Between the mid-nineteenth century and the end of the twentieth century Egypt’s governments sought to control the rural population through their shelter. The practice first started with the transplantation of so-called ‘model villages’ from Europe in the 1840s, as ‘izbas, built on royal and large landowners’ estates to house agricultural workers. Within a century the hamlets controlled a considerable portion of the population. But that was not enough, and by the 1930s a ‘model village’ movement remerged targeting the rest of the rural population through the (over)ambitious endeavor to reconstruct villages and remold people into ‘model citizens.’ By the 1950s, regime change would undo the private ‘izbas, though evolve the concept of government-built New Villages to resettle tens of thousands of people on desert land reclamation schemes in ‘model societies,’ a concept that survived more or less intact until the end of the 1990s. Today, a resurgence of private agricultural workers’ camps has replaced government provision in an ominous rebirth of the ‘izba. Focusing on a chapter from Egypt’s Housing Crisis: The Shaping of Urban Space (AUC Press, 2020), this talk chronicles how politics, pandemics, social inequity and architecture have shaped shelter in rural Egypt over the last century and a half.
Yahia Shawkat is an urban and housing researcher who specialises in policy analysis, data visualization and historical mapping. He is co-founder of the research studio 10 Tooba and editor of its open knowledge portal The Built Environment Observatory, advocating housing and spatial justice.