THE REBUILDING OF CAIRO

The rebuilding of Cairo was conceived not only as a means of urban reconstruction but as a principle of military? order to be represented and inscribed in people’s lives. The process of modernization was developed through a framing technique (“new order”) that involved surveillance, disciplinary control, and the reconstruction of villages that worked as containers for human beings, objects and functions. People were controlled, collected, and classified according to distinctions and categories to create an artificial, yet believable sense of harmony. The process of restructuring became a never ending, asphyxiating machine that rested upon the idea of seeing the world as an exhibition, a performance with suspicious scenery, producing an effect apart from reality. 

The city and the world were beautifully interpenetrated, creating an imaginary structure (nurtured from real and fictional realms) that forced the viewers/performers to experience their surroundings as a picture or a painting. The space of the real developed into a representational space. In the new dimension of Cairo, there was a continuity of order, modes of government and ways of understanding the social totality. Elite micro-collectives were protected and “gated.” The memory of the city was resurrected through a process of cultural heritization that focused on rescuing the “belle époque’s legacy,” mainly in sites dedicated to tourism. Such sites were considered places for generating income and promoting images of the city as a modern-state, with high quality of life, creativity, safeguarding, commercial architecture, and surveillance to the extent that the mere concept of tourism ended up being seen as a way for cultural preservation.