25 - 31 January 2001
Issue No.518
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 25 - 31 January 2001 Issue No.518 |
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Build till you're broke
Living next to a building site provides a certain vantage point in a city as resolute in its ambition to remain forever in process as Cairo. No setting in aspic here, which is what makes the business of restoration such an absurdly touching spectacle. It goes on endlessly, and then some more, this attempt to shore up the architectural fragments that constitute the most visible reminders of a millennial history. And the completed restoration project, if indeed it is ever completed, is complete only by the most temporary standards. You can be sure that before long another batch of problems will come along, to be variously laid at the door of a rising water table, a leaky sewage system, or bureaucratic wrangling between the multitude of government agencies charged with protecting the city's monuments and coping with the inevitable attrition that results from the fact that these same monuments are housed in a city that is also home to 17 million souls. That figure of 17 million, incidentally, give or take a few hundred, is equal to the entire population of Australia, which should put some of the problems in perspective. And then, of course, there are the natural disasters, such as earthquakes. Acts of God, too, take their toll.
Travel by Metro to that newly restored enclave, Old Cairo, and it is impossible to miss the endless procession of buildings sporting rooftops that consist almost entirely of metal rods, sprouting like tenacious weeds from beds of reinforced concrete. These are all new -- or at least newish -- buildings, fully inhabited, perhaps for a decade, sometimes longer, and yet they wait perpetually for the birth of one more storey. Those in the know used to explain the phenomenon by referring to the tax breaks available for buildings in the process of construction, an explanation I never really swallowed. Tax authorities, whatever other faults they have, are unlikely to be fooled by the strategic placement of a few metal rods on the roof. Or else, the more knowledgeable would whisper, it is to accommodate the need, at some future date, to provide apartments for marriageable children, an argument too that does not quite fully explain why the existing householders are willing, for twenty years or more, to live in a building that advertises its semi-complete status to every passer-by.
Tellingly, a great many depictions of Cairo, certainly those dating from the last four centuries, contain this semi-finished quality. The city, evidently, has a long history as a building site. It has resisted any sense of completion for hundreds of years -- so much so that those areas conceived as finished entities, Downtown (certainly by the late 1930s), Heliopolis (for much of its history not really a part of the city) and suburban Maadi, can appear to be something of an anomaly. Far more typical is the sense of a place intent on a constant transformation, a place with boundaries that when they can be fixed, which is not often, remain porous.
The fanfare that accompanies the unveiling of new restoration projects, then, while providing a satisfying amount of publicity for sites that are all too often neglected, should never be taken as the final word. Sooner or later more work will have to be done, a new approach taken.
It is a Sisyphian task, this saving of the past: witness the early 16th century mosque of Sinan Pasha in Bulaq, one of the earliest Ottoman mosques to be built here, proudly bearing a plaque that proclaims it was restored in 1983, but which is now shored up with wooden scaffolding. No whisper, I'm sure, when this particular restoration project was proudly unveiled, that it would have a shelf life of less than two decades.
If it is possible to speak of a building site aesthetic, then it is here, in Cairo, that it is to be found. What else could explain the construction of a ghost city, comprising a glut of housing units spread in endless closed communities along the Desert Road to Alexandria and its various turnoffs hither and thither, than a fetishistic attachment to building for building's sake. Certainly the construction of these, and their northern coast holiday counterparts, made no economic sense. They did, however, make a by no means small contribution to the liquidity crisis that was an endless fixture of last year's headlines.
Building till you're broke, building on the brink of a recession, building in the absence of a market, none of it makes the slightest sense if one chooses to be coldly rational. And Cairo, amazingly given the on-going debate about its housing shortage, boasts more empty housing units than any other comparable city. There should be no housing crisis, given the number of empty housing units, but there is, and the answer in which everyone -- from the banks that finance construction, the architects and construction companies, to those responsible for issuing building permits -- conspires, is to build yet more complexes that no one can afford.
An urban conglomeration that grew up in the shadow of the pyramids -- a city that, in an earlier stage of development, looted the same pyramids to renew itself, that burned itself to the ground to avoid an invasion that didn't happen and then left the site, Fustat, abandoned while it reinvented itself elsewhere -- is hardly likely to remain content for long with what is.
And so I sit on my balcony, overlooking one of the few gardens that remain in Garden City. If I lean over the railings though, and strain to my right, I can see the spectre of a 23-storey building, currently under construction, the noisiest bits of building work occurring exclusively at night, between the hours of midnight and 6 am. No one, so far as I am aware, has registered a complaint against the noise, or even thought of raising a petition. In this quiet residential district we all just sit tight and put up with the sleepless nights, or else experiment with various types of earplugs.
Beyond the garden is another, 20-storey apartment building in a faded shade of chewing gum pink. It has been complete for several years now, but at night it is possible to count the illuminated windows on the fingers of one hand. Perhaps two out of 200 flats are occupied. But that simple fact deters no one.
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