On a number of rooftops in urban Egypt, lower-middle class families rear animals such as goats, chickens, sheep, rabbits, geese, and turkeys. In the absence of affordable meat protein, some families rear their animals for nutritional sustenance. Based on one-year of ethnographic fieldwork in urban Cairo and Alexandria, this article explores rooftops as a fertile resource for understanding gender, revisiting kin relations, and opening up discussions on multi species relations in Egypt. Primarily, rooftop labor is gendered labor: Whereas females feed and care for all rooftop animals as their children, males nurture and feed rooftop pigeons as their sweethearts. For females, rooftops are extensions of kitchens in which meals begin. For males, on the other hand, rooftops are where they take breaks and suspend their social duties and obligations. Through different male and female trajectories, this article explores how rooftop tasks matter to what interlocutors convey about themselves. In situating rooftop relations within broader gendered trajectories, this article argues that care and nurturance are at the center of what interlocutors communicate about themselves upstairs. Conceived as spaces of nurturance, rooftops give particular shape to all gendered relations in which even a commonly violent male pigeon-rearing practice is remarkably nurturing and nonviolent. Whether through securing food, searching for a loving company, or weeping over a lost love, rooftop care and nurturance help males and females either suspend and/or perfect their gendered social obligations. Rather than mere utopian love, rooftop multispecies relations operate within a revisited “kin contract” in which both humans and animals share reciprocal duties and responsibilities for one another. On another level, this article attempts to carve out space for research on multispecies relations in the region, one which refines and complements the categories that contour the Middle East.

Despite its long history and continued centrality to the urban landscape in many cities, the balcony has largely been the space of the poet, the artist, and the literary critic - but not the urbanist or anthropologist. Simultaneously, while there is great commercial interest in the balcony and new, innovative designs and shapes continuously circulate in the media to cater to varying needs and tastes around the world, little anthropological or sociological attention has been directed to this space and its sociocultural and political significance. This paper focuses on the balcony as an important affective urban space that connects yet separates and facilitates yet limits participation in social life. It connects the here and there, the interior and exterior, the visible and invisible, the protected and exposed. This space of in-betweenness comes in different shapes and sizes and affords the residents of Cairo not only a functional space, but also a socio-cultural medium that materializes various inequalities and circulates multiple meanings. In this paper, I integrate insights from the work of Henri Lefebvre and his notion of rhythmanalysis, the work of Pierre Bourdieu and his discussion of social class, and new materialism scholarship and its focus on relationality and the agency of matter. My goal is to trace how continuities and differences, unity and distinction, and intimacy and distance are produced through the interplay between human and nonhuman, time and space, and objects and people. My analysis shows that, as a space of in-betweens, the balcony generates a sense of doubleness: we can look from the outside and explore what the balcony and its shape, decoration, and style tell us about the inhabitants of the place. We can also look (and hear and smell) from the balcony and explore what this view, this positionality, tells us about the neighborhood and the city at large. Thus, this space can serve as the object of our analysis, a space that embodies and circulates meanings as well as a location, a site that enables us to grasp the nature of social interaction and urban life.

Existing literature on Turkey’s authoritarian neoliberal urban landscape has so far paid attention to urban transformation projects enacted through a top-down mechanism that involves forced evictions and displacement usually met by local resistance on the one hand, and urban transformation projects that generate revenues for the government’s political constituencies and in return popular and economic support for the government on the other. Yet, this research demonstrates what the existing literature cannot adequately account for: How and why local residents and institutions standing against and outside of the government’s redistribution mechanisms consent to urban transformation in their communities. This research displays the mechanisms through which the government’s authoritarian neoliberal politics are leveraged and reproduced by a local community in Istanbul, for whom execution of the urban transformation is an economic mechanism of maintaining elite status by channeling capital investment into the region, while condemnation of the urban transformation is a cultural mechanism of signaling elite status by self-distancing from the government’s authoritarian neoliberal urban policies. Hence, in order to generate a better understanding of how urban inequality is reproduced, this research stresses the need to pay attention to urban actors with more complex relations to authoritarian neoliberal urbanism that can involve tacit approval or covert authorization of such practices, most often as a mechanism for upward mobility.

Sabils, or charitable water fountains, are a key location for exploring vernacular water architecture and investigating the underlying conceptual frameworks that give them life. The city of Cairo, Egypt has a long history of sabils (and sabil-kuttab) that form an integral part of the urban landscape, drawing on religious precedence and enacting both cosmological and everyday ethical notions of reciprocity. Sabils are particularly important in the changing environmental conditions of Cairo and point to the ways in which small-scale water infrastructure can add to the picture of urban water resilience in the context of Climate Change. Materially, the expansion of vernacular sabils is a response to the experience of transversing increasingly hot urban spaces and residents’ lived experience of unfolding climate change. The focus of this research are the four predominant contemporary vernacular forms of charitable water fountains in urban spaces: olla, zeer, coleman, and coldaire. These vernacular forms reshape public and semipublic urban spaces to provide palatable and preferred water free of charge to people as they live their daily lives; shopping, traversing and doing business on Cairo’s streets in the “city inside-out” (Bayat 2012). Ethnically, the establishment of a sabil enables the accumulation of hassnet, or merits accrued with god, in the Islamic tradition and are one of a limited set of posthumous avenues through which souls can shift the balance of good and bad that they take with them to judgement day. As such, people create sabils as one way of building towards a future afterlife for themselves and departed loved ones. This paper will discuss four interrelated aims that residents of the informal area of Ezbet Khairallah articulated for creating a sabil- as attempts to be good, work towards being kind, to manage grief, and to solve practical problems. The paper will additionally outline some of the practices of maintenance and care that sabil-keepers invest in order to offer clean, cool, good smelling water.

Over the past 20 years, Istanbul’s urban peripheries have witnessed a concerted effort of transformation. This effort is epitomized in several mega-infrastructure projects tightly focused around the city’s western periphery – a new bridge across the Bosporus, a mega-airport and a new canal dredged between the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara. Such mega-infrastructure projects gesture to the interplay between the political economy of developmentalism, the affective politics of authoritarianism (Tokdogan 2019), and the environmental politics of extraction, that have collectively come to define the neoliberal fetishization of economic growth in Turkey (Adaman and Akbulut 2020). This paper thinks alongside the artistic, activist and academic interventions that have taken place against such mega-infrastructure projects. I study Between Two Seas, Serkan Taycan’s walking route/artwork that invites participants on a four-day stroll along the city’s frontiers; the work of the activist group Kuzey Ormanları Savunması, and İstanbul: 2023 Sinan Logie and Yoann Morvan’s walking ethnogrpahy of Istanbul’s peripheries. I also analyze mapping efforts and counter-visual tactics employed by artists and activist groups along İstanbul’s urban peripheries, working with mapping, photography and video footage. I contextualize these materials with cultural histories of the specific sites that are scattered around İstanbul’s peripheries, drawing on academic work, archival records, and documentaries. Last, I add to the mix with my own strolls of these sites. Drawing on this material, I engage in a reflection on the movements of hafriyat (used here as something between “extraction” and “debris”) as it mediates and traverses İstanbul’s limits. How does studying geosocial (Yusoff 2017) movements of hafriyat help us understand the superposition of extractive activities on the one hand and spaces of waste, excess, and ruination on the other? What kind of a commoning organizes around hafriayt, that situates itself at the margins of social reproduction? How does hafriyat help us know a city’s limits, not as a border given at the outset but as a relation, individuated through the collective labor of walking, mapping, organizing? To answer these questions, I draw on the broader tradition of Spinozist Marxism (Hardt and Negri 2009; Read 2011), bringing this tradition in conversation with feminist insights from anthropology (Oguz 2020), geography (Yusoff 2018), and media studies (Gabrys 2019). The concept of hafriyat is mobilized to move between the scales of environmentality, political economy, and affect, developing the Spinozist-Marxist focus on the production of subjectivity by investigating the geosocial conditions that subtend subjectivation.