{"id":37346,"date":"2025-06-13T08:36:49","date_gmt":"2025-06-13T06:36:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/?p=37346"},"modified":"2025-08-19T15:41:40","modified_gmt":"2025-08-19T13:41:40","slug":"cairo-a-downtown-in-search-of-lost-global-city-status","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/cairo-a-downtown-in-search-of-lost-global-city-status\/","title":{"rendered":"Cairo: A Downtown in Search of Lost Global City Status"},"content":{"rendered":"
A photo festival backed by a real estate developer puts the spotlight on a downtown Cairo under transformation.<\/span><\/h5>\n

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Iason Athanasiadis<\/span><\/h4>\n

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CAIRO<\/strong>: Marwa Abou Leila was reborn in Tahrir Square during the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. The 48-year-old corporate banker, who worked handling an Egyptian bank\u2019s VIP clients during the day, started receiving criticism from conservative colleagues at work for frequenting the revolution after hours.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cEveryone who believed in the Revolution was reborn in Tahrir,\u201d said Abou Leila, who is now the organizer of Cairo Photo Week. \u201cIt made us reconsider our lives and made me quit my job and rethink so many things.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

It also reconnected her with Cairo\u2019s <\/span>wast al-balad<\/span><\/i>, a European district of begrimed-but-spectacular (or spectacularly begrimed), turn-of-the-20<\/span>th<\/span>-century mansions and apartment buildings on a grander scale than either Istanbul\u2019s Beyo\u011flu or Algiers\u2019 centre-ville. Inspired by Haussman\u2019s Paris, the district was built from the 1860s onwards on the debris of popular neighborhoods to coincide with the opening of the Suez Canal, and remained \u2014 for over a century \u2014 a westernized multicultural district, as well as the Egyptian capital\u2019s commercial and entertainment center.<\/span><\/p>\n

But by Abou Leila\u2019s time, the minorities had emigrated and downtown was a shadow of its former self, occupied by a few Egyptian bourgeois hanging on in their decaying palaces, a new middle class that managed to secure rent-frozen apartments, and rural immigrants. Unlike most well-off Egyptians who may live in expensive satellite compounds and have no connection to the district, Abou Leila\u2019s childhood visits to her grandmother\u2019s high-ceilinged apartment left her with memories of ancient elevators whirring past grand, gloomy landings or knocking on the \u201ccrazy Greek neighbor lady\u2019s door and running away.\u201d But her parents\u2019 separation ended the connection to downtown.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

After the Revolution, Abou Leila quit her corporate career and took a photography course in London\u2019s Photographers\u2019 Gallery. The hybrid gallery, educational and networking space inspired her to create <\/span>Photopia<\/span><\/a>, which eventually led to workshops and the founding of Cairo Photo Week in 2018. A real estate development called al-Ismaelia, whose owner Abou Leila met in Tahrir during the revolution, provided some of its 25 buildings as venues for the rapidly evolving festival.<\/span><\/p>\n

Respectable folk had avoided Downtown ever since the 1880s, when it became Cairo\u2019s entertainment district and developed \u201ca hierarchy of shame,\u201d as Raphael Cormack writes in <\/span>Midnight in Cairo: The Divas of Egypt\u2019s Roaring Twenties<\/span><\/i>. Even after the Greeks, Armenians and Jews left Egypt, their theatres, revues and cabarets were replaced by clandestine speakeasies and spit-and-sawdust beerhalls obscured behind closed doors.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I first moved here in 1977 as a student, Downtown was sort of like it is now, a chaotic place of declining grandeur,\u201d said Patrick Werr, a retired financial journalist, long-term Cairo resident and collector of, so far, four downtown apartments. \u201cIt used to be where all the rich people lived 100 years ago, but even during its decline I always knew it would always come back because the architecture is fantastic.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Famed Muslim and Jewish actors Anwar Wagdi and Leila Mourad married and lived in the 70-meter Immobilia building. It was Cairo\u2019s tallest high-rise upon completion, and its residents a veritable who\u2019s who of Egypt\u2019s entertainment and business elite: actor Omar Sharif, singer Mohammed Abdel Wahab and director Naguib el-Rihani.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Downtown and its subcultures slouched through the introverted Eighties and Nineties. At the tail end of the millennium, an Australian curator ignored conventional thinking and opened a new gallery in the middle of a district of auto mechanics. The coexistence proved peaceful and soon bore what proved to be a citywide, era-defining art festival called Nitaq.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cYou had a map and a schedule and walked from one place to the next, stopping to have a beer, a sandwich, watched a play, attended a concert, had another beer,\u201d said Karim Shafei, the founder of <\/span>al-Ismaelia<\/span><\/a>, the first property company to invest in downtown in scale. \u201cThere were poetry readings on rooftops, video installations in crumbling buildings, and artworks hanging in restaurants and bars: this was when I fell in love with Downtown.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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A scene from Cairo’s Downtown (photo Iason Athanasiadis).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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The 2011 Revolution, and the years of instability and securitization that followed, paralyzed but also introduced the district to a new generation. Its most recent moment of global exposure was in 2021, when its building facades were hastily painted to act as backdrops to the departure of the Egyptian Museum\u2019s mummies in a <\/span>spectacular<\/span><\/a> dubbed the Pharaohs\u2019 Golden Parade.<\/span><\/p>\n

The mummies\u2019 exit marked another step in Downtown\u2019s desertion. The succession of expulsions began in the late 19<\/span>th<\/span> century with the mass removal of common Egyptians in order to establish a European district. The ethnic minorities were largely banished following the nationalizations of the 1950s and the Arab Israeli wars. In the 21<\/span>st<\/span> century, the long-rumbling 2011 revolution unspooled downtown, to be followed by the transfer of all government ministries to a new, purpose-built capital out in the desert. A 2024 Supreme Court <\/span>decision<\/span><\/a> ending rent-controlled apartments has set the stage for mass evictions.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Pharaoh Ramses II and other downtown exiles<\/b><\/h4>\n

During Photo Week, a sagging villa hid the traces of one of central Cairo\u2019s most prominent exiled residents. The statue of Pharaoh Ramses II, which dominated the square next to Cairo\u2019s monumental Art Deco central train terminal for decades until its removal in 2006, peeked out of a photograph in Egyptian Palestinian photojournalist Randa Shaath\u2019s exhibit. After decades of central Cairene pollution corroding the statue\u2019s granite, it was recently installed in the new Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), which is supposed to open this year.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cCairo\u2019s changing a lot and the people and scenes, mostly literary, that I knew in Downtown no longer exist,\u201d Shaath told TMR. \u201cI still walk around but the shops are different, the streets are changed, and I feel alienated.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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A portrait of Randa Shaath (photo Iason Athanasiadis)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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In Shaath\u2019s exhibit, titled <\/span>Cairo 1990s<\/span><\/i>, comedians, belly dancers and cops jostle in a bygone downtown. \u201cHouses and cities disappear, and memory fades,\u201d says Shaath, \u201cyet photographs remain as a tool to resist disappearance and loss.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Shaath reminisces how painters would gather in a caf\u00e9 known as el-Kayiba (the Depressing), while writers consorted in Zahret al-Bustan and novelists and translators at the Greek Club. \u201cBut that scene is finished, the spirit of people discussing art and culture no longer exists,\u201d she concludes. One area, known as the Triangle of Fear, traced a mental hotspot between famous downtown hangouts the Grillon, the Greek Club, and Estoril, within which the likelihood of encountering one of these often-cantankerous, larger-than-life characters surged. Leftist lyricist Ahmad Fouad Negm derided the Downtown\u2019s bourgeois intellectuals as \u201cpreening and pompous, glib and loquacious, never going to demos and never mixing with crowds.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The venue for Shaath\u2019s show is an exhibit in itself: a whimsical, late 19<\/span>th<\/span> century European villa with a grand staircase propped up by a stick, bulging tiled floors and a cockerel-shaped weathervane that might as well be swiveling over a Swiss mountain village rather than facing the dreaded Ministry of Interior complex once housing State Security. When the villa was first constructed by Mohamed Faizi Pasha, the son of an Albanian general in the new, post-Mameluke Egypt established by Mohamed Ali, it was in a district of verdant Nile side palaces. Faizi Pasha was a civil servant, initially functioning as a Turkish-Arabic translator in the orbit of the nearby Abdeen Palace before working his way up to become the director of <\/span>waqfs <\/span><\/i>(Islamic charitable endowments).<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a modernizing period and beautiful buildings were coming up,\u201d said Mariam Helmy, Faizi Pasha\u2019s fifth-generation descendant and a cultural programmer at the GEM, who is seeking to repurpose the villa. \u201cRather than freezing it in time through a restoration and treating it like a museum piece, or closing it up to become a private exclusive space, I\u2019d like it to have a cultural and creative future.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cPeople recognize that this is the time to snap up apartments in downtown and turn them into Airbnbs,\u201d Helmy added. \u201cFor me, the sky\u2019s the limit for this place, but it needs investors with an eye for history and creating the right balance of taking care of it, while giving it a new lease of life.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The villa was rented for decades by the American University in Cairo and saw multiple roles as classroom, <\/span>cr\u00e8che<\/span><\/i> and bookshop. Climbing the stairs, Mariam points out the original stone floors in the upper storey before pausing in dismay at the ravaged roof\u2019s cracked wooden slats. On the grounds of the Ministry of Interior opposite, a place synonymous with torture, cranes are preparing an Innovation District. Another villa, once housing the AUC Rare Books Library, has already reopened as a coworking and events space.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt was impossible to visit this district before and just walk around,\u201d said Michel Hanna, a photographer with a large architectural archive built up over 15 years. \u201cSometimes they even prohibited the people who lived by the ministry to go on their balconies.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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