Egypt’s Housing Crisis: An Interview with Yahia Shawkat
Borderlines Editor Karim Malak sat down with Yahia Shawkat to discuss his new book that deals with the manufacture of the ‘Housing Crisis in Egypt. Shawkat is the co-founder of 10 Tooba: a think tank that is dedicated to thinking about the built environment and its intersection with social issues, politics and the provision of housing.
Karim Malak: Thank you very much for allowing me to interview you and for giving me an opportunity to read an advance copy of your book. This is not your first book though. In 2013 you published Social Justice and the Built Environment: A Map of Egypt when you were still in the human rights world, working in the Egyptian initiative for personal rights (EIPR). Shortly after you left to start your own research center, 10 Tooba, devoted to urban politics or rather the built environment – to borrow a phrase and concept you use. In many ways, Egypt's housing crisis mirrors your own trajectory from architect to housing advocate to author. It problematizes how each approach to the housing crisis in Egypt, from that of architects to World Bank consultants and human rights advocates, are unable to confront the monster that is Egypt's housing crisis or realize the fundamental finding of your book. Egypt's housing crisis is manufactured, something that is also mired in the statistics and also the law that governs housing. Talk to us about the writing process of Egypt's housing crisis and your own intellectual trajectory. How did you go about researching the book and amass that data you present?
Yahia Shawkat: Thanks, Karim, for your interest in the book and for finding the time to interview me about it. I'll start with the last bit of your question. I think also, like the first book, I was interested in trying to find a baseline to housing issues in Egypt. So the first book, Social Justice and the Built Environment, was my exploration of what is actually wrong with housing and everything associated with it. So access to infrastructure, access to land, the governance of cities. And when people called for social justice when we went out in 2011. So what would that mean in terms of implementation? What are we really asking? So the first book tried to find an answer to that. The second one came after a few years working as a housing rights officer and then setting up 10 Tooba and looking more at housing issues specifically. And for me, again, it was trying to answer questions that I couldn't find answers to earlier. So I decided to investigate the issue of housing in Egypt in a broader way. How is it that housing functions in Egypt and how do people access housing? Because there's a very big blind spot when you meet people that work in housing, those advocate for housing rights, and so on. Unfortunately, we believe that housing in Egypt is a market like most Western markets. Whereas actually one of the main things that you find is that most people actually build their housing themselves; self built or buna’ ahaly, as it's called. And this, paradoxically, is the housing that is most demonized by the government and by planning experts and by architects as Ashwaiyat, slums, or informal housing. So this was for me, really what I was trying to find out: where is the norm and how far are we from it?
KM: On that same point, it seems to me that, there are no norms or, there is a completely different set of norms and that it is your interdisciplinary method, not as a housing expert, but your other forms of expertise, that seep in through the book and allow you to detect them; be it the mélange of your ethnographic approach or your architectural approach to looking at the human and the non-human, or your insight as someone who has a background statistics. All of these approaches allowed you to make this very provocative argument that housing, for example, only recently became a market in 1970s Egypt. This has also allowed you to discuss topics far and near and as vast as the post 1956 War housing resettlement of Suez residents, Coptic Christians evicted from their homes and the history of Egyptian hamlets, or of the ‘izba as it was called in Arabic. How easy or difficult was it researching as well as also writing using this interdisciplinary approach?
YS: Just reflecting on your question makes me think of how the writing happened. But I think that the easy way to answer it is rather that I was able to do it because I'm not an academic. I'm not shackled or restricted to working in any of thes chosen disciplines that I mentioned. This has meant that it has given me the freedom to actually investigate something and then use whatever tools are there to find the answer, rather than have to follow a certain groove or a set of rules to get to that answer. But overall, I guess any book is difficult. Some chapters or elements were easier than others. Some I set out and I didn't know what I was going to find. Others the data was already mostly there from my older research. It was just a matter of investigating it, assembling it and making sense of it. One chapter on self built settlements was relatively easy since there was a whole paper trail of laws governing it that went back to 1956 and continued to the present all the way up to 2019. All I had to do was read them and map them onto everything else we already knew. Subsequently that painted the picture that you now see in the book. Others, like the ‘izba chapter or the one on rent, took much more work on their own because I had to dig much harder for information about them.
The ‘Izba chapter started out as the beginning of the self-build chapter, and then became a chapter all on its own because the information that I found gave it a whole story of its own rather being the prelude to another story.
KM: This was the story, namely, that housing was for the longest time something social. You talked a lot about that in your book and yet it's not written elsewhere. On the one hand, you say it was very easy to write the chapter on self built homes. Yet this doesn't figure in the tone of the debate in housing in the literature. People assume that housing is a commodity that has to be purchased. And yet, on the other hand, the chapter that was more difficult to write, the one on ‘izbas and the sociality of housing, was proof that it was difficult to argue that housing was a social thing, that it predated the market. Yet we never hear about this in the literature. Why do you think that is and how hard was it to uncover that story? Is this a deeply buried story, to phrase it in another way?
YS: I guess buried gives it the impression that it's something that happened on purpose. I think it is just ignored from the history of the built environment. This dichotomy between what is urban and what is rural is a reflection of what architects, urbanists and historians are largely interested in: the planned, the urban, rather than the 'organic', or rural, even though as we find out, a significant part of the rural built environment – where the majority of people lived – was planned and controlled. The rural as it so happens was the seed of modern urban planning and housing. The only people that I've found who had written anything meaningful on hamlets in Egypt were political scientists, sociologists or anthropologists. The fact that we never learned about this in five years of architecture school says it all.
KM: I want to follow up on what you were talking about, the tools that allowed you to write the book, but shift gears a little bit and talk instead about the tools of the state. Do you see the tools of the state as being manufactured along with this crisis? You know, the housing crisis is being manufactured. I mean, to put it more crudely, is this something that is helpful for the state to manufacture in the sense that alongside with it it is building itself? So, for example, is the law being extended to certain groups that perhaps the state could not reach before it embarked on its housing project? Is there a new amassing of technical information and statistics also about certain groups and individuals that the state never reached before? Is the power of the police being extended to these new projects as the state starts to intervene in the ‘housing crisis’ and simultaneously begins to control the citizenry?
YS: What we've seen over time is that control, and not just in Egypt, but in many other countries, has moved from a physical form, like in the hamlets of the 19th century which then became workers’ housing colonies in the 20th century, to other technologies of control today. Who can say that people aren't controlled through their debt or their rent? By having to pay your mortgage or your rent every month in a deregulated market with little protection of your rights, you are automatically demobilized from taking part in any politics that might rock that boat. Housing as a fundamental part of your life can also be the key to your control. Having said that there remains, or there is a reemergence of physical and spatial control in mega farming estates in the desert, where the hamlet has been revived as a housing barracks for male agricultural workers who spend weeks, if not months on end there, and only going back to their original villages for holidays every so often. It is a very destabilizing force to actually have to spend most of your time in a place where you do not have any political agency while being linked completely to your work. You are also prevented from engaging in anything that would happen back in your place of origin.
KM: And in your place of origin, presumably, you would have tenure rights that are recognized by the state? How do you read the continued struggle of Egyptians to legalize their tenure in the face of challenges to it by the state, either through using eminent domain or expropriation decrees? Has resistance been successfully historically? And how does it change throughout the hundred and so period of study of your book?
YS: I think we see the sort of the waxing and waning of state power vis-a-vis the use of eminent domain. There have been many plans for slum clearance in Cairo and other cities from the late 19th Century, but most remained unimplemented. In Gehan Selim's book on the Cairene district Bulaq, she unearths many plans dating from the 1920s to raise the district completely, which at its peak in the 1960s was home to two hundred thousand people. But the different regimes that came were only able to nibble on parts of it. During the socialist sixties government buildings and the regime's self image took precedence when it came to land expropriation. For example we see areas of the corniche expropriated to build the radio and television building, known as Maspero, along with that of the National Archives, which actually happen to have been built on former industrial land. But then this changes in the 1970s with the Infitah (market liberalization) and the move of Egypt towards liberal capitalism. And then you start finding hotels coming up on the Corniche on land that is not all expropriated. But then recently the Maspero triangle, also in Bulaq, was just expropriated by the government for real estate investment enterprises. Today, this is the biggest tenure issue, where private property is being sequestered and resold to other private owners, rather than direct public use.
KM: Yet resistance sometimes has been successful. One of the most striking examples you give us is the peculiar and compelling case of the residents of the island of al-Warraq on the Nile. These residents have been under siege by the state since 2017 because of their refusal to comply and implement eminent domain decrees that expropriate their land. What is it about that island that is unique? Is it its materiality? Is it that it's surrounded by a body of water, making it, in my opinion, one of the biggest obstacles to the state's plan for the “gentrification” of the island?
YS: To understand that you have to go back to the pre-2011 Mubarak regime, especially under Gamal Mubarak's tenure of the ruling party’s policy committee. Around 2008 or so a document titled Cairo 2050 was leaked. It showed exorbitant visions of a largely rebuilt Cairo, one image even had a UFO hovering over new skyscrapers. It was very ominous how vast swaths of land that are homes that are home to millions of people, were simply replaced. one of the areas with skyscrapers was al-Warraq Island. What is really concerning is that this horrid vision that seemed to have died with the Mubarak regime, has found new blood under the current regime. In al-Warraq we find the government capitalising on informalized tenure, in this case old agricultural land that was leased by the government to small holders during the socialist regime for decades. After they’d established communities there and the government extended infrastructure and built public schools over the decades, the government turned around and claimed that these are ‘informal’ communities and that people should be evicted. But by issuing expropriation decrees rather than eviction orders, the government has implicitly recognised that it is private property they are revoking from owners, and not informal public property. The residents put up a brave fight, especially in such exceptional circumstances where protest has been mostly criminalised, but I am not sure how much longer they will remain there.
This in many ways mirrors the US's controversial urban renewal schemes of the 1950s through the 1970s, where private land and private homes were taken by force. But then given to private developers. There has been a lot of contention when it comes to the use of eminent domain for non-public use, and it has been deemed unconstitutional in some countries.
KM: The interesting thing here, of course, is that when you say that it is abuse of sequestering private property there is implicit recognition of the social aspect of housing that predates the issuing of private property deeds. These islanders don't have private property in the sense of registered property deeds, but they do have another form of tenure that is perhaps social and not recognized by the market. Do you think this eminent domain is an attempt to take away all aspects of that social type of housing and tenure?
YS: Yes, of course. Eminent domain and the way the law put it, is about revoking that form of tenure. The law assumes that people have registered title. And, of course, the fact that maybe 90 percent of Egyptians have not makes eminent domain a joke in terms of protecting your rights.
In its current scheme, which goes back to 1990, the expropriation law assumes that people have registered title and that only 'apparent' owners are given the order. So if you're not on the roster somewhere or the government register of titles, you don't get the decree and you just find out the day the bulldozer comes to demolish your home. So it is a very unfair and controversial law that can be very easily abused. And yes, I think it's designed knowing that it is very easy for the government to expropriate with very little resistance.
KM: In many ways, it's also a tool of the market. I don't mean a tool only in the sense of amassing capital, extracting money, converting gray or informal tenure into private property and recognized tenure. But I mean, in the sense that if 90 percent of Egyptians don't have a deed to their land and you have all these eminent domain decrees expropriating land, then you ipso facto are taking this great informal tenure, making it a formal part of the market and circulating it. It's something that I think has always been sold as part of the World Bank's project to grant people title deeds, much in the same way. Hernando de Soto tried to do that in Chile and then tried to come to Egypt. What are your thoughts on that?
YS: One of the biggest critiques of De Soto calling informal housing in Egypt 'dead capital', is that it's only dead to international financial organizations that want to capitalize on it. But within Egypt, it's alive and well. People have exchanged property and tenure using customary ways for centuries. In one talk that I attended, I think it was in 2014 where the government invited De Soto to Egypt, he was very clear in saying how his job was to allow capital in Egypt to be exchanged on the international market and for international banks and businesses to be able to make business in Egypt. For that, the rules need to be the same. So it's a way of standardizing this kind of flow of capital between countries. And of course, this is a very big concern for Egyptians because further internationalizing the real estate market will only make housing more unaffordable than it already is. Going back to the use of eminent domain in al-Warraq, and thus turning the residents’ tenure from informalized tenure to formalized tenure would go a long way to putting it on the international market. But I don't think all the way because, as you will find in the book, a lot of the government's own actions are semiformal and do not give property the kind of security that developers and investors seek. So ultimately, I don't think it's a cut and shut formalization.
KM: So in a way, even the government's own promise of formalization is falling short. I hadn't thought of that – very interesting. One of the more striking contributions of your book – to return to your background as an architect – is weaving in the very materiality of the built environment into your analysis. You often demonstrate, for example, that demolition orders do not target the whole building, but its facade, allowing residents to rebuild their domicile at perhaps little cost – requiring just the remodeling of walls, rebuilding their balconies. Yet at the same time, we see the Egyptian state learning and leaving the rubble of demolished buildings at contested sites such as the area behind Bulaq. This shows the level or war of materiality that is ongoing between residents who hold unrecognized tenure in the face of eminent domain decrees. To what extent does this type of material analysis figure in urban studies? What are examples of how it can change our understanding of urban politics?
YS: I think it's very key to urban politics, so – for example – when I visited Ramlat al-Bulaq it was the same as what was happening in Maspero by way of demolition and leaving the rubble on top of the land without removing it. And there was a recent image of El Mex in Alexandria where the rubble of the demolished buildings remained, forcing the people to resettle in government housing. In many ways it's about different levels of sending a message. Leaving the rubble there has the pragmatic effect of making it harder for people to rebuild, if they come back. But I think the biggest deterrent is actually to other people living there. It decays the neighbourhood, as residents have pointed out to me.
KM: So it is a way to get people who have not sold out to developers to sell, for example?
YS: Exactly. It's this kind of pressure, a form of blockbusting, by making the built environment around you as unpleasant as possible. And not only that, it also decreases the real estate value. So if you're going to sell, the place depreciates in value. And whoever is the last strong-holder who is refusing to sell or leave, will be forced to do so at the lowest rates as they will be surrounded by rubble.
KM: For the longest time, we've heard of these things and housing organizations and human rights organizations have alluded to this, you've done some of this work at the EIPR, but we've never heard of it being done in affluent areas such as Zamalek for example. Yet with the digging of the underground metro we’ve seen precisely the same technique being deployed to evict people from certain buildings that have dilapidated in order to make way to build a garage complex. All of this is to bring me to my question. Do you think that we are now coming to the tail end of the use of eminent domain? As you rightfully say, it's now being used at an unbridled scale, but do you think we're coming to the point where it will be deployed against people who have even had and sought recognized tenure at more affluent areas in Cairo?
YS: Well, eminent domain law covers all the bases. It is enshrined in the Constitution where private property is supposed to be upheld and protected by the state and can only be expropriated for so-called public benefit. But the law allows for public benefit to be decided by the Prime Minister, the executive branch, and not at the constitutional or legislative level. This fact takes out any kind of allusion to protected tenure. Ultimately it's a battle of public opinion that might stop eminent domain, or severe resistance by owners or residents to it, or your own contacts and clout with the government. It all depends on who you are, and how important the project is to the government. This brings me to a point that, for me, is one of the conclusions after writing the book: tenure in Egypt has to practiced; to borrow the Arabic term used in legal proceedings I found that tenure had to be tumaras [manifested], by the residents, if you do not enforce tangible control on your property, you will lose it.
KM: In the same vein, your book confronts the question of urban, as well as rural, violence. How is it that state bureaucrats waged a type of benign and impervious form of violence in their planning schemes in order to formulate a model citizen through the model village? How successful is this form of violence as opposed to more material and corporal violence?
YS: Well we see violence and the home evolve over time. From direct bodily violence and control of Hamlet residents, which was transferred to big factory worker housing by the mid 20th Century. Today, violence has turned into different forms, depending on who you are and where you're living. You of course still have direct harm, which the work of Omnia Khalil has shown. Though there is indirect violence through neglect, like the ubiquitous building collapses that claim tens of lives every year, or freak accidents like the collapse of a whole plateau of rock in Dweika about twelve years ago where over 100 people lost their lives. You have the violence of floods flowing through villages and taking the homes away and this happened in Cairo last winter. Then you have the other level of violence, which is psychological. The precariousness of losing your home is an immense stress on residents that may live with it for years because their area's tenure is precarious. Many areas have been slated for demolition for years and nothing happened; an almost indefinite precariousness. I would say the last one has been the most successful, as you say, because it's hard to monitor, and its scale is huge.
KM: Finally, the last question follows on from that very well. What does the future of urban politics in Egypt and housing more broadly in the global south? At the end of your book, you offer a bleak outlook, cautioning the reader that the issue is not something that the state can solve, especially considering that the housing market is a late invention of the 1970s and that the housing crisis, as you argue, is manufactured. You claimed that in juxtaposition with the fact that houses have, for the longest time in Egypt, been self built. Why has this trend been reversed and why does the state feel the need to, it seems to me, to intervene and make the housing crisis even worse?
YS: Well the trend still hasn't been reversed, but I would say it's facing its biggest challenges. When you look at the available data, the housing market in terms of buying and selling is still about 20 percent, a minority share, but it's growing and it's almost doubling. So I think self built housing will still be around for a while.
KM: I mean, one of the very interesting things you had in your book was in the 1950s and 60s, the state somewhat recognized that most houses were self built. It would help create cooperatives or perhaps provide the land and they would continue at least that trend as now at least been given up.
YS: It has you’re right. But self build housing has really adjusted to the liberal market. This idea of eradicating informal buildings is not going to happen; case in point is the new legalization law which allows informal housing to be recognized in exchange for the payment of a rather expensive ‘reconciliation’ fine. The government is trying in all the ways possible to get people to legalize and pay the fine. It is in my opinion one of the most contentious laws that have been recently passed. So I don't think self builders are going to go anywhere soon and maybe in certain areas, maybe in certain cities, it will decrease. But on a whole it is still the future.
It's always been illegalized but there has been a de facto tolerance that just came and went with political events and elections since 1956. Self-building has seen years of demonization, followed by years of embrace via the provision of infrastructure and some services. Many of the areas that were self built since the 1950s are now incorporated into the so-called formal city. Today though, we're in a demonization cycle. Maybe the government is trying to meet an international Sustainable Development Goal in terms of formalizing housing? I don’t know. Maybe it is trying to get some more money today for its coffers? Tomorrow, it may be different.
Yahia Shawkat is an urban and housing researcher who specializes in policy and legislative analysis, data visualization and historical mapping. With a focus on spatial justice and the right to housing he co-founded the research studio 10 Tooba in 2014, where he developed the Built Environment Observatory, an open knowledge portal identifying deprivation, scrutinizing state spending, and advocating equitable urban and housing policies.