This cross-disciplinary, ethnographic, contextualized, and empirical volume explores the meaning and significance of urban space, and maps the spatial inscription of power on the mega-city of Cairo. Suspicious of collective life and averse to power-sharing, Egyptian governance structures weaken but do not stop the public's role in the remaking of their city. What happens to a city where neo-liberalism has scaled back public services and encouraged the privatization of public goods, while the vast majority cannot afford the effects of such policies? Who wins and loses in the march to the modern and the global as the government transforms urban spaces and markets in the name of growth, security, tourism, and modernity? How do Cairenes struggle with an ambiguous and vulnerable legal and bureaucratic environment when legality is a privilege affordable only to the few or the connected? This companion volume to Cairo Cosmopolitan (2006) further develops the central insights of the Cairo School of Urban Studies. Contributors: Khaled Adham, Jennifer Bell, Agnes Deboulet, Taline Djerdjerian, W. J. Dorman, Benedicte Florin, Joerg Gertel, Katarzyna Grabska, Patrick Haenni, Mozn Hassan, Samia Mehrez, Sarah Ben Nefissa, Agnieszka Paczynska, Samuli Schielke, Mulki Al-Sharmani, Diane Singerman, Hania Sobhy, and Malika Zeghal. Contents: Introduction 'Contesting Myths, Critiquing Cosmopolitanism, and Creating the Cairo School of Urban Studies' by Diane Singerman and Paul Amar Cairo: The City Cosmopolitan Cairo Consumer and Investor Geographies Cairo Heritage and Touristic Globalization Cairo Subcultures and Media Contestation Cairo Celebratory Spaces and Vernacular World-Crossing Afterword Whose Cairo?

Product Description: Bringing together a distinguished interdisciplinary group of scholars, this volume explores what happens when new forms of privatization meet collectivist pasts, public space is sold off to satisfy investor needs and tourist gazes, and the state plans for Egypt's future in desert cities while stigmatizing and neglecting Cairo's popular neighborhoods...read more

Product Description: "... the quality of each of these essays is excellent, and the book warrants extensive reading by political scientists, sociologists, and all scholars of the contemporary Middle East. —American Journal of Sociology"This book’s ethnographic material offers much to surprise and challenge assumptions about gender, Islam and social change in Egypt...read more