The Urban Supplement: Formality and Informality in Cairo

Abstract

As our globe becomes increasingly urbanized, debates about the future city often oppose formal planning with informal growth. This opposition frames how we imagine what the city is and could be: either planned formal megaproject or sprawling informal slum. Cairo, with its extensive informality and planned desert suburbs, is a prime example of this opposition. However, this dissertation challenges the idea that formality and informality are separate. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s concept of supplementarity, this dissertation argues that informality is interior and necessary to formality. To build on this claim, this dissertation treats the city as a medium. It claims that cities record, transmit, and process relations. However, as media theory explains, mediation is defined as much by noise as by signal. From this perspective, this dissertation argues that informality is the generative noise of the urban medium. In order to make these claims, this dissertation analyzes a variety of materials. It looks at the reality of Cairo’s urbanism through an analysis of informal development and the New Administrative Capital being built in the desert east of Cairo. It also looks at imaginations of possible futures for Cairo’s development through two novels, Ahmed Naji’s Using Life and Ahmed Khaled Towfik’s Utopia, and the urban projects of design and research NGO CLUSTER. In conclusion, the dissertation argues that informality is a generative excess that produces spaces of autonomy in the city.