SELECTIVE CRISIS: WATER SHORTAGES IN CAIRO'S ELITE AND INFORMAL NEIGHBORHOODS

• Published in: Arab studies journal Vol. 30; no. 2; pp. 82 - 88
• Main Author: Wahby, Noura
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Washington, D.C Georgetown University, Center for Contemporary Arab Studies 01.10.2022
• Subjects: Accountability; Built environment; Civil society; Complaints; Crises; Elites; Environmentalism; Floods; Gated communities; Governance; Grass roots movement; Hopelessness; Immunity; Infrastructure; International organizations; Landscape; Monopolies; Neighborhoods; Political ecology; Political ideologies; Politics; Privatization; Public policy; Rural areas; Social capital; Social networks; State-society relations; Urban areas; Water shortages; Water supply; Cairo Egypt; Egypt
• ISSN: 1083-4753; 2328-9627

Community water governance supports self-supply regimes in rural areas and self-built networks in urban milieus, in which grassroots activism, social capital, and heterogenous configurations of sociotechnical relations construct the water supply.4 Despite the centralization and, in some cases, corporatization and privatization of water governance in the region, my research demonstrates how communities lie at the crux of daily negotiations over water supply, maintenance, quality, and repair. Two framings have dominated traditional discussions on Middle Eastern urban environments: normative technocratic approaches to governing the city, led by governments and international organizations, and elite conceptions of environmental resource protection and action.7 These framings construct an illusory state monopoly over definitions of nature, environmentalism, and direct interventions in the built environment.8 However, critical scholars using the methods of urban political ecology (UPE) have revealed the ways in which heterogeneous action by social actors like developers, civil society, and grassroots movements, has multiplied the logics of governing urban space.9 These methods allows us to see cities as fragmented urban landscapes where political ideologies and the logic of capital shape, reproduce, and sustain embedded state-society relations.10 Similarly, UPE scholars have reframed the issue of water scarcity as a socially and politically constructed phenomenon designed to foster new markets of common goods, such as water, energy and land.11 Drawing on these methods, over the past decade, I have focused my research on the urban environment in Cairo on challenging long-held assumptions and apolitical explanations of urban failures, by demonstrating how they are socially constructed and related to the technicalities of decaying physical infrastructure.12 I have done this by studying state patterns of policy action and inaction, elite practices, and private-sector and international development institutions' influence, as well as how grassroots movements and civil society attend to their own needs for water supply, quality, and storage. The production of water scarcity as an environmental crisis epitomizes this process. Since Ethiopia's 2011 declaration that it would construct the Renaissance Dam on the Nile, public discourse on water in Egypt has turned to new apocalyptic visions of water shortages, and even regional water wars.13 For the first time, state officials have permitted the use of the term "water scarcity" to describe the failings of the water system.14 However, unequal access to water, shortages, and despair over its absence and failings are nothing new to Egyptian waterscapes. In many cases, state water companies refuse to acknowledge complaints from those in gated communities, asking them instead to appeal to their developers, which obfuscates the lines of accountability and repair.18 Although the state and developers usually respond to elite demands within an acceptable timeline, geographies of power, class, and capital have not provided these elites with immunity from worsening shortages, which they increasingly perceive to be an endemic crisis.