Exploring the creative city in post-revolutionary Downtown Cairo: On coworking spaces and neoliberal strategies in New Egypt

Funding Sponsor

American University in Cairo

Second Author's Department

Architecture Department

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https://doi.org/10.1080/07352166.2024.2360487

All Authors

Heba Mourad Momen El-Husseiny Zeinab Shafik

Document Type

Research Article

Publication Title

Journal of Urban Affairs

Publication Date

1-1-2025

doi

10.1080/07352166.2024.2360487

Abstract

This paper examines the remaking of Downtown Cairo in the post-revolutionary era through real-estate’s adoption of the creative city approach using a neoliberal strategy of adaptive reuse for historical buildings. Through mapping a new narrative of coworking spaces in Downtown Cairo and carrying out spatial and observational analyses of Consoleya coworking space as a case study, the paper situates and theorizes spatial practices of the creative city and explores the subject formation of the entrepreneurial citizen as a neoliberal strategy to pacify Downtown Cairo. The analysis draws on the work of Harvey’s entrepreneurial urbanism, Bourdieu’s social construct of capital, and Foucault’s subject formation to demonstrate coworking spaces’ monetization of Downtown Cairo, generation of class privileges and exercise of control through an entertaining atmosphere of co-creation. The case study epitomizes New Egypt’s neoliberal era of soft control recurring in the ongoing urban regeneration projects of Downtown Cairo.

First Page

3753

Last Page

3771

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