MER Article Environmental Conditions in Cairo In a 1994 assesment of environmental health risks prepared for the US Agency for International Development (USAID), American and Egyptian experts identified three leading environmental health risks for residents of Cairo: particulate matter air pollution, lead and microbiological diseases from envir Sally Ethelston • 3 min read
MER Article Who's to Blame? On the question of who or what should be blamed for endangering the environment (multiple answers possible), the largest number (72.1 percent) thought that “people in general” were at fault. Another sizable minority (35.7 percent) blamed factories, while 15.1 percent blamed “cars and transportation,” and 9.4 Sohair Mehanna, Nicholas Hopkins • 1 min read
MER Article Relocation and the Use of Urban Space in Cairo Sahar was only ten years old when her family, along with almost 5,000 Egyptian working-class families, was relocated from her neighborhood in the center of Cairo to a public housing project in al-Zawiya al-Hamra, in northern Cairo. The relocation project was part of Sadat’s open-door policy (infitah Farha Ghannam • 7 min read
MER Article Pollution, Popular Perceptions and Grassroots Environmental Activism An increase in media attention paid to environmental pollution, and a 1994 USAID report on environmental risk assessment in Cairo, [1] reflect and have engendered a growing concern for the environment in Cairo. While grassroots political action is rare, [2] there is an awareness among the general po Sohair Mehanna, Nicholas Hopkins • 9 min read
MER Article Giza Spaces “Itfaddalu ma‘ana,” Umm Ibrahim shouts across the alley to the next roof, “please eat with us.” “Shukran, Allah yikhalliki,” promptly comes the answer from Abu Samia and his wife, “thank you, may God keep you.” It is a sunny Friday afternoon in December, and both families have decided to eat lunch o Petra Kuppinger • 7 min read
MER Article An Expensive Toy Flanked by the Cairo citadel and the Nile on its eastern and western sides, respectively, Sayyida Zaynab, a neglected neighborhood, is but a stone’s throw away from the city center. Inhabited by poor families, its old buildings are rapidly deteriorating, while new owners haphazardly add extra rooms and extensions Fayza Hassan • 3 min read
MER Article Urban Planning and Growth in Cairo Descriptions of Cairo are dominated typically by the stark imagery of an extremely concentrated population mass near asphyxiation. From this perspective, one need look no further than its inhabited rooftops, its streets choked with traffic and pollution and its crowded cemeteries, where the living r Eric Denis • 12 min read
MER Article Facts and Figures on Cairo Despite the attention focused on the problems of cities around the world -- most recently at the Habitat II Conference in Istanbul -- surprisingly little comparable data on urban centers are available, as was found by the World Resources Institute in preparing their 1996-1997 World Resources report. Population figures, for example, Sally Ethelston • 2 min read
MER Article Cairo's Poor The proliferation of more than 100 squatter communities with some 6 million inhabitants signifies only one, but perhaps the starkest, component of the growing socioeconomic disparity [1] in Cairo since Sadat’s infitah (“opening up” or economic liberalization) in 1974 and the more recent implementation of the IMF’s structural Asef Bayat • 12 min read
MER Article Al Miskin International/Tainted Love What is up in Egypt? In Cairo, Mustafa Bakri, was deposed as editor-in-chief of al-Ahrar following the failure of the mutiny he led in the halls of the Liberal Party to depose of its leader, Mustafa Kamal Murad. Bakri stormed the party headquarters with 600 armed followers and had himself voted pres Al Miskin • 3 min read
MER Article Nasrallah, On Boys, Girls and the Veil Yousry Nasrallah’s new documentary film, On Boys, Girls and the Veil, touches on a paradoxical aspect of Egyptian filmmaking. Despite the ubiquitous hijab -- the neo-Islamic “veil” -- in Egyptian life, covered women are quite rare in the cinema. The reason for this is that both filmmakers and Islami Walter Armbrust • 6 min read
MER Article Copts in the "Egyptian Fabric" To talk about Egyptian Christians as a “minority” is to open a can of worms. The sensitivity of the relationship between Egyptian Muslims and Christians was evident in 1994 when a conference on minorities in the Middle East, supposed to be held in Cairo, included the Copts of Egypt on its agenda. [1 Karim El-Gawhary • 6 min read
