Year: 2010
Type: article
Abstract: Cairo, a divided city home to many numerous worlds within, is part of the global condition which characterizes cities of the developing South. While a new network of 'global spaces' (Oncu & Weyland, 1997: 1) occupied by five-star hotels, multinational companies and world-class shopping malls has invaded its metropolitan life, beyond the sleek facade of Cairo's urban skylines, an altogether different story subsists. Although its modern 'global spaces' have become zones of "first world" sophistication and global belonging for some, for the vast majority, they are unattainable zones of exclusion and segregation which bar them from taking part in these acts of belonging. Thus, Cairo looked at from ‘below’ reveals a gloomier yet increasingly more dynamic and unpredictable narrative of struggle: a daily struggle for space, identity and recognition. Such juxtapositions and inconsistencies, characteristic of contemporary cosmopolitan cities, have become a backdrop against which fresh possibilities for new and unusual forms of imagination and belonging are constantly being created and re-created. By understanding cosmopolitanism not as westernization, but as a form of internal heterogeneity, where through personal strategies and performance we incorporate the global into our own local repertoires, this paper is arguing that it is lower middle class Egyptian youth who are more deserving of the cosmopolitan label owing to their ability to undergo a careful and inclusive negotiation between alternative cultural repertoires. It is important to note that in the Egyptian context, the lower middle class have many characteristics that the west would associate with the working class.
Source: Arab Media and Society.
DOI: 10.70090/hes10ycc
Author: Heba Elsayed
Language: English
Subfield: Urban Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4402961839