[Urbanstudy] article on cairo, informal city

[Curt Gambetta]

In the New York Times today:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/01/world/middleeast/01cairo.html?em&ex=1172898000&en=18c863abdc77037d&ei=5087%0A

-Curt

March 1, 2007

Cairo Journal


In Arab Hub, the Poor Are Left to Their Fate


By MICHAEL SLACKMAN


  


 
	 CAIRO, Feb. 23 — Ali Mezar
has spent his life fishing a narrow, muddy patch of the Nile in this,
one of the most crowded cities in the world. But Mr. Mezar has little
contact with urban civilization. He sleeps in his boat, makes tea from
the dirty Nile water and on good days earns a few dollars.

Not far away, on the shoulder of a busy avenue, Karim Sayed, 21, herds sheep and goats
matted with urban filth. He spends his days staring into oncoming
traffic, hoping to make a sale before the police move him or confiscate
a sheep. 

At the city’s edge, in a packed neighborhood built entirely by its
residents, Mina Fathy and his neighbors fix sewerage, water and
electricity problems on their own because they say the government
offers them virtually no service in such functions.

 Cairo is home to 15 million and often described as the center of
the Arab world, an incubator of culture and ideas. But it is also a
collection of villages, a ruralized metropolis where people live by
their wits and devices, cut off from the authorities, the law and often
each other.

 That social reality does not just speak to the quality and style of
life for millions of Egyptians. It also plays a role in the nation’s
style of governance. 

The fisherman on the Nile, the shepherd in the road and residents of
so-called informal communities say their experiences navigating city
life have taught them the same lessons: the government is not there to
better their lives; advancement is based on connections and bribes; the
central authority is at best a benign force to be avoided.

“Everything is from God,” said Mr. Mezar, the fisherman, who was
speaking practically, not theologically. “There is no such thing as
government. The government is one thing, and we are something else.
What am I going to get from the government?”

  

Cairo has been the capital of Egypt
for more than 1,000 years, and sits where the dry sands of the desert
lead to the fertile Nile Delta. Egyptian officials like to say that
this is where modern bureaucracy was invented, where the mechanics of
governance first took shape. 

While the Egyptian government is the country’s largest employer, it
is by all accounts an utterly unreliable source of help for the average
citizen. That combination, social scientists say, helps create a system
that has stifled political opposition and allowed a small group to
remain in power for decades. 

One brick in the foundation of single-party rule has been public
resignation. There is no widespread expectation that the authorities
will give the common man a voice, and so there is rarely any outrage
when they do not. The fisherman, the shepherd and Mr. Fathy all said
that the most they could hope for from the government was that it stay
out of their lives.

“We hope God keeps the municipality away from us,” Mr. Sayed said as
he sat in a wooden chair, surveying his fetid flock of goats and sheep
with headlights streaming by.

Such a feeling of separation is one reason that the leadership has
been able to clamp down on opposition political activities without
incurring widespread public wrath, political analysts say. 

“People see the government as something quite foreign or removed
from their lives,” said Diane Singerman, a professor in government at
American University in Washington who has written extensively about
Cairo. “Commuters to the city, or poor peddlers and working people, do
not see the government as particularly interested in their lives, and
they also see politics as quite elite and risky and something to stay
away from.”

Officials say part of the disillusionment comes from unrealistic
expectations, a holdover from the heady days of Gamal Abdel Nasser,
Egypt’s leader from 1954 to 1970, when government jobs were deemed a
right and cradle-to-grave care a promise.

Mr. Mezar and his cousin Muhammad Hassan
fish the Nile just as their parents and their grandparents did, living
in the bottom of their small wooden boats. Dark from the sun, hands
callused from their oars, they are the image of Egypt, and they often
smile and wave dutifully as tour boats motor up the river, with
tourists snapping their pictures. 

 They dock their boats beneath a busy overpass, waking each morning at 6, filling their glasses with tea
made from water scooped directly from the Nile. They worry that despite
their fishing licenses, the police will demand their fish or write a
ticket for some invented infraction.

“There is only despair,” Mr. Hassan said as he slowly rowed while
his son, Rageb, 22, stood barefoot on the front of the boat putting out
the net. “It is all about connections. If you know someone, you get 20
jobs. If not, you get nothing.”

He said they knew about bilharzia, the life-threatening parasite in
the slow-moving waters on the edge of the Nile, but their priority is
catching fish.

“We get checked for bilharzia,” he said.

“Really?” he was asked.

“No, never,” he replied, shaking his head.

There were four boats working the river one morning, including Mr.
Hassan’s. The crews were all relatives of his. No one expressed anger —
or depression. Only resignation. 

“I am sick of Egypt,” Mr. Mezar said. “I like fishing, but you see,
are there any fish? I would give all of this if the government gave me
a job.”

Cairo has grown like a living organism, swallowing up agricultural
lands and villages as its population has ballooned. Nearly
three-quarters of the population live like Mr. Fathy, in informal
communities. 

Mr. Fathy comes from Manshiet Nasser, a sprawling labyrinth
of brick apartment buildings along trash-strewn dirt roads that is home
to hundreds of thousands of people. Informal communities are not
shantytowns, but neighborhoods that grew organically, without any urban
planning. People simply built homes, some buying agricultural land,
some squatting on desert land. 

The nature of these communities has bred a sense of distance and
alienation from the government, experts in Cairo’s life say. The
government only provided services when the neighborhoods reached a
critical mass, when the numbers of people could no longer be ignored.
Few have schools. Roads are so narrow that police trucks cannot enter.
Electricity is pirated. Order is established by the community,
independent from the authorities.

“My impression is that they think they are something different from
the rest of the city,” said Abdel Halim Ibrahim Abdel Halim, an urban
planner and architect. “They feel like they provided housing for
themselves, they control that housing.” 

 Residents of Manshiet Nasser, which is on a plateau, often refer to
those in the formal center of the city as “people who come from under,”
as Salah Ibrahim, 40, meant when he said, “People who come from under
never listen to us.” He said a road in front of his house had been
flooded with sewage for days until, finally, the neighbors all donated
money to have it repaired. 

 “Every house is on its own,” said Mr. Fathy, who said he had paid a
bribe of 2,000 pounds, about $350, when inspectors insisted that he
tear down the third-floor apartment he was building on top of his
parents’ building. “Every house has to solve its own problems.”





Mona El-Naggar contributed reporting.




 
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