City Development Regimes in-the-Making. Phronetic Analysis of Governance, Networks and Power in Cairo, 2011-2022

Since the revolutionary uprising of January 2011, Cairo’s inner-city neighbourhoods have undergone rapid spatial transformations. Over the last decade, numerous old housing buildings have been replaced by modern ones, leading to the displacement of residents to the desert cities or newly-constructed neighbourhoods outside the city centre. The most remarkable transformations occurred since early 2018. Notably, these changes have been characterised by a fast implementation rate and a lack of community resistance to displacement. This was also evident in neighbourhoods with a long history of opposition, such as Maspero, the first neighbourhood where such a transformation occurred. The research begins with the proposition that Maspero served as an urban laboratory for the state to experiment with various different governance approaches to develop a pre-revolutionary model of dealing with inner-city neighbourhoods as part of a broader effort to ‘emerge a regime’ that could govern Cairo’s city development. Thus, the primary objective of this study is to understand how the current state sought to establish a post-revolutionary ‘City Development Regime’. The research draws an ethnography of Cairo’s city development regimes, focusing on the dynamics of power, governance, and networks among the community actors. It also examines how the preferences of the community actors have evolved concerning these changes. To achieve this objective, the methodological framework employed in this study involves a qualitative analysis of the Phronesis (narrations and discourses) produced by the community actors. The methodological framework employed in this study can be described as the ‘Network-based Phronetic Planning Research’. The methodology effectively combines power, network, and discourse analyses together and employs the conceptual tools of Argumentative Discourse Analysis (ADA) and the methodological guidelines of Phronetic analyses within a unified methodological framework. The research starts with a contextual analysis of the city development regimes in Egypt since 1952, with reference to housing and urban informality. Subsequently, an analysis of the Maspero case study is conducted, presenting its urban, architectural, and socio-economic profiles. It further, elaborates on the land ownership patterns and stakeholder ‘constellations’, and discusses the attempts that were made to develop the neighbourhood since the 1960s. These preliminary steps lay the foundation for analysing Maspero’s Phronesis within the respective contexts. Phronetic analyses, ‘Network Governance Approach’, and ‘Political Network Analyses’ are employed to convert narrations (stories) into mosaic pieces in order to understand governance and network relationships between the community actors. Finally, power analyses are used to draw the mosaic pieces together to investigate how these relationships (understood in this research as the influence models of power) are produced, reproduced, and maintained under a broader practice of the city development regime. The study makes the following contributions to the field of planning and power research; firstly, the specially-designed Network-Based Phronetic Planning Research is a step in the ‘long trek’ towards developing narrative and power analyses for urban planning research. Secondly, the study contributes to the theoretical understanding of power beyond the notion based on an ‘ability’ to mobilise resources under certain hypothetical conditions – what is called in this study ‘frozen resources’. Thirdly, it contributes to the – still contested in the literature – understanding of the power-to and power-over influence models. Fourthly, the study uncovers the application of certain influence models of ‘dark power’ in the Egyptian context between 2011 and 2022. While some of these models have been discussed previously in relation to existing theories, others are newly conceptualised in this research, albeit still based on the understanding in the former power literature. Furthermore, the power analyses of this research prove that the concept of the ‘capacity-to-govern’ is ‘urban’ and varies in reference to the context in which the regimes emerge. Thus, the City Development Regime concept is introduced in this research rather than other concepts, such as the Urban Regime concept of Clarence Stone, that was developed to investigate the U.S. context. The study offers a systematic analysis that concludes that the extended national modernisation project, namely Cairo 2050, have been instrumentalised in order to pool resources, establish networks, and generate the power necessary to emerge a post-revolutionary City Development Regime. Moreover, the research identifies the state’s adaptation of what may be called, in this research, ‘soft displacement’, as an alternative to forced evictions in Maspero. The study concludes that the current city development regime is not fully stabilised and so may be called, in this study, a ‘regime in-the-Making’. It further concludes that the state’s power is neither superior nor hegemonic. Both civil society and the market still have the potential to practise influence models of power to challenge the state’s power machinery. Finally, this study highlights that the current city development regime represents an evolving version of a well-established state-military regime since 1952. The ‘societal contribution’ can be concluded that it offers knowledge milestones and uncovers ‘inconvenient facts’ about the state’s power machinery that can be used by civil society actors, urban activists and practitioners to a) understand and predict the state’s plans and implementing methods and b) to develop more grounded and less idealistic notions of how to ‘develop a capacity to co-govern’ the urban context.