Istanbul’s material and social geography in the early twentieth century was significantly transformed by improvements in public transportation such as extending tramways and the ferryboat service. Transportation facilitated urban integration by linking distant places, and enabled new spatializations of class and ethnicity that overlaid historical geographies of difference in this cosmopolitan city. As an element of urban planning, transportation had symbolic value; modernist urban plans articulated secular, nationalist desires to realize a modern nation. To date, however, scholarship in Middle East Studies has not fully explored the culture of urban movement and the politics of mobility. How is mobility embodied, and what expectations or assumptions inform experiences of mobility? How is mobility inflected by imagined cultural geographies – understandings of people and place - specific to particular cities? This paper brings a critical mobilities paradigm to examining representations of transportation infrastructure and of urban mobility as an experience. I study humorous representations of urban life in satirical newspapers published in Istanbul between 1923-1940 (the long nationalist era) to examine “constellations of mobility”. As Tim Cresswell argues, such constellations combine the fact of physical movement getting from one place to another; the representations of movement that give it shared meaning; and, finally, the experienced and embodied practice of movement. Because public transportation brought diverse people of the city more frequently into contact with one another, the spatial integration of movement across the city demanded a continual retracing of imagined cultural boundaries through normative, regulated urban interaction. Spaces of mobility posed a cultural problem: increasing contact among diverse people required the spatial norms to regulate proper behavior and provide a sense of cultural order amidst a chaotic social and political environment. Satire was an important cultural medium for reproducing urban norms, and Turkish satirical representations of transportation in the nationalist era were woven through with Turkish nationalist ethnic, classed, and gendered discourses as they touched ground in Istanbul. For example, representations of encounters on ferryboats to Kadıköy produce an understanding of that place as an ethnic minority area, and of the attractive modern women, politically traitorous Greek men, and amusing Armenian people there. Boats on the Golden Horn, by contrast, carry poor, traditional Turks. Tramways in Beyoğlu are chaotic, and illuminate the corruption and failures of the municipality. Read together, Turkish satirical representations of urban transportation reveal a deep ambivalence regarding the ethnic and geographic dimensions of national and social modernity.

During the Algerian war for independence, architecture became an active agent, as evidenced in the defining spatial dynamics of the Casbah (especially as they were rendered in iconic visual form in Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film Battle of Algiers) and in the colonial administration’s concerted construction of modern housing estates explicitly designed as means of pacifying, acculturating, and controlling their inhabitants. Challenging prevailing accounts focused primarily on self-contained building projects and their architects’ design intentions, this paper aims to resituate new apartment blocks erected in Algiers as defining nodes within the broader urban landscape as it was radically rewritten by war. In this context, housing functioned simultaneously as target, weapon, and battleground. Architects and colonial authorities seized upon housing as the linchpin of ambitious planning strategies focused on the systematic reordering of the capital and the strategic displacement of inhabitants. Monumental mass housing projects, whether conceived as permanent apartments or temporary “transit” units, were, in their design logic and location, deeply entangled with the unauthorized and adhoc constructions they were supposedly intended to replace, including temporary barracks erected to accommodate forcibly “regrouped” rural residents and bidonvilles, or shantytowns, rapidly proliferating in the capital and on its outskirts. In the later stages of the war, the urban periphery became the site of intense contestation. Battles over housing were defined by multiple borderlands, since the most aggressively publicized new developments in Algiers were rooted in designs first developed in Marseille and, as the war continued, housing forms and policies developed in Algiers were reabsorbed into the city of Marseille. In Algiers, the strategic targeting of housing by planning experts and the ever-present French military apparatus was powerfully challenged by inhabitants, who actively rewrote buildings as battlegrounds. Through ephemeral tactics of graffiti, sound, light, and collective protest, urban spaces––streets, courtyards, walls, rooftops, balconies, and even apartment interiors––became conjectural sites for imagining new conditions of citizenship.

This paper examines the postcolonial construction of citizenship through urban consumption and mobility in Aswan, Egypt, during the Nasser period. Egyptians have since used this construction of citizenship as a claim-making device against the state, during the Sadat era and even in the current uprising against the Mubarak regime. The paper takes as its focus the urban development of Aswan city, rather than that of Cairo and Alexandria, which usually stand for all urban experience in Egypt. Aswan city, previously a remote “security city” or “border city,” changed dramatically in the 1950s and 1960s because of the building of the Aswan High Dam. Aswan city became a site of Cold-War cosmopolitanism and opportunity in the 1960s and attracted a range of domestic and foreign visitors and new residents. Even some of Nasser’s strongest political opponents moved to Aswan to celebrate the dam and its city as a highpoint of nationalist and developmental planning in the early postcolonial period. Although considerable scholarly work exists on the diplomatic, environmental, and labor dimensions of building the High Dam (e.g., Waterbury, 1979; Fahim, 1981; Mitchell, 2002; Bishop, 1997; Mossallam, 2012), the urban history of the town itself remains understudied. The paper begins with historiographical and theoretical discussions about the importance of scholarly focus on provincial cities and debates over the concept of the “frontier.” It argues that consumer goods and retail space, as both material aspects of the urban environment and also of wider circuits of trade/politico-economic processes, helped to construct a new postcolonial citizenship in Egypt. State confidence that the High Dam would raise the popular standard of living created opportunities for some of Aswan’s residents to improve their social status; other residents found their status actually diminished in the growing city. The paper offers evidence for and an analysis of these disparities. More broadly, the paper points to ways in which the development of Cold War and postcolonial cities remains crucially relevant to contemporary Middle Eastern urban experience. The paper’s methodology is historical; its primary sources are press advertisements and articles, published and unpublished government documents, memoirs, literature, and film.

This paper illuminates the confrontation between the moral and ethical force behind heritage preservation as an ‘industry’ and the everyday needs and practices of urban dwellers in Istanbul and Cairo. The main focus of existing scholarship on archeological excavation and heritage preservation in the modern Middle East has focused on the histories/heritage these two fields privilege over others to illuminate struggles and relations between regional human groupings based on ethnicity, religion and class in the wake of the formation of the nation-state (e.g. Abu El-Haj 2001; Mills 2010). In this paper I build on this literature’s insights on the workings of the ‘heritage industry’ to ask not “which histories are being preserved” but “how does the preservation of any heritage as a practice reorder power dynamics and processes of meaning-making in Istanbul and Cairo”. To tackle this question I first examine the historical genealogy of the proliferation and empowerment of what I term the ‘heritage industry’ in the modern Middle East, and the ways in which its ascendancy reorders the city. In particular I focus on the discursive and political-economic dynamics behind the development of a moral force behind the funding and implementation of large-scale heritage preservation projects in the region. I then examine how specific historical preservation projects taking place in contemporary Istanbul and Cairo privilege the preservation of history/heritage over other potential urban planning priorities to redesign contested spaces in the city. In Istanbul I study the heritage preservation projects taking place in the neighborhoods of Fener-Balat and Tarlabaşı and in Cairo I study the projects taking place in Darb El-Ahmar and Gammaliyah neighborhoods. I then rely on ethnographic research I conducted in 2011-2012 in the four neighborhoods to unmask how urban dwellers contest and capitalize upon these heritage preservation projects to empower their vision for everyday life and the place of ‘history’ in their city. I illuminate such urban agency and the assemblage of power in the city through practices including: hiding heritage from interveners, staking claims to historical knowledge, and circulating rumors specific to the lived experience of historical neighborhoods to resist undesirable interventions. In uncovering these agential spatial tactics, I also push scholarship on heritage to move beyond thinking of ‘history’ as defined by the experience of human groupings and emphasize the importance of affective human-nonhuman relations in the making of ‘history’ and meaning in the city.

Centrally located in Cairo’s hectic landscape, strategically positioned near several national and global attractions, a busy hub that allows the mixing of different social groups, and an embodiment of the modern history of the Egyptian capital, Midan al-Tahrir became the site of massive political protests that have shaped the country’s political and social landscape. Between January 25 and February 2011, the square, a space of in-betweens, became the center of national and global attention when millions of Egyptians protested daily until President Mubarak stepped down after 30 years of ruling the country. Drawing on media representations, memories, and ethnographic research, I explore how al-Tahrir during these 18 days became a “heterotopic space” that mediated the here and there, real and imagined, opened and enclosed, concrete and mythical. It became an actualized utopia, a “counter arrangement,” which forcefully articulated an alternative understanding of order, citizenship, and civic responsibility that sharply contrasted with the corruption and injustice the protestors sought to transform. Al-Tahrir shifted from being a site for national liberation into a liberated space that offered a modality for the type of society the protestors aspired to materialize in the future. I argue that it this redefinition of Tahrir that contributed to its effective status as a site of legitimate resistance and a focal point in a moral geography that connected different spaces and social groups in multiple locations into the same political and ethical project. These meanings, however, have shifted over the past three years and the square, its meanings, and uses have become contested by multiple groups. This paper traces these changes and how different groups competed to appropriate, used, and redefine al-Tahrir and its location in the national imagination.