The People of the City: Unraveling the How in Ramlet Bulaq

Abstract

In 2008, government policies in Egypt began to use notions of planned and unplanned, and safe and unsafe settlements to define the built environment shown in the maps of cities. The official discourse in the media began to describe the urban poor as Ashwa’yaat, which means chaotic neighbors. Social discourse began to criminalize the residents or urban poor who lived in so-called slums. In this article, I analyze one of these neighborhoods labeled as a slum from an urban anthropological perspective. I analyze the different relations in this neighborhood to understand the city and its people. I argue that people in Ramlet Bulaq construct their relationship to space in terms of their labor or what they are doing every day, and through this process produce the very space named Ramlet Bulaq. My inquiry also explores how structural violence may change individuals’ relation to the space and its construction. Labor is at the heart of political and social relations of power that produce the space of Ramlet Bulaq and shape the making of the people of Ramlet Bulaq.