Abstract
A majority of scholars consider Egypt’s urban development a product of the neo-liberal political economy facilitated by the country’s central government. In this article, we want to shift our attention towards the public and its demand for housing. We describe the urban everyday experiences of a population within a country in which a visual culture established via public media creates an urban imagination that does not reflect the lived social, spatial, and economic reality of the majority of the population. Exploration of the general public’s attitudes towards media narratives that focus their advertisement campaigns on high class residential projects launched this investigation. The argument that follows is based on empirical studies within the Greater Cairo Region (GCR). In this setting, a puzzling trend from our collected data guides our central research question: Why aren’t ads for luxury housing—a market segment clearly beyond the reach of most Egyptians—condemned by those who cannot afford it? To tackle this phenomenon, we shed light on how the pre—and post-marital demand for housing among young couples and their families influence the market, and particularly, the market for upscale and luxury housing in Cairo. The research consists of four phases, including (1) field interviews with Uber and Careem drivers, (2) an online survey targeting inhabitants across varying urban and social segments of the GCR, (3) the first author’s personal story, which posits that marriage culture acts as a key driver for real estate narratives, and (4) a visual analysis of a real estate advertisement. To conclude, the article discusses how far a hegemonic visual culture that caters to socio-economic links between class, marriage, and real estate engages the support of a large part of the population, which in turn, co-produces a spatially unjust urban development scheme that works against their own interests.
Highlights
Issue This article is part of the issue “Visual Communication in Urban Design and Planning: The Impact of Mediatisation(s) on the Construction of Urban Futures” edited by Gabriela Christmann (Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space, Germany), Christoph Bernhardt (Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space, Germany) and Jörg Stollmann (TU Berlin, Germany)
Media play a role in conditioning the desires of the general public for luxury housing, despite the fact that it doesn’t serve their housing needs
A puzzle from our collected data guides our central research question: Why aren’t ads for luxury housing—a market segment that caters beyond the reach of most Egyptians—condemned by those who cannot afford it? The pervasiveness of realestate advertisement could be interpreted from (1) the government’s perspective and its desire to promote its political agenda manifested through its urban planning schemes, and from (2) a bottom-up cultural perspective, which functions as an indicator of the general public’s demands or least desires
Summary
A majority of scholars consider Egypt’s urban development a product of the neo-liberal political economy, which the country’s central government has helped facilitate Egypt’s professional urban development discourses and practices as well as its planning education focus on satellite towns, prestigious new desert cities, and gated communities catering to the uppermiddle class (Hendawy, in press-a; Hendawy & Saeed, 2019) These projects are guiding infrastructural investments, tying up planning resources and most of all, they are overshadowing the reality experienced by the disadvantaged majority urban population. The pervasiveness of realestate advertisement could be interpreted from (1) the government’s perspective and its desire to promote its political agenda manifested through its urban planning schemes, and from (2) a bottom-up cultural perspective, which functions as an indicator of the general public’s demands or least desires The former reflection was shared amongst a number of scholars (Daher, 2013; Denis, 2006; Elmouelhi, 2019; Hassan, 2017; Shawkat & Hendawy, 2016), while the latter postulate remains under-explored. The article discusses how far a hegemonic visual culture that caters to and socio-economic links between class, marriage, and real estate engage the support of a large part of the population, which in turn, co-produces a spatially unjust urban development scheme that works against their own interests
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