Cairo

Urban Studies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Ben Prestel
Keyword(s):  
Urban Politics ◽  
The State ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Comprehensive Overview ◽  
Political Transitions ◽  
Egyptian Revolution ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
Sexuality And Religion ◽  
Egyptian Government ◽  
The City

Much like the vibrant city on the Nile itself, scholarship on Cairo has seen many changes in recent years. The continued growth of the Egyptian capital, the transformation of its cityscape, as well as the political transitions of the last decade have contributed to shifting depictions of the city. Between the Egyptian revolution of 2011 and the rise of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to the Egyptian presidency, a few years could fundamentally change authors’ perspectives. The magnitude of change is probably best reflected in the new capital that the Egyptian government is building approximately 40 kilometers east of Cairo. Scholars have described this project as an “anti-Cairo” and its conclusion is set to affect the city. Demographic developments add to the image of transformation. Since the publication of Janet Abu-Lughod’s groundbreaking study The City Victorious in 1971, Cairo’s number of inhabitants has grown from around seven million to between fifteen and twenty-five million. In tandem with demographic growth, the city has been expanding into neighboring governorates along the Nile. Real estate companies and the state have also continued to develop new satellite cities at a distance from previously urbanized land. The Egyptian capital now extends much further along the Nile and also reaches deeper into the desert west and east of the city than it did five decades ago. While mapping is a politically fraught issue, David Sims estimated in 2010 that the newly planned towns around Cairo alone extend over a combined area of 1,174 square kilometers (Sims 2010, p. 172). This shifting terrain sets limits to any attempt at a comprehensive overview of literature about Cairo. Instead, the present bibliography seeks to capture continuity and change in scholarly literature on the city. It contains older works, which still inspire thinking about Cairo, as well as studies that focus on the city’s recent transformation over the past ten years. The bibliography is split into eight parts: General Overviews; Urban Planning, Architecture, and the Cityscape; The State and Urban Politics; Economy and Inequality; History; Neighborhoods; Gender and Sexuality; and Religion. This division reflects some of the priorities of scholarship about the city; it illustrates under which headings scholars have thought about Cairo. Such priorities have themselves invited criticism. Several titles in the categories of history or gender and sexuality demonstrate how the focus of scholarship has changed over time. In some studies, the dividing line between research on Cairo and Egypt also tends to become blurred. The particular political, cultural, and economic centralization of the country contributes to publications that are largely based on observations in Cairo, but are framed in terms of analyses of the whole country. It is therefore important to highlight that the city’s centrality endows it with an especially prominent place in studies of Egypt at large.

Urban Politics in the State Arena

2009 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Burns ◽  
Laura Evans ◽  
Gerald Gamm ◽  
Corrine McConnaughy
Keyword(s):  
Urban Politics ◽  
Special Kind ◽  
The State ◽  
State Legislators ◽  
Divided Government ◽  
Legislative Process ◽  
Central Feature ◽  
The Past ◽  
Big Cities ◽  
The City

We seek to explain how states govern big cities. Political scientists' accounts of urban politics either fail to treat the state systematically or place state hostility at the center of such an account. Accounts by historians, by contrast, offer tools political scientists can use to theorize urban politics in the state arena. We use those tools, and we find that cities can manage the legislative process. This power starts with bill introduction and carries through to the vote on the floor. This ability results from a central feature of American state politics: on bills about big cities, state legislators now and in the past find their primary voting cues in the unity of local delegations. The city delegation, then, has tremendous power to manage the state's involvement in city affairs. In many respects, ours is an account of a special kind of divided government, with two institutional arenas where urban government is carried out.

Mexico City

Urban Studies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alejandra María Leal Martínez
Keyword(s):  
Mexico City ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Metropolitan Area ◽  
Urban Politics ◽  
Federal District ◽  
Environmental Problems ◽  
The State ◽  
Small Island ◽  
World Class ◽  
The City

Numerous urban scholars have been studying Mexico City—the capital of Mexico—since at least the 1970s, drawn to its remarkable growth during the second half of the 20th century and to its specific patterns of urbanization. The city is located at more than 7,000 feet above sea level in the southern section of a large, enclosed basin known as the Valley of Mexico. Its name officially designates what until recently was the Federal District, an area of 550 square miles divided into sixteen administrative jurisdictions and which, until 1997, lacked a democratically elected government. A 2016 reform transformed Mexico City into the country’s thirty-second state. In common usage, the name Mexico City also refers to the greater Mexico City Metropolitan Area, which as of 2010 also included fifty-nine adjacent municipalities in the State of Mexico and one in the State of Hidalgo, with a total extent of nearly 3,100 square miles. According to the 2010 census, Mexico City’s population is around nine million, while the greater Metropolitan Area has more than twenty million inhabitants. The city was founded in 1521 on the ruins of the Aztec capital on a small island in Lake Texcoco and gradually expanded onto the increasingly desiccated lakebed, which has created a particular set of environmental problems, such as constant flooding. Like other major Latin American cities, Mexico City—and later the Metropolitan Area—grew exponentially after the 1940s, as industrialization attracted massive migration. Its population jumped from three million in 1930 to around fifteen million in 1985. Mexico’s most important city, as well as its political, cultural, and economic center, Mexico City is a study in contrasts. It displays wealth and poverty extremes, world-class architecture next to marginal shantytowns, and a vibrant, cosmopolitan cultural life alongside high criminal rates and seemingly intractable environmental problems, which continue to attract the interest of a wide variety of urban scholars. This bibliography is selective rather than exhaustive. It privileges recent English- and Spanish-language scholarship, but also includes key texts that continue to inform the field, as well as recent urban historiography. It is divided into the main topics covered by urban scholars of Mexico City since the 1970s. These range from urban planning, urban politics, informality, poverty, and marginality, which were dominant themes until the 1980s, to urban protest and social movements, gentrification, and environmental, gender, and cultural studies, which have expanded the field more recently. The author wishes to thank Carlos Humberto Arroyo Batista for his research assistance in elaborating this bibliography.

Ras al Khaimah: further archaeological discoveries

Antiquity ◽  
1976 ◽  
Vol 50 (200) ◽  
pp. 216-222
Author(s):  
Beatrice De Cardi
Keyword(s):  
United Arab Emirates ◽  
The State ◽  
Focused Attention ◽  
North East ◽  
The North ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

Ras a1 Khaimah is the most northerly of the seven states comprising the United Arab Emirates and its Ruler, H. H. Sheikh Saqr bin Mohammad al-Qasimi, is keenly interested in the history of the state and its people. Survey carried out there jointly with Dr D. B. Doe in 1968 had focused attention on the site of JuIfar which lies just north of the present town of Ras a1 Khaimah (de Cardi, 1971, 230-2). Julfar was in existence in Abbasid times and its importance as an entrep6t during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries-the Portuguese Period-is reflected by the quantity and variety of imported wares to be found among the ruins of the city. Most of the sites discovered during the survey dated from that period but a group of cairns near Ghalilah and some long gabled graves in the Shimal area to the north-east of the date-groves behind Ras a1 Khaimah (map, FIG. I) clearly represented a more distant past.

Analysis of geodetic and legal documentation in the process of expropriation for roads. Krakow case study

2013 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-84
Author(s):  
Anna Trembecka
Keyword(s):  
Local Government ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
The State ◽  
Property Value ◽  
Real Property ◽  
Construction Design ◽  
Special Rules ◽  
The City

Abstract Amendment to the Act on special rules of preparation and implementation of investment in public roads resulted in an accelerated mode of acquisition of land for the development of roads. The decision to authorize the execution of road investment issued on its basis has several effects, i.e. determines the location of a road, approves surveying division, approves construction design and also results in acquisition of a real property by virtue of law by the State Treasury or local government unit, among others. The conducted study revealed that over 3 years, in this mode, the city of Krakow has acquired 31 hectares of land intended for the implementation of road investments. Compensation is determined in separate proceedings based on an appraisal study estimating property value, often at a distant time after the loss of land by the owner. One reason for the lengthy compensation proceedings is challenging the proposed amount of compensation, unregulated legal status of the property as well as imprecise legislation. It is important to properly develop geodetic and legal documentation which accompanies the application for issuance of the decision and is also used in compensation proceedings.

Afterword II

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kamran Asdar Ali
Keyword(s):  
Social Economic ◽  
Therapeutic Process ◽  
Working Women ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Space ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Labor Activists ◽  
Cultural Healing ◽  
The City ◽  
Everyday Living

The second afterword to the book by Kamran Asdar Ali returns us to the city, and to the lives of Karachi’s working women and working classes. He draws on women’s poems, diaries, and memoirs to capture some more ephemeral qualities of everyday living and dying. These contrast with the violent suppression of an underclass of trade unionists and labor activists by a coalition of the state, military courts and industrialists, since the fifties. Given the long, progressive erosion of peace in Karachi how, he asks, might we imagine a therapeutic process of social, economic and cultural healing? Through an image of citizens “at work” creating citywide networks and connections, we are offered finally some possibilities of dreaming. Namely, through increased understandings, not of conflict, but also of each other’s intimate everyday lives, the dream emerges of a new political space or public where even intractable disagreements can be managed through gestures of kindness, compromise, and fresh vocabularies of how to carry on and get by.

Contesting the City

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian D. Liddy
Keyword(s):  
Urban Politics ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Urban Citizenship ◽  
Town Government ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
Political Narrative ◽  
Classical Models ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The City

The political narrative of late medieval English towns is often reduced to the story of the gradual intensification of oligarchy, in which power was exercised and projected by an ever smaller ruling group over an increasingly subservient urban population. This book takes its inspiration not from English historiography, but from a more dynamic continental scholarship on towns in the southern Low Countries, Germany, and France. Its premise is that scholarly debate about urban oligarchy has obscured contemporary debate about urban citizenship. It identifies from the records of English towns a tradition of urban citizenship, which did not draw upon the intellectual legacy of classical models of the ‘citizen’. This was a vernacular citizenship, which was not peculiar to England, but which was present elsewhere in late medieval Europe. It was a citizenship that was defined and created through action. There were multiple, and divergent, ideas about citizenship, which encouraged townspeople to make demands, to assert rights, and to resist authority. This book exploits the rich archival sources of the five major towns in England—Bristol, Coventry, London, Norwich, and York—in order to present a new picture of town government and urban politics over three centuries. The power of urban governors was much more precarious than historians have imagined. Urban oligarchy could never prevail—whether ideologically or in practice—when there was never a single, fixed meaning of the citizen.

Trade, Commerce, and the State in the Roman World

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
The State ◽  
Market Regulation ◽  
External Trade ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Legal Structures ◽  
The City ◽  
Political Character ◽  
Different Sources

This interdisciplinary volume presents nineteen chapters by Roman historians and archaeologists, discussing trade in the Roman Empire in the period c.100 BC to AD 350, and in particular the role of the Roman state, in shaping the institutional framework for trade within and outside the Empire, in taxing that trade, and in intervening in the markets to ensure the supply of particular commodities, especially for the city of Rome and for the army. The chapters in this volume address facets of the subject on the basis of widely different sources of evidence—historical, papyrological, and archaeological—and are grouped in three sections: institutional factors (taxation, legal structures, market regulation, financial institutions); evidence for long-distance trade within the Empire, in wood, stone, glass, and pottery; and trade beyond the frontiers, with the East (as far as China), India, Arabia, and the Red Sea, and the Sahara. Rome’s external trade with realms to the east emerges as being of particular significance to the fisc. But in the eastern part of the Empire at least, the state appears, in collaboration with the elite holders of wealth, to have adapted the mechanisms of taxation, both direct and indirect, to support its need for revenue. On the other hand, the price of that collaboration, which was in effect a fiscal partnership, in slightly different forms in East and West, in the longer term fundamentally changed the political character of the Empire.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aled Davies
Keyword(s):  
International Monetary System ◽  
The State ◽  
Real Economy ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
Monetary System ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
City Of London ◽  
The City

The aim of this book has been to evaluate the relationship between Britain’s financial sector, based in the City of London, and the social democratic economic strategy of post-war Britain. The central argument presented in the book was that changes to the City during the 1960s and 1970s undermined a number of the key post-war social democratic techniques designed to sustain and develop a modern industrial economy. Financial institutionalization weakened the state’s ability to influence investment, and the labour movement was unable successfully to integrate the institutionalized funds within a renewed social democratic economic agenda. The post-war settlement in banking came under strain in the 1960s as new banking and credit institutions developed that the state struggled to manage. This was exacerbated by the decision to introduce competition among the clearing banks in 1971, which further weakened the state’s capacity to control the provision and allocation of credit to the real economy. The resurrection of an unregulated global capital market, centred on London, overwhelmed the capacity of the state to pursue domestic-focused macroeconomic policies—a problem worsened by the concurrent collapse of the Bretton Woods international monetary system. Against this background, the fundamental social democratic assumption that national prosperity could be achieved only through industry-led growth and modernization was undermined by an effective campaign to reconceptualize Britain as a fundamentally financial and commercial nation with the City of London at its heart....

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