This presentation discusses issues related to the cultural perceptions of space and privacy on the Arabian Peninsula. Most of the studies on this topic emphasize how unrelated men and women are separated in commercial and municipal spaces in the countries making up the Gulf Cooperation Council. Based on fifteen years of experience and research in southern Oman, I will focus on how men and women navigate the same or nearby public spaces at the same time. Using examples from shops, grocery stores, universities, restaurants, cafes, airports and hospitals I will discuss who moves where according to cultural rules about position and proximity. This presentation will examine how the interior and exterior of buildings, as well as public spaces such as walking paths and picnic areas, are designed to promote both ease of movement and privacy. This material environment is then traveled through following set communal understandings of placement. Unlike Saudi Arabia’s forced gender segregation, Oman relies on individuals choosing to adhere to societal norms instead of top-down government restrictions. For example, an initiative at one bank to have a “women’s only” teller fizzled out (as did a scheme to give women customers pink bank cards), but customers and clerks continue to follow strict, unwritten rules about who stands where. Another example is universities. In some Gulf countries, there are separate campuses for men and women. Omani institutions of higher learning have only one campus yet there are both physical (having two sets of doors for classrooms) and mental (where students choose to sit) barriers to gender-mixing. Using theories and insights from the fields of architecture, architectural sociology, anthropology, Islamic studies, and urban studies I will explain how privacy is maintained in public zones. I will specifically address the common trope of how clothing enhances privacy, a truism that is not always true. This work is based on research for over a decade with one group of tribes in southern Oman.

No men live in the villages of Al-Samaha (Egypt) and Jinwar (Syria). Conceived by women for other (abused, abandoned, or widowed) women; for girls escaping violence and forced marriages; victims of sexism and patriarchal oppression; refugees of war and tyrannical governments, these insurgent communities as acts of resistance, a radical moment in the (post)colonial architectural imagination. This paper tells the story of how they were conceived; how they evolved; how they are managed; how they survived; the impact they have had on their contexts. The idea of a ‘women’s space’ as a haven of support, sisterhood and resistance makes frequent appearance in literature, and (more recently) in architectural theory. Writers such as Joanna Russ and Ursula Le Guin long imagined a future of “classless, ecology-minded, politically and socially ungoverned” utopias (Russ, 1995), where women break free from all domestic and social confinements, and “all the maps change.” (Le Guin, 1986). Umoja, Al-Samaha and Jinwar go a step further. They are the inaugural sites of a radical remapping of (socio-architectural) traditions in post-colonial Africa and the Middle East. In writing about these radical experiments, I maintain a critical consciousness; a vigilance in employing the instruments of historical, humanistic and cultural construction from which the modern struggle for women’s rights has frequently been victim. Focusing on the telling detail rather than detailed telling, my aim will be to bring the experiences of Al-Samaha and Jnwar to bear on our understanding of women’s (our) rights and struggles.

One of the primary theoretical contributions of settler colonial studies is that settler colonialism is part of a structure that persists despite formal decolonization or national independence. This paper lingers on the role of the built environment as a source of reproduction and architectural preservation as a practice through which this settler colonial structure is maintained by focusing on local architectural preservation practice in Casablanca. Despite the formal independence of Morocco in 1956, this paper argues that architectural preservation practice serves as mode through which to reinforce the structure of settler society. By drawing on semi-structured interviews and participant observation, this paper maps what I refer to as local preservationist moves to avoidance, an adaptation of Tuck and Yang’s “settler moves to avoidance”. By preservationist moves to avoidance, I mean the practices that simultaneously legitimate preservation interventions and remake the histories of settler colonialism by reframing the histories of the built environment as histories of the nation state and modernist architecture. The constitutive role of preservation with the knowledge production of both the nation state and modernist architecture in Casablanca prompts questions on the entanglement of settler colonialism, knowledge production, and the built environment.

This paper investigates the politics of urban mobility and infrastructure in post-1970s Cairo. It takes the case of the Greater Cairo Ring Road, constructed during Egypt’s moment of economic liberalization beginning in 1974 (Infitah). The Ring Road was planned to alleviate urban crowdedness, accelerate desert development, and contain urban encroachment on the Nile Delta’s dwindling fertile land. Yet, it facilitated an unprecedented erosion of land fit for agriculture and led to the emergence of Cairo’s peri-urban belt and border: the spatially and geographically peripheral rural-urban communities that surround the city and supply the majority of its waged labor. Thus, as it transformed mobility in the city, it also transformed its geographical, social, and ecological parameters. In this paper, I ask two interrelated questions. Firstly, how did the Ring Road reconfigure relations of mobility and space in Cairo and its peripheries? Secondly, how are uneven relations of mobility (of power) expressed in, and negotiated through, the urban geography of the Ring Road? I draw on policy documents, press archives, and interviews with urban planners, officials, and private developers to construct a political and urban history of the Ring Road. By studying how planning and constructing the Road articulated and re-configured relations of space, capital, and coercion in Cairo and its peripheries, I analyze how and why mobility in the city was planned and for whom. I am specifically interested in how mobility functions as a political technology of power and rule in post-Infitah Egypt (Kotef 2015). Indeed, while the reconfiguration of spatial relations in Cairo as a result of economic liberalization has been thoroughly documented and analyzed (Piffero 2017; Sims 2014; Shawkat 2020), relations of mobility remain understudied. Building on this analysis, I argue that the Road was planned not only as an infrastructure to facilitate the flow of global capital and to cater to a growing automobile economy (Dodson 2017; Barak 2019; Taha 2002), but also as a state effort to govern and discipline the production of urban space and movement(s) in the city and its rural and desert peripheries. This paper builds on literature in biopolitics, the anthropology of infrastructure, and political economy. It aims to enrich our understanding of the many ways that mobility and infrastructure—as products of urban plans, state power, and capital flows—play an integral role in controlling, containing, and disciplining populations across Egypt and the Middle East.

Access to certain treatments related to sexuality and reproduction, such as seeking for abortion or antirretroviral (ARV) treatment for HIV, through certain venues (such as hospitals and pharmacies) does not flow easily through the Cairo’s urban grid. Hospitals, laboratories and pharmacies become infrastructural intermediaries that “authorize” distribution of prescriptions, circulation of medication, and provision of healthcare. However, urban health infrastructures become disciplinary forces over free and autonomous embodiments of sexuality and reproduction, inhabited by healthcare providers that replicate moral panics and heteronormative systems of values around the body. I propose to talk about an urban epidemiological approach of Cairo, where the location, construction and organization of those buildings, streets and centers impact vulnerability not only to HIV infection, treatment and mortality, but also to induced abortion, maternal mortality and abortion care, as well as to safe hormone treatment, and safe gender reassignment surgery. When we move to understanding the urban epidemiology of healthcare infrastructure, we can consider how the private sector and informal circulations of medication have been taking over in the last couple of years on the supply of medication and healthcare that public hospitals and its pharmacies won’t provide. Similarly, it makes more evident the class, gender and racial dimensions outside a public service that patients can allegedly hold accountable. Following Abourahme’s (2015) ethnography of concrete, and Hamdy’s (2012) ethnography of biotechnologies, I map different healthcare centers and pharmacies in multiple neighborhoods in Cairo that have become more securitized post-2011. I base my analysis on field work I’ve conducted from 2016 to 2018 through different durations. I compliment it with participant observation of hospitals, pharmacies and other spaces in the city where medical services and pills circulate. Finally, I compare and contrast these sources with archival analysis of the official reports by the National AIDS Committee Officer since 2011, UNFPA Egypt figures, and chronicles or reports from media outlets and other researchers’ ethnographies.