(This is the beginning of an article I'm preparing for publication that is called "Where is Alexandria: Myths of the City and the Anti-City in Alexandria after Cosmopolitanism. This excerpt was published by Cairobserver in February 2017: http://cairobserver.com/post/157608069564/in-love-with-the-ugly-face-of-alexandria. A first version of the full article is already published online in Arabic by Taralbahr: أين تقع الإسكندرية؟ أساطير المدينة والمدينة النقيض بعد المرحلة الكوزموبوليتانية.
In March 2015, on one of my many
journeys between Berlin and Alexandria, I landed in Borg El Arab airport west
of Alexandria late at night. The airport is 50 kilometres away from the city
centre, but close to many thriving industrial areas, holiday villages, and
up-market suburbs that have been built west of the city and along the North
Coast in the past two decades. At the airport I was picked up by my friend
Mustafa who moved some years ago from his native village to the district of
Agami at the western edge of Alexandria. Agami is known among the Egyptian
bourgeoisie as a pleasant beach resort. Mustafa, however, lives three kilometres
away from the coast in an informal neighborhood on a small hill right behind
the Chinese Housing (al-Masakin al-Siniya), an area of large public housing
blocks. The Chinese blocks were built in the 1980’s as company housing of
public sector companies by an Egyptian-Chinese joint venture. For decades, the
Chinese Housing has been an area where poor and marginalised people would live,
people who lack the means to build a house of their own in an informal
settlement. It has a bad reputation as a place marked by gangs and crime, but
the reality is much calmer. Mustafa and I moved in the area with no sense of
risk even late at night. He quite likes it there. Two years earlier, an
Egyptian employee at a foreign research institute in Alexandria had been
shocked to hear that I frequented the Chinese Housing. She said that she was
surprised that I was still alive. For her it was a no-go area, definitely not a
part of her Alexandria.
Next evening, I continued my
journey on a minibus to the opposite end of the city, the neighborhood of
Mandara where I usually live in Alexandria as a guest of the novelist Mukhtar
Shehata. The distance from Agami to Mandara is 35 kilometres on the direct
route through the city centre. To avoid congestion, the minibus takes a longer
but faster detour via the International Road south of the city. The International
Road crosses Lake Marioutiyya on a landfill bridge where the nauseating smell
from pollution occasionally compels passengers to hold their noses. The road
passes poor informal areas in inland Agami, the up-market suburb of King Mariout,
vast chemical and cement factory complexes, and the up-market City Center
shopping mall (far from the historical centre of the city). Finally, the
minibus enters the city again along the 45 Street in what is known as “the East
of the City” (Sharq al-Madina). Approaching the end of the line, the minibus
turns to smaller streets, passes the Faculty of Islamic Studies of the al-Azhar
University (one of the main sites of learning for foreign Muslim students who
come to Egypt), and finally enters the busy Mallaha Street surrounded by shops,
market stands, and congested by private cars, taxis, minibuses and toktoks.
Eastern Alexandria is symbolically
divided class-wise by the Abu Qir suburban train line, the seaside being relatively
well off, and the inland often poorer. I live almost exactly at the class
border, next to the railway line. On the wealthy side of the railway are the Montazah
Gardens, the Fathallah shopping mall, the Sheraton Hotel, and the beach. On the
poor side begins a concrete jungle of both poor and middle-income areas,
informally built in the 1990’s and in perpetual construction, where 15-floor
towers are now replacing older five-floor apartment buildings.
In Mukhtar’s words, this is “the
ugly face of Alexandria.” And it would be difficult indeed to find the Chinese
Blocks, the International Road, or inland Mandara beautiful in any conventional
sense. However, It is not simply the poor face of the city. The suburban
crescent that surrounds the old coastal core of Alexandria is made up of poor,
middle-income and upmarket districts alike. Millions live and work in the
suburban crescent and only enter the iconic sites of the city on the seafront
and the old centre on weekend and holiday outings. The ugly face of the city
has little on offer for a romantic weekend, but those who want to understand
what kind of city Alexandria is today and what it may become, should not miss
it.
