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Since the late 1970s, Western aid agencies, including the US Agency for InternationalDevelopment (AID) and the World Bank, sought to assist the Egyptian government inplanning its capital, Cairo. The aim was to foster an administratively competentEgyptian state able to respond, for example, to informal urbanization of the city’sagricultural periphery by channelling the city’s growth into planned and serviced desertsites. However, these initiatives were almost entirely unsuccessful. Egyptian officialsrejected engagement with the informal urbanization process. The projects becameenmeshed in bureaucratic struggles over control of valuable state desert land. Thisarticle examines these failed planning exercises, first, in order to assess what theyindicate about Egypt’s authoritarian dispensation of power, in place since 1952 butchallenged in the February 2011 overthrow of President Husni Mubarak. It concludesthat project failure is diagnostic of the regime’s exclusionary nature and the presence ofautonomous centres of power such as the Egyptian military. Secondly, the article looksat how this political order shaped Cairo’s largely uncontrolled growth by constrainingthe Egyptian state’s capacity to manage it. Thus, urban planning in Cairo reveals howauthoritarian power relations have been inscribed upon Egyptian social space.
