Ismail, Shehab (Author)
Elshakry, Marwa S. (Advisor)
This dissertation traces the transition of colonial Cairo from a marginal space to the British regime to an object of colonial governance and the site of technological and social intervention. It examines what caused this transition, how it shaped the spatial and social landscape of a booming metropolis, and how these developments produced and sustained opportunities, contradictions, and spaces for contestation and opposition. This dissertation challenges the current literature on British Cairo, which treats the colonial era (1882-1922) as a homogeneous expression of the regime’s retreat and of capital-led growth, by providing an account of the regime’s program of infrastructural reorganization and schemes of public housing and town planning. Because the literature largely ignores this history, it does not detect the colonial regime’s increasing discomfort at capital-led urban development or the regime’s late attempt to refashion its relation to capital and to take charge of Cairo’s future growth. The first part of this dissertation examines the pressures and crises that led to this transition. A protracted biological crisis that saw waves of cholera epidemics and high death rates underscored the need for constructing and improving infrastructures of sanitation and service provision. And capital’s forceful entry into the city led to a speculative property bubble, a housing crisis, and uncoordinated urban expansion, which made the disjointed framework of urban administration and the absence of regulations all the more evident. These crises made the colonial regime liable to critiques from elites, proponents, and certainly from the nascent anticolonial movement. The second part examines projects of sanitation and schemes of housing and town planning that the regime turned to since the beginning of the twentieth century and that embodied a changing approach to the city. During the latter two decades of the occupation, the colonial regime invested in upgrading Cairo’s water supply and constructing the city’s first sewage network. This dissertation traces not only how these infrastructural technologies worked but also how they became sites of contestation over power and knowledge. It examines the reception of infrastructures by urban dwellers across the social spectrum, the techno-social debates they occasioned among expert managers and designers, including above all engineers and public hygienists, and the social visions they embodied. Finally, the regime broached projects of public housing and town planning that constituted, in one sense, the culmination of a program of infrastructural reorganization, and in another, an attempt to give coherence to urban governance and assume leadership over the city’s development. By offering material improvement, these schemes were also meant to neutralize political discontent, which nonetheless erupted with the 1919 revolution.
...More
Article
Karimkhanzand, Mostafa;
(2013)
Iranian Medicine's Encounter with the Cholera and Plague Epidemics in Qajar Iran in the 19th Century
(/isis/citation/CBB001510311/)
Article
Chiffoleau, Sylvia;
(2013)
Entre bienfaisance, contrôle des populations et agenda international: la politique sanitaire du mandat français en Syrie et au Liban
(/isis/citation/CBB001213546/)
Book
Guido Zucconi;
(2022)
La città degli igienisti. Riforme e utopie sanitarie nell’Italia umbertina
(/isis/citation/CBB086521160/)
Book
Mills, Dennis;
(2015)
Effluence and Influence: Public Health, Sewers & Politics in Lincoln 1848-50
(/isis/citation/CBB314462408/)
Thesis
Zhou, Fang;
(2010)
The Wheels That Transformed the City: The Historical Development of Public Transportation Systems in Shanghai, 1843--1937
(/isis/citation/CBB001567173/)
Article
Pemberton, Rita;
(2012)
Dirt, Disease and Death: Control, Resistance and Change in the Post-Emancipation Caribbean
(/isis/citation/CBB001420620/)
Thesis
Christopher Steven Kindell;
(2019)
The Sanitary Sieve: Public Health, Infectious Diseases, and the Urbanization of Honolulu, c. 1850–1914
(/isis/citation/CBB673158334/)
Book
Michael Zeheter;
(2016)
Epidemics, Empire, and Environments: Cholera in Madras and Quebec City, 1818–1910
(/isis/citation/CBB332451344/)
Book
Espinosa, Mariola;
(2009)
Epidemic Invasions: Yellow Fever and the Limits of Cuban Independence, 1878--1930
(/isis/citation/CBB001020061/)
Book
Jacob Doherty;
(2021)
Waste Worlds: Inhabiting Kampala's Infrastructures of Disposability
(/isis/citation/CBB866747879/)
Article
Shehab Ismail;
(2023)
The Engineer as Economist: Sewers and the Making of the Water Consumer in Colonial Cairo, 1890
(/isis/citation/CBB727906214/)
Book
Moira M. W. Chan-Yeung;
(2018)
A Medical History of Hong Kong: 1842–1941
(/isis/citation/CBB803413564/)
Book
Cohen, William A.;
Johnson, Ryan;
(2005)
Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life
(/isis/citation/CBB000830265/)
Book
Mari K. Webel;
(2019)
The Politics of Disease Control: Sleeping Sickness in Eastern Africa, 1890–1920
(/isis/citation/CBB175864050/)
Book
Smith, Carl S;
(2013)
City Water, City Life: Water and the Infrastructure of Ideas in Urbanizing Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago
(/isis/citation/CBB001420308/)
Article
Armiero, Marco;
(2011)
Enclosing the Sea: Remaking Work and Leisure Spaces on the Naples Waterfront, 1870--1900
(/isis/citation/CBB001212863/)
Article
Brittany Merritt;
(2017)
Insecurities of Empire: Struggles over health reform in interwar Barbados
(/isis/citation/CBB808225876/)
Chapter
Chu, Cecilia;
(2013)
Combating Nuisance: Sanitation, Regulation, and the Politics of Property in Colonial Hong Kong
(/isis/citation/CBB001214652/)
Book
Jacob Steere-Williams;
(2020)
The Filth Disease: Typhoid Fever and the Practices of Epidemiology in Victorian England
(/isis/citation/CBB965282260/)
Article
Martín, Abel Fernando Martínez;
Abril, Fred Gustavo Manrique;
Álvarez, Bernardo Francisco Meléndez;
(2007)
La pandemia de gripa de 1918 en Bogotá
(/isis/citation/CBB000831359/)
Be the first to comment!