Shelter as Capital: The City as Prison/The Housing Question in Egypt
SHEETAL CHHABRIA
Borderlines inaugurates its first book forum titled “Shelter as Capital” which engages with urban politics in the Global South and draws the connections between Egyptian and Indian urban politics. This essay is the first part of five in a book forum dedicated to Yahia Shawkat’s book: Egypt’s Housing Crisis.
A row of Ibni Baytak (Build Your Home) houses in various stages of development in Badr New City, Egypt. This is a rare example of a formally planned self-build project for low-income households. February 2013. (Photograph by Yahia Shawkat.)
In an article titled “Forgotten Places,” the abolitionist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore states, “A prison is a city that weighs heavily on the place where it is.” She has on other occasions drawn this analogy of prisons as cities, elaborating that prisons are political, infrastructural, and economic “dead weights” on their regions that displace the possibility of real social investment in the lives of those who live both inside and outside the prison. There is much to be gained by pursuing this analogy. Indeed, prisons act as resource sinks in the region in which they exist, consuming massive social, technical, technological, and material infrastructure. Prisons also house and therefore manage “surplus” populations, carefully immobilizing and incarcerating some form of surplus value – which is extracted through forms of labor, bondage, and debt, so as to benefit others whose mobility is prized. Prisons therefore, and most importantly, resolve the crises inherent in capitalist societies — crises of plenty amidst poverty — on behalf of capital and its devotees. In other words, prisons, when understood as node in a region of organized abandonment, and one example of a kind of “forgotten place,” work for those who seek to keep capital moving no matter what the cost by combining economic and extra-economic methods of extraction and control.
But if a prison is like a city can we say that the reverse is also true? Can we ask in what ways cities are like prisons? What precisely would we able to see we saw the city not as the symbol or “crucible” of modern mobility – as in dominant strands of social theory since at least Adam Smith – but instead as a site meant to render immobile and stuck in place the masses of people cities now house?
Yahwia Shawkat’s Egypt’s Housing Crisis, a wonderfully rich investigation into the factors that have caused and benefited from Egypt’s “perpetual housing crisis,” lends itself to such a read. The “perpetuation” of the housing crisis in Egypt has resulted in what Shawkat calls a manufactured informality, i.e. an entire spectrum of formality to informality that crosses into all forms of tenure as well as owner or government-built housing. (177) This perpetuation of the housing crisis that Shawkat documents should prompt serious reflection on who benefits from the manufacturing of insecure shelter over the decades? Spanning the late nineteenth century to the present, Shawkat shows us how the terrain of housing is a political, social, material, and economic terrain, causing the rise and demise of states and governors and constraining the mobility, social and physical, of Egypt’s working classes.
Early in the book we learn a remarkable fact: Egypt has the largest number of empty homes on a per capita basis worldwide while at the same time having a significant proportion of its population sheltered under the threat of constant eviction. Egypt’s condition of housing therefore exemplifies best the meaning of crisis, where people-less homes are wedged into urban landscapes amidst large populations who are contending daily with their inability to fulfill their own need for secure shelter. That this condition of precarity is naturalized, rather than questioned, only speaks to the power of the market whereby basic needs can go unfulfilled as long as one is devoted to “the economy.”
In Egypt, as elsewhere, housing becomes imbricated in relations of capital, politics, social life—even making and breaking marriages—as rulers and statesmen make false promises of provisioning housing to the people of Egypt. When they can’t provision housing, amnesty for illegal housing constitutes an entire regime of de facto tolerance, interrupted only on occasion by “false demolitions,” a symbolic performance of an eviction, and evidence of good governance, executed by destroying non-structural elements of illegal settlements (51). Shawkat uses official government housing records to portray the history of housing policy and law and the piecemeal attempts to solve the housing crisis that have been undertaken. He does so while providing a very detailed examination of the way in which Egypt’s leaders have used their ability to provision housing as a source for political legitimacy. Readers learn not just about Egypt, but about the imbrications of housing under capitalist, colonialist, and neoliberal regimes worldwide. But Shawkat asks a very important question about the long history of de facto tolerance, pausing to wonder what exactly is this tolerance given “in exchange for?” (3)
Housing and the Art of Governance
What becomes clear is that the most important development in the field of housing over the decades has been its ability to serve as a tool in the art of managing populations. It is this use of housing that connects the ‘izba, private hamlets on agricultural estates that housed much of the rural population, to the broader manufacturing of informality in urban settings. Between the 1840s to the 1950s, those residing on the ‘izbas were ruled by proxy. But even once the ‘izbas were outlawed in the 1950s and replaced with a drive to produce the “model village” with more self-governing “model citizens,” ‘izbas served as “total institutions,” a term used by the sociologist Erving Goffman to describe the powerful function of prisons. Like prisons, Shawkat tells us, the ‘izba was “where ‘bonded labor’ that was neither slave nor free produced a ‘military agriculture.’” Living under the control of the landowners, residents were surveilled and terrorized by private security guards and thus not allowed to work elsewhere nor leave without permission. An illicit escape meant being rendered not only both landless and homeless, but probably even jobless. (90) By the time of the land reform policies of 1952, those residing on ‘izbas, or “totally instituted” people, made up one-third of the rural population. (91) The Arab socialist era was no match for the tenacity of housing to serve as social control.
Shawkat shows how, “[p]atronage and control through housing were thus reinvented for the Arab socialist era. The ‘izba on the private estate, thought to have disappeared with the land reform policies of the 1950s, would be revived within the same decade — and especially in Tahrir, as a national socialist model village on a state-owned estate, a village ten times the size of a landowner’s ‘izba.” (99-100) It was thus that social control survived in housing. Reforming the ‘izba only fueled the private sector to switch investments to real estate investments (13) In fact, by the 2000s, the ’izba re-surged, and was re-invented as a private agricultural workers’ camp concomitant with the rise of agricultural financialization. Having failed to address the fundamental inequality of power between the landed and landless, between the investing classes and the dispossessed, this could have been the only fate for the politics of shelter in Egypt – namely the resurgence of a “worker colony” on newly commodified of land, labor, and shelter. Such a resurgence of presumably atavistic forms can also be seen in India, Pakistan, Indonesia and everywhere that the dynamics of postcolonial and national development have depoliticized the demands of labor. The “final transformation” of the 1970s, when shelter tenure was transformed from renting to ownership, invented Egypt’s recent housing market, which still supplies only one-fifth of urban housing needs (32).
Clemens Palme Dutt, a British member of the Communist Party who was of Bengali descent, first translated Friedrich Engels’ “The Housing Question” into English in 1935. But Engels’ warnings have barely made it into the common sense of the Right to the City movements in the Global North – let alone in the Global South. When Engels warned in “The Housing Question” against conceding to piecemeal municipal reforms that provision working class housing while leaving the power of capital completely intact, he couldn’t have known that he was predicting the future of twentieth century development – especially in the Global South. Even though housing is fundamentally contentious—a site of struggle between the haves and have-nots or between the powerful and the powerless—it is used to depoliticize the questions of capital-labor relations which Engels warned about before. The result of this failure to contend is a manufactured informality in which those who belong legally to the places they live are apart from those rendered liminal by a repeating legal ambiguity, that of de facto tolerance amidst de jure criminalization. Such liminality and ambiguity does not simply reflect but indeed produces economic insecurity generation after generation.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore teaches scholars of such forgotten places how to “conceptualize the kinds of places that where prisoners come from and where prisons are built as a single – though spatially discontinuous – abandoned region.” From Mumbai to Cairo, we can do the same, conceptualizing the kinds of places where precariously sheltered residents come from, the ‘izbas of commodified agriculture, and the cities are built, as single but spatially discontinuous abandoned regions.
In the past few decades, as cities across the globe strive to become “world cities at last,” there have been occasional concessions to provide working class housing. Yet about these concessions, we must ask the question Shawkat asks, “in exchange for what?” In most cases, such concessions mask a broader goal of “cleaning” up the city to secure the allegiance of a fast consolidating capitalist class that traverses colony and metropole, as well as the line between the state and market. Everywhere that city boosters can be found, are collaborative projects of investments for capital alongside organized abandonment for labor.
And who benefits from this organized abandonment? On the one hand there are the property owners who evade any regulation on their surplus investments in housing. Rather than accepting the limit on how many housing units could be exempted from rent control laws in the 1970s, entrepreneurial upper and middle classes property owners listed family members and even underage children as individual owners. Large extended families could thus be fabricated and deployed to avoid sales caps and garner more and more rent. The propertied classes’ evasion of impingement on one’s presumed right to income was common not only in Egyptian urban real estate, but almost exactly similar to the evasion of agricultural land reforms in rural India. In the 1950s, large-holders, rather than concede to land ceiling laws, found brothers to divide land up with. Second, state and government officials used their relations of patronage with both developers and the precariously sheltered masses all at once to secure their rule, offering development opportunities for one while provisioning informal tolerance for the other. Third, the large development industry and its knowledge-workers demanded all sorts of removals of regulations to harness the full power of capital. In 1980, a US-AID funded study to document the “shortcomings” of rent-control laws was produced by a collaboration amongst the professoriate scattered across MIT and the University of Cairo. Local technocrats implemented the maligning of rent control within large state and non-state bureaucratic machinery. But importantly, a professoriate alliance growing between US universities and those in places like Cairo and Delhi showed the true meaning of all the “global partnerships” institutions of higher education still pursue. The great minds who demand the dismantling of rent control are in fact just down the hall from theorists of postcolonial emancipation.
Urban housing is not categorically distinct from the regimes of commodification and social control that traverse the city and country. Both the ‘izba and manufactured informality exist a “single abandoned region,” a kind of organized abandonment that renders not only prisoners or city-residents shelter insecure, but also makes all those on whom their heavy weight rests economically precarious. It only remains to be seen whether the residents and workers of the singular regions that form the rural-urban continuum can form an alliance against the powers that be. The purpose of such an alliance would be not only to end Egypt’s housing crisis and secure shelter, but confront the power of capital that makes housing a shelter for capital, rather than simply make shelter for shelter itself.
Sheetal Chhabria is Associate Professor of History at Connecticut College. Her first book, Making the Modern Slum: the Power of Capital in Colonial Bombay (University of Washington Press 2019, Global South Asia Series), shows how the well-being of the city–rather than of its people–became an increasingly urgent goal of government, positioning agrarian distress, famished migrants, and the laboring poor as threats to be contained or excluded. Other publications have analyzed the politics of indigeneity, colonial knowledge, and the production of the economy as social scientific fact. Sheetal has published in Comparative Studies in Society and History, the Journal of Urban History (2018) and the Journal of World History.