Acts of Deforming a City; Top-Down Placeless-Making in Pretorian Cairo

Abstract

Top-down or authoritarian urban interventions, in Cairo mushroomed in 2018; flyovers, transforming the streets into express and arterial roads cutting through residential areas. Furthermore, they were carried out in the name of “development”; however, their liveability measures and Placemaking aspects seem questionable. In order to monitor and evaluate the top-down urban interventions’ measures, significant cases from Pretorian Cairo were chosen for assessment. Various authoritarian urban interventions from 2018 to 2022 in Cairo are collected, described according to their values, are analyzed in relation to Placemaking aspects and objectives. Neglecting pedestrians’ safety, ignoring acts of imagining places for human activities, maximising capitalist profit, creating car-oriented projects and eliminating potential public collaboration produced a process the author calls placeless-making. They presented the following characteristics: overwhelming domination of commercial investments, street billboards in numerous sizes and designs and visually unidentified spaces. No place identity was created, no public collaboration was achieved, and no physical activities were encouraged.