Cairo According to Nezar AlSayyad: Histories of a Superimposed City

Cairo: Histories of a City (2011) is the book in which Nezar AlSayyad, an Egyptian-American architect and urban historian, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, reconstructed more than a thousand years of the Egyptian capital as a succession of superimposed cities, each built by a power that wanted to leave its mark and each inhabited by a population that transformed it in its own way. His thesis is that Cairo has not one history but many, Fatimid, Mamluk, Ottoman, Khedivial, colonial, Nasserist and informal, and that today's city, with more than twenty million people in its metropolitan area, is explained by the accumulation of those layers and by the tensions between the power that builds and the people who inhabit.

From Fustat to the Mamluk city: a thousand years of superimposed layers

The book begins before Cairo. Fustat, founded in 641 after the Arab conquest beside the Roman fortress of Babylon, was Egypt's first Islamic capital, and al-Qahira, the Victorious, was founded in 969 by the Fatimids as a walled palace city to its north, reserved for the caliph and his court. AlSayyad shows how Saladin, in the twelfth century, joined both with the Citadel and opened the royal city to the population, and how the Mamluks made Cairo the largest city of the Islamic world, with mosques, madrasas and markets that still define its historic core, declared a World Heritage site in 1979.

Khedive Ismail's Paris on the Nile and the dual city

Modernity arrived with Khedive Ismail. After visiting the Paris exposition of 1867, Ismail commissioned a Paris on the Nile: boulevards, squares, an opera house and palaces west of the old city, inaugurated for the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and financed with a debt that led to the British occupation of 1882. AlSayyad reads that Khedivial Cairo as the origin of the dual city that persists: a modern, planned city for elites beside an old city left to its fate, a pattern the colony reinforced and the suburbs of Heliopolis and Maadi, built by foreign companies, extended.

Nasser, Sadat and the ashwa'iyat: the informal city as the major work

The revolution of 1952 changed the builder but not the logic. Nasser raised Nasr City and public housing blocks, nationalised and expropriated, and turned Tahrir Square into the state's stage; Sadat opened the economy and launched the new desert cities, 6th of October and 10th of Ramadan, which barely attracted population. Meanwhile, real growth happened in the ashwa'iyat, the informal neighbourhoods built on farmland at the city's edges, where around 60 percent of Cairenes now live without plan, sufficient services or recognition. AlSayyad presents that informal city as the largest urban work of contemporary Egypt.

Tahrir 2011 and the New Capital: the palimpsest continues

The book closed months before the revolution of 2011, and AlSayyad added in later editions a reading of Tahrir as proof that squares built by power can be taken by the people. Since then, al-Sisi's government has answered with the New Administrative Capital in the desert, begun in 2015 to house ministries and elites far from the rebellious city, and with demolitions in the City of the Dead and in historic neighbourhoods to open highways. The history of superimposed cities, his reading suggests, continues: a new power builds its Cairo while the old one fills with people.

AlSayyad's lesson is that Cairo is understood as palimpsest and as conflict. Each regime built a new city beside the previous one rather than transforming it, and each was reappropriated by a population that overflowed it, and that dynamic explains both the heritage wealth and the inequality and informality of today. For the planning of Southern metropolises, Cairo shows that planning in the desert does not solve the existing city and that urban history is the first instrument for governing it.