Through the Tide: Adaptive Reuse, Creative Industries, and the Politics of Arts-Led Redevelopment in Downtown Cairo
Graduate thesis (2020)

Abstract

The ongoing relocation of administrative and ministerial functions to the New Administrative Capital is leaving an array of late-19th to mid-20th century buildings in central Cairo vacant and awaiting conversion. Its role previously limited to providing a clean slate for private development through “restoring order,” the state is now looking to private developers’ decade-long experience with arts-led redevelopment in Downtown that has fully materialized with the gush of creative industries since 2011. Descendants of the 1990s contemporary arts scene and the earlier 1970s literary counterculture, Downtown’s creative industries emerged in a rare period of complete creative autonomy during and after the 2011 revolution. They have taken a distinctive form right in between an extralegal marginal “creative underclass” and a formalized “creative elite.” Inspired by the Global North’s model of instrumentalization of arts and culture to “revitalize” decaying downtowns, specialized private developers were instead faced with a creative scene saturated with socially and politically subversive overtones. In tandem with the state’s efforts to sterilize Downtown of all remnants of dissidence and informality, Downtown’s creative industries have undergone a process of capitalistic conditioning. Among cases of co-optation, re-framing, and resistance, entrepreneurial creative spaces have sprung up—presenting a sanitized version of creativity ideal for neoliberal redevelopment agendas. Concerns about gentrification are often shut down as an imported Anglo-American construct that has no place in the Global South. This has inspired a new discourse that attempts to uproot, redefine, and localize the concept. This thesis attempts to plug into this dialogue by unraveling the multi-layered convolutions of heritage, capital, art, and dissidence, and analyzing their implications on the social and built environments. Through looking at the intersections between adaptive reuse, creative industries, and arts-led redevelopment, an attempt is made to understand post-2011 Downtown Cairo. And by looking through Cairo’s lens, the shapes adaptive reuse and creative industries take become clear representations of changing socioeconomic and political narratives.