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Bridges, Billboards and Kites: Material and affective infrastructures in Cairo’s curfews
Abstract
During the spring of 2020, Cairo responded to the global pandemic by imposing a curfew. During this time, Cairenes took to flying kites over the city’s bridges and rooftops in the few hours before curfew time. Young people from different neighbourhoods would attach their cell phones to the kites to take snapshots of the city from above. By July, kites were banned, seized and their owners were fined. The pretexts for grounding the kites were personal safety as well as national security, making it another one of those irrational things states do for security and to crack down on joy. This short-lived curfew corresponded to multiple global measures that range from total lockdown to slowing of activity. For many, a condition of being fenced in, in lockdown, and enmeshed in relations of containment and emergency posit new questions about urbanity. For others this condition of suspension or “glitch” (after Lauren Berlant) is reminiscent of familiar interruptions and emergencies experienced many times in the past. Indeed, Cairo has only also recently experienced multiple curfews in 2011 and during the violent summer of 2013. The paper draws on affective thinking about the city, specifically Lauren Berlant’s conceptualizing of infrastructures, glitches and attachments, as well as the growing literature on atmospheric and elemental geographies of air. It asks a series of question about what kind of infrastructures of urban living are interrupted or allowed to extend during times of change of rhythms in the city. How do social and material infrastructures extend, suspend and respond to the glitch of a curfew? And, in what ways does this glitch sit within ongoing and ordinary inhabiting the city? In the paper, I argue that addressing these questions allows us also to think through this curfew’s more violent resonances in a post-revolutionary city. Thinking with infrastructure as material and affective also allows us to complicate infrastructure beyond looking at it the purview of the state, on one hand, or the social relations that extend despite of the state on the other-- rather, as ambivalent inhabiting of the city.
Discipline
Geography
Geographic Area
Egypt
Sub Area
Urban Studies