Cairo Contested: Governance, Urban Space, and Global Modernity

This cross-disciplinary, ethnographic, contextualized, and empirical volume explores the meaning and significance of urban space, and maps the spatial inscription of power on the mega-city of Cairo. Suspicious of collective life and averse to power-sharing, Egyptian governance structures weaken but do not stop the public's role in the remaking of their city.
What happens to a city where neo-liberalism has scaled back public services and encouraged the privatization of public goods, while the vast majority cannot afford the effects of such policies? Who wins and loses in the march to the modern and the global as the government transforms urban spaces and markets in the name of growth, security, tourism, and modernity? How do Cairenes struggle with an ambiguous and vulnerable legal and bureaucratic environment when legality is a privilege affordable only to the few or the connected?
This companion volume to Cairo Cosmopolitan (2006) further develops the central insights of the Cairo School of Urban Studies.
Contributors: Khaled Adham, Jennifer Bell, Agnes Deboulet, Taline Djerdjerian, W. J. Dorman, Benedicte Florin, Joerg Gertel, Katarzyna Grabska, Patrick Haenni, Mozn Hassan, Samia Mehrez, Sarah Ben Nefissa, Agnieszka Paczynska, Samuli Schielke, Mulki Al-Sharmani, Diane Singerman, Hania Sobhy, and Malika Zeghal. Contents: Introduction 'Contesting Myths, Critiquing Cosmopolitanism, and Creating the Cairo School of Urban Studies' by Diane Singerman and Paul Amar
Cairo: The City Cosmopolitan
Cairo Consumer and Investor Geographies
Cairo Heritage and Touristic Globalization
Cairo Subcultures and Media Contestation
Cairo Celebratory Spaces and Vernacular World-Crossing
Afterword
Whose Cairo?