Egypt's Housing Crisis: The Shaping of Urban Space

by Yahia Shawkat

Along with football and religion, housing is a fundamental cornerstone of Egyptian life: it can make or break marriage proposals, invigorate or slow down the economy, and popularize or embarrass a ruler. Housing is political. Almost every Egyptian ruler over the last eighty years has directly associated himself with at least one large-scale housing project. It is also big business, with Egypt currently the world leader in per capita housing production, building at almost double China's rate, and creating a housing surplus that counts in the millions of units.
Despite this, Egypt has been in the grip of a housing crisis for almost eight decades. From the 1940s onward, officials deployed a number of policies to create adequate housing for the country's growing population. By the 1970s, housing production had outstripped population growth, but today half of Egypt's one hundred million people cannot afford a decent home. Yahia Shawkat argues that wars, mass displacement, and rural-urban migration played a part in creating the problem early on, but that neoliberal deregulation, crony capitalism and corruption, and neglectful planning have made things steadily worse ever since. In the final analysis he asks, is affordable housing for all really that hard to achieve?

Genres: Architecture

288 pages, Hardcover

Published September 1, 2020

About the author

Yahia Shawkat is an urban and housing researcher who specialises 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, scrutinising state spending, and advocating equitable urban and housing policies.

As housing rights officer at EIPR (2013-2015), Yahia focused on commodification-based eviction, the deadly building collapse phenomenon and produced a series of housing policy notes on the exclusionary social housing programme. In 2012, he directed the Right to Housing Initiative producing an infographic book and 10 short documentaries.

Yahia is a regular guest lecturer, and his work has been published in Egypte Monde Arabe and Architecture_MPS, while he has contributed to Mada Masr, Open Democracy, Heinrich Boell, MEI, among others. Yahia has consulted on housing policy for the watchdog BIC, as well as UN-Habitat and UNHCR.

He received the 2018 IHS AI Urban Professional Award (Runner up), and has been the 2010 recipient of the National Award for Architecture. In 2008 Yahia curated the Egyptian Pavillion at the 11th Venice Architecture Biennale. He holds a BSc in Architecture from Cairo University.

Reviews

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book will be one of the most beneficial references for all researchers interested in studying housing in Egypt. It unpacks in a detailed method the series of regimes, events and policies that has lead the housing scene in Egypt, for lack of a better word, to become completely and utterly messed up! I was always curious to know the reasons behind the wide spread of informality in Egypt, readings this book has given me a better understanding of the complex layers of socio-economic and political influences that shaped what the author phrased as "Manufactured Informality".
The author managed to sequence and write the chapters in a really smooth and intriguing way, it was almost like you're reading a dystopian fictional story that is, unfortunately, accurately descriptive of our reality in Egypt. I'll definitely recommend this book to my colleagues and students.