‘Digging in the water?’ Grassroots urbanism, the Egyptian state, and the politics of heritage-making in post-revolution Cairo

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article analyzes a week-long workshop held in 2016 in the UNESCO World Heritage Site of ‘Historic Cairo’. Organised by an informal ‘heritage association’ known as the Cairo Heritage School (CHS), the event was part of a broader fluorescence of urban-focused initiatives that spread across the Egyptian capital after the so-called January 25th Revolution of 2011. Focusing on both the workshop, which generated proposals for the adaptive reuse of a fifteenth-century palace, and the government’s regulation of the event, I demonstrate how a symbiotic relationship developed between the CHS organisers and the local authorities. I argue that this relationship complicates analyses of heritage-making activities that dichotomise actors as ‘with’ and ‘without’ power and shows how heritage-work creates spaces for non-state groups to exercise agency in ways that can challenge structures of authority.