Lianes

This article is based on many years work. I first began to work with Ferdinand Tönnies’ concepts of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft[1] when doing my doctoral research on the poet Máirtín Ó Direáin. There I thought of Gemeinschaft in terms of the small island community of Inishmore (Árainn) in the West of Ireland. Gesellschaft was Dublin. But when dealing with poetry things are not that straight forward and finally I concluded that the island as recreated poetically was a literary Gemeinschaft and the city as similarly recreated in the poetry was a literary Gesellschaft.

 

Living for three years in London and four years in Cairo my view of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft has since undergone some basic changes. Perhaps my understanding now comes closer to what Tönnies originally meant by the two terms.

 

In this article I look at one of Cairo’s urban villages – Shéra Dokki. There we see the Gemeinschaft present in a busy city street. The city usually seen to epitomise the Gesellschaft plays host to Gemeinschafts on streets and pavements. Gemeinschafts form part of the many layers of urban life.

 

Throughout the article I look at the different ways in which men and women interact with the Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. The Gemeinschaft is traditionally seen as somewhere where women are safe and in their rightful element. The Gesellschaft, on the other hand, is seen as dangerous for women, especially with regard to their reputations. The street is very much a gendered environment. As a woman, I always felt that I was being judged while I was in the street in Cairo. The question: “What is she doing?” was never far from people’s lips. It followed the question: “Where is she from?” almost immediately.

 

 

Walking through the streets of Cairo on a daily basis I noticed many things that seemed to question my hitherto rather simplistic ideas regarding the Gemeinschaft and the Gesellschaft. It is now four years since I left Cairo and my observations have had time to mature. I was in many ways a flâneur, walking in the city seeing new things and jotting down notes on returning to my flat. This article is the result of retrospective analysis of these observations. I saw myself as part of my environment. At the time I wanted to stay in Cairo for ever. But I was always an outsider, a mixture of tourist and ex-pat. For four years I passed through this street everyday, during that time I lived in flats on both sides of the street. I engaged in what might be called Flânerie.(Parsons, 2000: 14) I was living and teaching in Cairo but spent a good deal of time exploring the city on foot. I was a flâneuse in the Middle East. Being a Western woman gave me some liberties in Cairo that an Egyptian woman would not have had. While I was constantly hailed on the street, in Cairo at least, I never encountered any serious threat to my safety. I could stumble into places where an Egyptian woman would never go alone.  Because I was a woman people were protective of me. People tried to help me even when I didn’t need any help. And while Egypt is not often seen as a liberal country, ironically as a woman I probably had more lee-way socially than if I had been a Western man strolling about Cairo. Men, and particularly Western men, are always seen as suspicious at every level in Egyptian society while women are usually only seen as suspicious morally (i.e. sexually). Being seen as a sex object rather than as a potential intelligence threat has its advantages sometimes.

 

However, when engaged in this kind of research it is important to continually question the “knowledge” that one is collecting. Edward Said warns in Orientalism that our power to know another culture is limited. We are bounded by our own subjective perceptions. We tend to think that what we “know” is all there is (Said, 2003: 34). Western scholarship, according to Said, too often sees the East as strange because it is unfamiliar and the West as the standard or norm because it is equally familiar (Ibid 43). Writing about another culture is always prone to misrepresentation and misunderstanding. In the words of Edward Said: “ …both learned and imaginative writing are never free, but are limited in their imagery, assumptions and intentions.”(Ibid 202)

 

In my research I have tried to accept the occupants of Shéra Dokki on their own terms. Yes, they are different from people in my country (Ireland), but I spent a long time amongst them, so in a sense these people became familiar and to an extent knowable to me. I have attempted to resist the temptation to exoticise these people. Since living in Egypt, Egypt has been simply Egypt to me. I do not see it as part of the Orient but rather as a distinct place with its own very strong national identity. 

 

Inhabitants of the East have traditionally been seen as Other by Westerners (Ibid., 48, 332); it becomes clear, however, that when one lives among Egyptians that they see Westerners as Other as well. Although I felt at home in Cairo, I was always reminded that I was a foreigner. I could never escape from the role of tourist in the eyes of those around me. In the end I had to accept this role and work with it. In a sense it gave me a raison d’être in the eyes of those who came across me in Shéra Dokki. I was a foreigner; therefore, I must be a tourist.

 

This article describes my perception of daily life along a very busy and culturally multi-layered street – Shéra Dokki. This street stretches from the zoological gardens right up to Mohandeseen. It is a wide, straight street. It is in no way a pretty place. It is dreary and quite dilapidated. But it is an extremely rich environment. Street life is vibrant here. Community and city unite on this street: Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. In many ways my research methods were similar to those used by Paul Stoller in his book Money Has No Smell. These are the same kind of “unassuming” research strategies (Stoller, 2002: x). I did not conduct surveys or formal interviews. The information I collected was gleaned from conversations with shopkeepers, market vendors, and people I came in contact with in the course of my daily life. My students supplied background information and explanations of Egyptian customs. 

 

 

 

“ What had been a road in the countryside became a civilized street in an urban area… Most spatial urban inventions derive from the concept of the street. Main Street is simply the urbanized section of a regional road, where commercial activities concentrate along a linear spine.” (Lozano, 1990: 224) 

 

The close knit family circles where neighbours know each other and are active in one another’s lives are very much in evidence in Shéra Dokki. This is both village and city – Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. (Tönnies, 1963) The presence of Gemeinschaft in this urban setting underlines the importance of seeing place in general as lived space. Edward Relph discusses this vision of place in his work Place and Placelessness: “ Places are fusions of human and natural order and are the significant centers of our immediate experiences of the world. They are defined less by unique locations, landscapes, and communities than by the focusing of experiences and intensions onto particular settings.” (Relph, 1976: 141)

 

The spatial environment of Shéra Dokki may be urban, but the lived environment is very much one of Gemeinschaft.

 

In Shéra Dokki there is a strong sense of Gemeinschaft living and working in this street. These are the people who have grown up in this urban setting, who have spent their whole life in this street. One cannot imagine these people feeling the alienation usually associated with life in the city. These people may not be from this city originally, but they have made their own of it. They inspect those who pass by. The street belongs to this core community. For those who merely pass through the street on their way somewhere else, however, the street will appear in a different light. Even the Egyptians who find themselves in this street simply as visitors and day-trippers may feel that they are not altogether at home. For those not at home in this street it will probably appear as a Gesellschaft. The Gesellschaft feels big and strange because we do not belong to the core group of the Gemeinschaft at the heart of the city[2].

 

Behaviour in this street is very much influenced by the mores of Egyptian society generally: the clothes one wears, the way one talks, what can and cannot be done. Although for those who live in this street, life goes on very much as it would in a country village, people never forget that a busy urban street runs through their community. For women in particular the street is always the scene of possible  censure and criticism. They have to abide by the rules or risk being mocked or accosted by those who sit and watch. It is primarily these people, those who work in the street selling fruit or cigarettes or a host of other things sold in Shéra Dokki, who pass judgment on those going by. This is ‘kalam il nés’[3] which is so dreaded by all  Egyptians. It is the gossip, the talk, that ‘the people’ engage in and which like all gossip can be very destructive.  When in the street for any purpose one is always vulnerable to this ‘kalam’, one has to constantly adjust one’s behaviour to avert criticism. Although gossip is dreaded by both men and women, women are more prone to censure in the street than men because public space has traditionally been seen as male space, the home being more appropriate to women. Tönnies wrote about this phenomenon in his now classic work Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft: “ The realm of life and work in the Gemeinschaft is particularly befitting to women; indeed, it is even necessary for them. For women, the home and not the market, their own or friend’s dwelling and not the street, is the natural seat of their activity…”(Tönnies, 1963: 162-163)

 

A Westerner may recoil at Tönnies’ ideas and may feel equally alienated from  Muslim attitudes to women’s place in the city/street; however, these ideas are not that different to Bourgeois attitudes to the city and men and women’s place within it in the 19^th century. Richard Sennett explores Bourgeois attitudes in this regard. Going into public places women risked being “disgraced”, men on the other hand could lose themselves in the crowd and suffer no ill consequences to their reputations (2002:23).

 

Although the street is a place where Egyptians are careful to appear at their best and incur as little comment as possible, still it is a place of great merriment as well. People laugh and talk with friends on the street. Cairenes seem to love to go on parade with their husband or wife and children and stroll through the street dressed in their best. Public scrutiny very much influences what women in particular wear in public. I have examined Egyptian women’s relationship to fashion elsewhere, but suffice to say that one of the primary reasons for veiling (the hijab) and the adoption of long, loose, Muslim dress, apart from religious beliefs, is the wish to be left alone in the streets. The more flesh on display in the street, the more one is likely to be accosted and mocked. (Ryan, 2003: 107-125)  The body is on show in the street. The clothes worn indoors are very different from the clothes worn on the street. Poorer women wear a black gallabaya[4] over more colourful clothes, black is seen as a respectable colour for older women to wear in the street. In Cairo one always puts one’s best foot forward.

 

(Although people are generally reserved in the street, one can see fights occurring between drivers here on a regular basis. Usually drivers are kept from coming to blows by the surrounding crowd, but verbal abuse is indulged in on all sides.)

 

There are many reasons why people go into the street. Perhaps they are simply going through this street to somewhere else. One may be shopping, looking for somewhere to eat or drink, one may work in the street, one may be having clothes or shoes repaired, or one may be simply strolling around to pass the time. There are two primary types of behaviour then in Shéra Dokki: instrumental (definite goal in mind) or recreational (no particular goal in mind). Meanwhile there is a long stream of traffic making its way slowly through the street, horns are honking and people are getting frustrated.

 

There are those who spend their entire day in the street, those who sit all day selling tissues. Others who work in kiosks, tiny huckster shops and vegetable shops practically live on the street. From very early in the morning until very late at night they are at their posts. They often eat their meals sitting on stools in the street, taking shade under a tree, sharing a meal with other street vendors. Here the intimate act of eating takes place in the public street. Public and personal space merging. No one censures these men for eating in the street, although young children are told not to eat in the street as they walk along. It seems that the rules that apply generally do not apply to the vendors, as their relationship with the street is different. For them the street is home, they do everything but sleep here (Stoller, 2002: 11).

 

Other people who spend all their time in the street are the street sweepers,  dressed in orange clothing and pushing their bins in front of them, they speak only to other sweepers. They carry their lunches on their bins and seem perfectly comfortable with the arrangement. Their lives are perilous as hypodermic needles are often among the rubbish found on the street. And of course there are the beggars, the destitute, who live in the street. They beg all day and most of the night. They survive on the charity of those moving through the street. Street children also live in the street, begging by day and scrounging a living any way they can, they sleep under the fly-over in Medan Dokki. It is hard to calculate the number of people supported by this one street.

 

Many, however, just pass through the street on their way somewhere else. For them it is strictly speaking a public domain. The higher the social class the more the street is seen as a public place where one is under scrutiny. These people avoid walking in the street at all. The lower the social class the more at ease people are in the street, the more the public and private blend. This seems to be more true for men than for women, but it is true for women also.

 

The street is a place of work, buying and selling, eating and drinking, repairs, ironing, learning, killing animals, resting on chairs, drinking public water from earthenware jugs, sleeping, praying, parading new clothes. The weather being dry and warm means that shops, stalls and restaurants are open to the street in a way that they usually are not in Europe. Thus private acts such as eating and buying are brought into the public domain.

 

Danger and the need for policing are associated with streets both in East and West. There is a threat of violence: a sudden eruption from the stifled tension. Goods one cannot afford or even aspire to are on view. This in itself is dangerous as it is a constant reminder of the inequality between rich and poor.

           

Over the years huge numbers of Egyptians have come to live in Cairo from the countryside. Far from experiencing the alienation usually associated with life in the city, however, these people brought many of their family members with them to the city and recreated village life on the streets of Cairo. Gemeinschafts came to settle in the Gesellschaft. These country people have changed not only the face of Cairo but also the mores acceptable on the streets. (Gardner, 1999)

 

One of the big differences between the streets in Cairo and the streets in Europe is that the Cairo streets are full of stationary people either selling their wares or just sitting talking, or perhaps praying. Cafés spill out onto the street in a far less organized way than they do in Paris for example. Walking on the pavements one has to constantly walk around things and people, one has to duck one’s head to avoid colliding with carcases from butcher shops. The idea of being able to walk quickly and of having a clear run from one shop to another is alien. Pedestrian shoppers have to pick their way carefully between  those who are stopped, conversing, eating, sleeping.  Pavements are dangerous places to walk as the level keeps going up and down, high steps, stairways going down to subterranean entrances. One has to be alert. It appears that Cairo streets were never designed to be walked on in a hurry.  European pavements are an altogether different affair. For the most part they have been completely sanitized: street vendors have been regulated and are found now in recognised markets controlled by permits and regulations, street cafés are cordoned off and have recognisable boundaries, people who stop and chat with friends are made to feel that they are in everybody’s way. Speed is of the essence. Anything that blocks the public thoroughfare must be reported and moved. No one stops, no one sits, no one lies down the ground and sleeps (if the homeless sometimes do, they will be moved on quickly). The noise levels too are different. In the West there is often hardly a sound on a city street whereas in Cairo the noise of car horns in particular is almost unbearable. The calls from the mosque and the noise of people calling out to each other are also quite loud.

 

The city is a controlled environment. In the city use of concrete, asphalt and stone creates a structure which keeps nature at bay. The occasional tree adds a gardeny touch. The trunks of trees are painted white, even the trees cannot be left completely to their own devices. Because of the shade created by the buildings and the air-conditioning in shops and cafés the city is a cooler place to be than the countryside. There are animals awaiting their fate tethered to trees outside butchers’ shops, they are killed on the footpath which runs red with their blood. It is a quiet affair, apparently gently done. The only other animals present on the street are the donkeys that pull heavy loads and of course the cats. Above the streets are roof-top gardens where hens and pigeons are kept. But Shéra Dokki has another very immediate relationship to nature, the city zoo and the Botanical Gardens are right at the end of the street. These are enclosed, cultivated nature however. They are controlled spaces. Parks, according to Lozano are: “ open, smaller scale versions of the natural world domesticated for recreational  use – the “lungs” of settlements…larger cities need – and invented parks…” (Lozano, 1990: 250)

 

On Fridays the faithful pray on green matting on the streets when there is no mosque near or no room left in the mosque. The loudspeaker attached to a building peels out the prayers and sermon. The street and mosque blend together. In the West people may stand outside a full church (the only time a church would be that full is at a funeral usually) but people do not kneel down in the street and pray, in a religious procession people will answer prayers in the street but at no time does the street substitute for the church. In the West the street is seen as an unclean place no matter how tidy it happens to be. In Egypt once a mat or piece of cardboard has been placed on the street, it becomes clean. Intentionality seems to be a big factor in Egypt. The street can be good or evil depending on what people are doing and what they have in mind.

 

Whilst the pavements in Shéra Dokki are never that full, the street itself is often completely jammed. A flyover takes much of the burden of traffic over the square which would be grid-locked without it. The easiest point at which to cross the street is underneath this flyover. The flyover is seen as a bridge and is dubbed ‘Il Kobri’. Around three o’clock is a very busy time in this street. Many people are returning from work, school children are being bussed home, crowds are gathering in the sandwich bars. Shéra Dokki is a great place to eat. There is every kind of eatery here: restaurants for the more middle class, sandwich bars for the working class and those just wanting a snack, seed shops which sell many types of seed and peanuts, juice shops selling a wide variety of juice, and of course koshary shops selling an Egyptian speciality of pasta and pulses. It is possible to eat a good meal in this street for little over one Egyptian pound. Many restaurants avail of the extra space on the pavements outside their premises to accommodate more customers. The pavement is tiled to match the inside of the restaurant and cleaned regularly. This colonisation of the pavement blurs the distinction between interior and exterior space. In Ramadan particularly families can be seen dining at 1.00am on the pavements of Shéra Dokki.       

 

Tourists are also catered for although tourists are a rare enough sight on Shéra Dokki. There is one shop that attracts foreigners though and that is a very upmarket shop that sells all sorts of ornaments. The more usual clientele is made up of Egyptians however.

 

There are now telephone kiosks on both sides of Shéra Dokki. Back in 1997 when I first came to Egypt it was not possible to make a long distance call to a country outside of Egypt from the street, I had to go to the post office and stand in line for the one or two telephones there devoted to long distance calls. Now it is possible to buy a telephone card in almost any huckster shop and make a call to anywhere in the world from these new kiosks found all over Cairo.

 

 

 

There is at least one ahwa in every Egyptian street, and Shéra Dokki is no exception. The ahwa is a coffee shop that sells mainly Turkish coffee and tea: the coffee in very small cups and the tea in glasses. The clientele is exclusively male – rarely do you see a woman in the ahwa. The ahwa is open to the street, so the men have a good view of everything that is going on in the street. Similarly the people on the street can see the men in the ahwa quite clearly. The ahwa is part of the pavement. The men are content to be on full view while they chat and drink coffee, tea, or smoke shisha (water pipe). Men are perfectly confident to be seen in public whether they are drinking, eating or smoking. Women in Cairo do not want to be on view if they are doing any of these things. To this day a woman will not smoke in the street. Smoking is forbidden by Islam, but many men smoke and some women. Again the wish to be shielded from the people in the street is not just a strong sense of modesty on the women’s part but also a fear of ‘kalam il nés’, that dreaded censure all too readily available in the street. The most commonly heard word of censure is the word ‘Haram!’ which basically means taboo and comes from Islam. The street and the ahwa are the ‘natural’ domains of men whereas women are always uneasy about being in the street or in traditional cafés. Their ‘natural’ domain is the home.

 

Men assert their power in the street by either flirting with young women or criticising them. The flirtation is usually well received as long as it is not vulgar. If a Western woman passes a man in the street, the flirting is usually more vulgar as the man struggles to flirt in English. Some see this ‘flirting’ as harassment. Some Egyptian women maintain that it is caused by corruption and sexual frustration.(Nawa, 2003: 1) The psychiatrist Adel Sadek argues that given that many men do not have access to discos and clubs in Egypt, the street itself becomes

their ‘outlet’.(Ibid.)

 

Unless accompanied by a man, the traditional café is thus out of bounds for women. Arab immigrants to London have brought this idea with them. The Arab cafés are male domains in places like Streatham in South London also.

 

As a foreign woman in Cairo I sometimes did manage to take a tea in an ahwa but never on my own. Once I played dominos with a friend in an ahwa only to be approached by a man in a gallabaya who greeted me with “How dare you?” I didn’t answer and he went away. It was clear that the flâneuse had overstepped the mark!

                                          

 

 

On the whole, however, street decorum is very important, how to behave, where to do things and where not to do them. This may seem oppressive, but it does have some good effects: I have never seen anyone drunk in the streets of Cairo. At the end of the day, Cairo is a highly controlled city whether it be through street decorum, ‘kalam il nés’, or police, and this makes it safe. Apart from the very rare fundamentalist attacks on tourists, one can walk around Cairo and feel quite safe.

 

There is a sense of excitement in the street, an expectation of seeing or hearing something new. The street is the ultimate venue for news swapping. There          is a buzz in the street. Going out is almost always more exciting than staying at home. There is an element of danger in the street. Anything might happen, and unlike Western streets, something invariably does happen as you walk along Shéra Dokki.

 

If you feel like having your hair cut, you can do so on either side of Shéra Dokki. There are barbers who are prepared to cut a Western woman’s hair even though they have never cut a woman’s hair before. They snip away and keep up a non-stop stream of conversation and they do a good job. And it costs far less than a coiffeur!

 

You can buy practically anything in this street. From haberdashery and clocks  to food and blankets.  This is not a specialist area as are many areas in Cairo (dozens of shoe shops all together, or jewellery shops or material shops), Shéra Dokki is an altogether all-purpose street. If one lives and works in Dokki, it is possible to spend weeks living entirely on the produce sold in this one street. One need never leave Dokki. It is a complete area, the ultimate Gemeinschaft. Shéra Dokki is becoming unusual in that on one level it is a city street, but at another level it is very much a community independent of Down Town Cairo. The newer areas of Cairo tend not to have supermarkets and butchers and greengrocers. These areas are designed with cars in mind. Shéra Dokki evolved around the needs of the pedestrian shopper.

 

Even though there is always a feeling of vulnerability in a street such as Shéra Dokki, people feel at home in the street they go through everyday. The school children are emboldened by their sheer numbers and anonymity, they can be a hostile force if they decide to give a lone foreigner a hard time, but thankfully that rarely happens in Shéra Dokki because there are too many adults in the streets who can chastise them. Again there is a village type of responsibility for the children.  Though these children may not live in the locality, still they are watched over by the people who work in the street. The children respond to their instruction quite good naturedly. The street children too are often chastised by both the traffic police permanently on point duty in the street and the general population of the street. Children unaccompanied by an adult are always prone to criticism and reprimand in the street. In one sense foreigners are seen as children because they are not accustomed to the rules of the street. People will try to help and advise foreigners even when they do not need any help. This can be very irritating, and for this and many other reasons foreigners, especially tourists, are often in a heightened state of irritation in Cairo. The thing that most annoyed me as a foreigner in Cairo was constantly being “welcomed” to Egypt. Even after four years the welcoming continued. I felt I was a Cairene at that stage, but I was constantly reminded that I would always be a visitor no matter how long I stayed. I may have been in Shéra Dokki every day, but I would never be of the street.

 

One of the main problems attendant on life in the city for those from a Muslim background is the proximity of “strangers” in the city. According to Richard Sennett the city can be defined as a “human settlement where strangers are likely to meet.” (2002: 39) Strangers are unknown and thus potentially dangerous. They do not share our ideas, background, culture or religion. One does not know where one stands with strangers. Egyptians classify all foreigners, or at least those who come from the West, as visitors to be welcomed. We are all actors playing our part according to Sennett. But usually in the city people can choose their parts to some extent. In Cairo the roles seem to be fixed. I would always be seen as a tourist no matter how much teaching I was doing.

 

The very young are balanced by the quite elderly in Shéra Dokki. The owners of many of the businesses are very old people, people who would be retired and possibly resident in old folk’s homes if they lived in the West. They appear to love their work and the street. I am not qualified to judge whether their productivity into old age keeps senility and physical ailments at bay or not. They do appear very healthy and content. Many of them seem to be intent on working till they drop.

 

When one stands back and asks what is the heart of a city street, the only answer that makes much sense is – money. Every shop and every business exists to make money. But it is easy to understand why this is not immediately obvious, it is difficult to differentiate means from ends on streets. Is money a means to buy food, for example, or is food being sold solely to generate an income for the shop owners? On the face of it it appears that there is an obsession with food on Shéra Dokki, but is the obsession actually with making money? The street children constantly remind the passer by that they want food, and this is the reason that they need money. The street with its buildings, stalls, farm produce and manufactured goods would not exist without the existence of money. Money built this street.  Unless you are a sociologist or enjoy aimless strolling, you would have little business walking through Shéra Dokki with empty pockets.

 

Shéra Dokki is a street that allows Dokki itself to be an urban village as opposed to a suburb. It is a street that the American writer Jane Jacobs would, I think, have liked very much.  It has those much needed ‘eyes on the street’ (In LeGates and Stout, 1997: 103) and the attendant safety. I have seen small children cycling tricycles around the pavement unaccompanied by anyone or so it seemed. The only major problem for Shéra Dokki is the sheer volume of traffic passing through it which now increasingly makes it very difficult to cross from one side to the other. Shéra Dokki is quite wide and there can be up to six lanes of traffic travelling along it at peak times. One wonders if the difficulty involved in crossing it is affecting the sense of shared community on the two sides of the street. Are the two sides becoming separate communities? The bridge (kubri)/ flyover mentioned earlier was built to take traffic over the square and out of Shéra Dokki quickly. The flyover is symbolic of speed. Underneath the kubri though there is a covered area that affords shelter for the homeless at night and by day a place where it is quite easy to cross the street. One section of this covered space has become a car park for one of the nearby restaurants. Some maintain that the kubri has spoiled the appearance of Shéra Dokki, even so it does perform a function and one dreads to think what the congestion in Medan Dokki would be like if there were no kubri.

 

Shéra Dokki, an urban village, is full of people who know each other in some capacity or other. Shopkeepers know many of their customers who live locally. And even though the built environment looks very much like a cityscape, Shéra Dokki has many of the characteristics of the Gemeinschaft. Here people interact constantly. The Gesellschaft can contain a Gemeinschaft type of society. Theorists usually tend to polarize the Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft descriptions of social groups. According to  D.J. Walmsley the move to Gesellschaft is often seen to be accompanied by a “decrease in primary contacts with family and friends”(Walmsley, 1988: 3). As Walmsley goes on to say this kind of polarization of societies is more of a caricature than an accurate description of actual social groups. I do hold, however, with the terms Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft as I have found them very useful tools particularly when discussing traditional and modern societies[5]. As a foreigner I have been aware of a certain closeness amongst people, who may not actually know each other, in Egypt. The pavements in Shéra Dokki were not built to accommodate the numbers of people who use them nowadays. But with the increase in population people have not adopted the western custom of averting the eyes and never looking directly at strangers. If the stranger happens to be a foreigner, people will often say: “Welcome to Egypt.” This welcome if often repeated can grate on the nerves, but the sentiment at least is laudable[6].

 

Around the corner from Shéra Dokki is the Dokki metro station. The metro has been in operation for many years but the extension of the line to include Dokki is a recent event. The metro is often crowded but would be even more utilised if it were not for the stigma attached to pubic transport in Cairo generally. Many middle class people have never been on the metro in their lives. If you question them as to the reason for this, they tell you that the metro is dirty and dangerous. Having used the metro daily during my time in Cairo, I have found it to be both clean and safe. The big problem for middle class Cairenes with regard to travelling on public transport is coming into direct contact with working class Cairenes. So even if it means being stuck in traffic jams for several hours a week rather than zooming around on the metro, the middle class will take the private car option. It seems strange to a foreigner, but it is perfectly sensible when one considers the importance of appearances in Egypt. If one is seen with the lower classes, paying 50 piastres for a metro ticket, then one can be taken for a member of that class. It is essential that one looks and acts the class one aspires to be, there is no such thing as dressing down in Cairo.

 

The buildings on Shéra Dokki tend to be of medium height. They are usually three or four stories high with the odd apartment block. There are no ugly tower blocks, but the street is home to many nonetheless. Cairo is densely populated all over and Dokki is no exception. According to Harley Sherlock cities are better places to live than the suburbs primarily because city dwellers have easy access to many more facilities : “ In scattered communities every activity outside the home involves a journey that has to be planned. There is great potential vitality in close-knit urban communities where social activity can be spontaneous and where the necessities and pleasures of life are close at hand.” (Sherlock, 1991: 247)

 

In Dokki people can certainly shop where they live. Although there are many traditional shops on Shéra Dokki there has been an increase in competition  recently with the opening of a large western supermarket (Metro) in the vicinity of Shéra Dokki. The nearest local supermarket (quite a small shop) closed down soon after the opening of Metro and seems to have moved somewhere else. Sainsbury’s has opened up a large store on Haram Street, it will be interesting to see how this affects local food stores.

           

Sherlock argues that accessibility is more important than mobility (Ibid., 181) Therefore, city streets should not revolve around the priorities of motorists, rather the pedestrian resident should be catered for and encouraged to go on living in the city. There is a conflict in Cairo between the interests of pedestrians and those of motorists, but as yet Dokki seems to have maintained a healthy balance between the two.

 

R.E. Pahl acknowledges the importance of “urban villages” to the discussion of life in the city generally. While Pahl highlights those “urban villages” established by migrants from the countryside (Pahl, 1969: 27), I emphasize the urban villages where those born and bred in the city have always lived, the Gemeinschaft like areas where the relationships between people are essentially village like. In Shéra Dokki people who interact may not actually know each other at all. The street encourages mingling and conversation. There is a high level of what Eduardo Lozano calls “urbanity”, i.e. “the potential capacity of the inhabitants of a town or city to interact with a sizable number of people and institutions concentrated in that town or city.” (Lozano, 1990: 157) According to Lozano it is the density of population in the city that encourages urbanity. I submit that this density fosters a level of intimacy which is usually associated with the rural Gemeinschaft.

 

Walking along Shéra Dokki one does not encounter many references to the West. There are plenty of the ubiquitous Pepsi freezers but there are no Western shops or restaurants. There is fast food here but it is Egyptian style fast food in the shape of sandwich bars and koshary[7] restaurants[8].There are parts of Cairo that are well stocked with many different kinds of Western restaurant, but Shéra Dokki for the most part is very focused on local food and local culture. McDonald’s and Pizza Hut can be found, however, in nearby Masaha Square. Nowhere on Shéra Dokki can one see evidence of the kind of anti-urban attitudes discussed by Lozano. (Lozano, 1990: 138) Anti-urban seems a strange concept perhaps in an era when the very word urban conjures up so many negative images. Lozana sees the urban experience as essentially positive, however, in so far as it promotes integrated activity on the part of city dwellers. Anything that undermines this experience is seen as “anti-urban”.

 

Not all Cairo streets have the community feeling that is so evident in Shéra Dokki. Haram Street, a much bigger “street”, leads through suburban Cairo towards the Pyramids of Giza.  It is almost impossible to walk the length of Haram Street, it is too long, too lacking in shade on a hot day. There are very few street vendors, there is little to look at as one walks along. There is, as I have already mentioned, a Sainsbury’s outlet, however, a gigantic supermarket with enormous lanes between the aisles, it mirrors Haram Street itself with its fast highway. Shopping malls are also to be found in Haram Street. As Lozano argues shopping malls are a very anti-urban development as they act as a cucoon negating the need to interact with the street as a whole (Ibid., 135, 138). I have always wondered what it was about Haram Street that I found so uncomfortable, Lozano puts his finger on the problem when discussing streets in general : “Today, what should be streets have been changed back into roads without spatial measure or scale, or capacity to encourage urban activities around them, in a reversion of the civilization process…Main Street is nothing more than a memory, and with the loss of the concept of the urban street we have lost the concept of community.” (Ibid., 226)

 

Haram Street is now a road, a road that strings suburban areas together but which has none of the community feel about it that is found in Shéra Dokki. The construction of the flyover (kubri) in Shéra Dokki threatened to turn that street into a road also. The sheer volume of traffic going through Shéra Dokki seems to have prevented this development, however. The traffic has to go slowly during the day, allowing people to j-walk in and out between the cars. The flyover has been tamed by those who use the area underneath as a sleeping area or as a car park.

 

Perhaps streets like Shéra Dokki will be a thing of the past in another ten/twenty years. But for now we can still enjoy streets like this in Cairo, the bustle, the diversity, the choice, and the connectedness of every aspect of daily living. It would be a huge mistake to forfeit urban village life for the sake of faster roads zooming through the city.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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