Service Provision and Prosperity in Urban Communities in the Greater Cairo Region

Abstract

It is widely argued that the Greater Cairo Region (GCR) in Egypt suffers from failing urban communities resulting partially from unresponsive services. The local discourse on urban services has not paid attention to the investigation of the provision process of services and its impact on community satisfaction and prosperity. In the Global South, there is an ongoing debate on the shortcomings of service provision and ways to improve them. Yet, emerging theoretical/conceptual approaches to the provision of urban services are not sufficiently comprehensive to explain processes of service provision worldwide and, arguably, cannot be because they cannot take account of local diversity. Consequently, this research investigates the impact of the process of service provision on community satisfaction and prosperity in GCR, Egypt. To help collect and analyze data, we constructed a conceptual framework of a potentially responsive process of service provision. We studied two privately developed middle- and upper-middle-income urban communities, using questionnaires with inhabitants and semi-structured interviews with relevant official representatives as well as documentary data sources. The research finds, in line with the Global South debate, that absent public participation, ineffective governmental institutions, pseudo-decentralization, and deficient regulations stand behind the failure of services, their lack of responsiveness, and low levels of community satisfaction. Yet, it also shows that community prosperity could be aided by, for example, private developers playing an active role in the provision process. Hence, community prosperity is not tied only to a specific set of institutional arrangements.