Politics in the Crevices: Urban Transformation and (Un)Making Markets in Cairo and Istanbul

The demise of the welfare state did not sound the death knell for redistribution. Nor has neoliberal 'Big Capital' bulldozed the city into unadulterated landscapes of accumulation. Traveling to the minute, hidden, invisible, intimate and subterranean crevices of the city, we explore a quiet, subtle yet intense battle for housing in a neoliberalizing Istanbul and Cairo. Based on material from El-Kazaz’s book Politics in the Crevices, which deployed a multi-sited ethnography of six central neighborhoods undergoing rapid transformation in the two cities, the lecture will expose an array of protagonists mobilizing the subtle practices of urban planning and design to secure affordable housing on the one hand and corner luxury real estate on the other. Careful urban design was expected to engineer what is coined in the book as “particularistic value” that would render property more lucrative for some dwellers over others in ways that manipulate the workings of “freely traded” real estate markets. Recuperating a thriving if quiet struggle over redistribution, the lecture will explore how that struggle had shifted away from familiar extra-market political arenas to machinations that operate from within “the market” as a practice and logic. Ultimately, the enactment of redistributive politics through the subtle practices of urban design and planning displaces weighty political struggles onto contests over intimate and private city crevices that are difficult to recuperate as a polity; breeding a festering, suspicious and fracturing polity. The lecture concludes by drawing linkages between the machinations of neoliberal politics and a polarizing othering populist politics that has since domineered political life in both Egypt and Turkey.