Public spaces revealed by the COVID-19 crisis in Cairo ? Managing and practicing the city
Florian BONNEFOI, Université de Poitiers, CNRS, Migrinter / CEDEJ, France
Laura MONFLEUR, Université de Tours, CITERES, EMAM / CEDEJ, France
Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, restrictive measures concerning public spaces have been taken in Cairo. Though, in a city of extreme density and more than 24 million inhabitants, they are difficult to apply. What the epidemic tells us about public space management in the Egyptian authoritarian context? How citizens negotiate their presence and their practice of public space in Cairo?
First, we will show how public spaces have been at the core of the strategy to control the epidemic through sterilization and closure, transforming the urban landscape. Indeed, they came out as key places to witness the awareness of the population. They became a scene for popular and official action against the virus, questioning regimes of visibility in a more general perspective in the Egyptian context. But more than a spatial management of the crisis, the government chose a temporal one: curfew instead of lock-down, more restrictive measures during celebrations, etc.
Then, we will emphasize how the pandemic modified and redefined the relationship of Cairo citizens to their urban environment and more particularly to public space. New practices, new temporalities appeared. They are shaped by the State through new laws and norms. We’ll see in what extend they persist to this day and how common citizens negotiate them on daily basis.
This communication relies on qualitative methods. The actions taken by the authorities have been apprehended through direct and immersive observation at the outbreak of the pandemic (end of March) and during the following waves (October 2020, February to December 2021). Confronted with those observations, a press review of Arabic online newspaper enabled us to follow the measures and to understand in what extend they’ve been followed by the inhabitants. Interviews with Cairenes during the first wave as well as immersion in the Egyptian capital-city in the following months give some insight into daily practices of public space in time of crisis.
Mots clés : Cairo|Public Space|Regime of visibility|Daily Geography|Dense City
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