It is fair to say that contemporary Egypt is obsessed with projects (mashari‘), large and small. On the one hand, men from all social backgrounds are on the hunt for the right project: a business venture or investment that could generate monetary and non-monetary values for family, friends and community. On the other, the current military-dominated government invests enormous amount of capital and prestige in spectacular mega projects: land reclamations, fish farms, industrial zones, an expanded Suez Canal and a New Administrative Capital in the desert 45 km east of Cairo (see Sims, 2018). In this paper – which combines ethnographic material from ongoing fieldwork on micro-projects in Cairo’s grassroots football industry with experimental cartographic representations of a handful of small and large Egyptian projects – I suggest that projects, regardless of scale, could be analysed generatively as bundles of connections and separations. The way in which a project links up with resources, actors and institutions elsewhere – through geography, infrastructures, finance and personal connections – does not only give the project its meaning, value and ‘relative location’ (Green, 2016). Such links also imbue the project with particular temporalities and timescales. My ethnography identifies three notions of time within three different spatial constellations: in Gamal Abdel Nasser’s decision to build the High Dam in Aswan with Egyptian labour and Soviet instead of Western capital, a set-up that fostered specific national and trans-continental futures; in the repetitive cycles of start, stall and stop common in Egyptian micro projects, a result of break-downs of precious yet fragile human and material links; and in feelings of rootedness to kin and to community, a consequence of Egyptian projects’ tendency to mobilise extensive family networks and re-activate historical legacies in urban space. In conclusion, the paper zooms out from my empirical material from Egypt to make a general-methodological argument. Creative combinations of ethnography and cartography, I suggest, are especially suitable to elucidate interrelationships between spatial connections and temporal inflections. After all, while mappings of disconnections and connections provide snapshot-like visualisations of relative locations, narratives documented through long-term ethnography are unmatched in rendering nuances of longitudinal temporal experience. The material presented in this paper demonstrates the usefulness of bringing these two dimensions together.

Within the historical quarters of Istanbul, in the district of Eminonu, lies the Istanbul Grand Bazaar. With its foundation nearly coinciding with the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks in the 15th century, the Istanbul Grand Bazaar stands as the oldest and largest covered market in the world. With over 3000 shops selling a wide variety of goods, the commerce of carpets and kilims remains one of the Bazaar's oldest and most iconic trades. The remarkable resilience of this trade, a core activity in the Bazaar, encapsulates traces of the multiple challenges faced by Turkey – and the region – across the centuries. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research conducted among carpet sellers within the Istanbul Grand Bazaar, and on radical cartography, this paper focuses on the everyday dimension of the negotiation of rugs whose trajectories professedly start in remote locations of Anatolia and, mediated by carpet sellers in the Bazaar, find their way into homes, collections, and galleries all over the world. Engaging with the notion of ‘relative location’ (Green, 2016), the paper explores how carpet sellers, their respective customers, and formal and informal regulations around this trade resort to selectively (dis)connecting Turkey from temporalities and spaces/contexts as a strategy to calibrate the value of the rugs being sold. In other words, while a rug derives its economic value from its temporal (for instance, age) and spatial (dis)connections (for instance, place of origin), that economic value is always enabled by the politics of evoking, concealing or blurring boundaries and borders, i.e. by the scaling up or down of proximity and distance between Turkey and other contexts. Finally, the paper suggests that combined efforts between cartographic and ethnographic methods applied to an analysis of temporal-spatialities – in this case, grounded in the Bazaar’s carpet trade - stand as a productive platform from where to recast ‘location’ as a power-inflected category and ‘locating’, as a power-wielding act.

Politics of waste and waste management have been hotly contested topics in Lebanon since the trash crisis of 2015, with subsequent social movements connecting the mismanagement of waste to a mismanagement of the Lebanese state. Narratives on the circulation of waste abound in the city. One prominent example is the closed loop of solid waste circulating from coastal landfills to the sea, from the sea to the shore, and from the shore to the landfills. In this paper I look at the circulation of solid waste and sewage on the Beirut littoral. The paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork among Beirutis from different backgrounds on the topic of conflicts about littoral public space carried out in years 2015 and 2018. In Beirut, a city flanked north and south by allegedly mismanaged coastal landfills, the paper zooms in on a public beach in the city, flanked north and south by controversial sewage exhausts. In this paper I examine how flows of sewage and solid waste have been discussed, managed, engaged, and made sense of on the coastline of the Lebanese capital. I suggest that the spatial configuration of waste and the ways different people engage with it can be conceptualized as a convergence of spatial trajectories and changing temporalities. By this I mean that the actual flows of waste are tied to different expectations and understandings of futures and pasts. Connecting my ethnographic material to a collaborative radical cartographic endeavour that maps the circulation of waste and ensuing sites of resistance and spatial reconfigurations, I bring forth a novel understanding of how blockages and redirections, and connections and disconnections, in the circulation of waste unfold in a process of spatial and temporal reconfiguration. In conclusion, the paper argues that connecting ethnography and radical cartography can help us understand how perceived non-actualization of planned municipal waste-management projects in Beirut amount to a generalized sense of a deferral of future in relation to temporalities of waste. This perpetual postponement typical of the waste situation can be understood as a temporal alignment in understanding the Lebanese state - although such perceptions of eternal deferral are always subject to conflicting interpretations.

Torn between science, politics and art, cartography has long been an object of dispute. While a map is based on data that has to be handled scientifically, it also draws on forms, colors and movements, i.e. “artistic devices”. The same material has to be handled scientifically but also aesthetically and artistically, all at the same time. When brought together, these elements produce a vision of the world as it is seen by the cartographer. The result is an image which represents a specific location, i.e. the way the cartographer sees, understands and interprets the world. In this respect, a map is fundamentally a political object; there is no such thing as an innocent map. Precisely because of the complexity of establishing what a map is and stands for, disputes about mapping are bound to remain unsolved. Still, they offer important clues as to how maps may be employed in disciplines where representations of the world and of people’s experiences are inflected by subjectivity and power, domination and resistance. In the context of the social sciences, this is precisely what makes the use of maps and mapping processes – here understood as “experimental” or “radical” cartography – simultaneously complex and controversial but also insightful, generative and potentially liberating: perspectives and (dis)connections that would remain invisible using other methodological approaches are rendered legible by maps, and especially so when combined with ethnographic material based on long-term fieldwork. Taking its cues from these insights, this paper reflects on collaborative work with maps and with ethnography in three Middle Eastern metropolises: Cairo, Beirut and Istanbul. It argues that neither orthodox cartographic approaches nor ethnography alone could do justice to the particular entanglements of space, multiple temporalities and politics under consideration in these sites. Instead, the paper demonstrates how the nuances of these contexts could be teased out and made legible from a radical cartography point of view. Besides reflecting on the challenges and limitations of this methodological innovation, the paper will provide an analysis of how the “operationability” of particular scales in each context might be tackled. How do we represent – in text and/or in maps – a multilayered phenomenon, including both static patterns and dynamic time-bound movements, spatially as well as temporally?