Adapting Geographies of Gentrification in Egypt: Lesson Learned from Fatimid Cairo and Heliopolis

Abstract

Since the 1960s, gentrification has been confused with other urban notions such as upgrading and renewal, regardless of its economic and political perspectives, whereas it has been processing and evolving in urban neighborhoods, especially in the Western countries such as the USA and the UK, away from the developing countries. It took place also in other countries outside the core cities of gentrification. Researchers and urban planners agreed that to re-energize the study of gentrification is to focus on its ‘geographies’ which are super-gentrification, third-world immigration—the global city, black/ethnic minority gentrification—race and gentrification, and livability/urban policy. To this point, the cultural diversity was omitted from the geography of gentrification, something that this paper will try to elaborate on and identify. Due to sociocultural differences between gentrification taking place in the developed world and that happening in the developing countries, the research suggests adding two new categories to the geographies of gentrification to reflect the specificities of Egypt. For instance, gentrification in Egypt is driven by other geographies of gentrification, namely historical-tourism gentrification and contracting/real estate gentrification. Thus, monitoring, observation, and analyzing of Heliopolis and Fatimid Cairo will be used to achieve the paper’s main objective; to adapt the gentrification process with the Egyptian case studies, and to fill the gap in the gentrification literature regarding the geographies of gentrification in developing countries, the theme that will establish a new level of gentrification and open new field of research in Egypt. Therefore, urban planning will have a different valid scope in Egypt and provide decision makers with a new tool to develop and maintain the urban planning approaches in Egypt.