal interview with Fares, January 2014, in Ramlet Bulaq.

Ibid.

Personal interview with Ali, January 2014, in Ramlet Bulaq.

Personal interview with Sha’awa, January 2014, in Ramlet Bulaq.

Ibid.

Personal interview with O’m Kimo, January 2014, in Ramlet Bulaq.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Omnia Khalil

Omnia Khalil is an urban anthropologist with an architectural background. Specializing in Cairo, she is interested in analyzing and understanding deprived communities in Egypt. Her work focuses on how neoliberalism relates with space, social movements, and violence. She finished her master’s degree in anthropology at the American University in Cairo.