ABOUT

I cannot say precisely when it began, but it must have been sometime around the 2011 uprising, with my home city, Cairo, at its epicentre, that I started to question what an ordinary person takes for granted. These questions followed me into my undergraduate studies in architecture at Cairo University between 2012 and 2017: Why am I not allowed to write more? Is drawing indeed the only medium for architects, as the professors claim? These questions unsettled my relationship with the discipline of Architecture.

After completing my undergraduate studies, I began working as a teaching assistant and later as an assistant lecturer within the same department at Cairo University, navigating a system of tenures that I found increasingly questionable. My experience in the Master’s programme there, however, unfolded differently. I was encouraged to write extensively about architecture, people, spaces, and history, culminating in a 65,000-word thesis. Under the guidance of my supervisor, Aly Gabr, I explored the interaction between the ‘modern Occident’, bearing the weight of the Enlightenment ideals, and a transforming ‘post-traditional Orient'. This inquiry cut across disciplines, including history, theory, arts, and architecture. Still, I focused mainly on the influence of 18th and 19th-century Western ideals of modernity on the changing implicit and explicit patterns of Islamic religious buildings in Cairo.

In 2021, I moved to the UK to undertake my PhD in history and theory of architecture and urbanism. From a seemingly paradoxical position, I have been working on unpacking Cairo’s contemporary urban spaces from University College, London! By the time I joined the Bartlett School of Architecture, my interests had shifted. I became less preoccupied with architecture in isolation and more drawn to people, their stories, and the dynamics that shape their everyday lives in the city. My research has since focused on the discursive production of Cairene ‘ʿashwaʾiyyat’, a term almost always translated by academics as ‘informal settlements’. In my thesis, I challenge this translation by exploring the layered discourses around that term: What does this term mean? How is it understood, experienced, and lived by Cairenes? How is it represented (or, in a Lefebvrian sense, produced) by the state? These questions are seemingly another iteration of what appears to be the beginning of a life-long practice of questioning how people live within the contemporary city.

If you would like to get in touch or have any ideas for a new collaboration, please use the form below.