How has the battle for housing shifted away from traditional political arenas onto private crevices of the city? At this event we will dicuss Politics in the Crevices which explores the world of urban planning and design practices in Istanbul and Cairo.

This transnational ethnography of neighborhoods undergoing contested rapid transformations, outlines how multiple actors—from highly capitalised international NGOs and corporations to city dwellers, bureaucrats, and planning experts—use careful urban design to empower conflicting agendas, whether manipulating property markets to protect affordable housing or corner luxury real estate. Such contemporary politicisations of urban design stem from unresolved struggles at the heart of messy transitions from the welfare state to neoliberalism, which have shifted the politics of redistribution from contested political arenas to design practices operating within market logics, relocating political struggles onto the city’s most intimate crevices. 

Meet our speaker and chair

Sarah El-Kazaz is Senior Lecturer in the politics department at SOAS, University of London and author of Politics in the Crevices: Urban Design and the Making of Property Markets in Cairo and Istanbul (Duke UP, 2023). Her research interests include: critical political economy, urbanism, infrastructure and digital politics, and her new book project investigates the politics of digital infrastructures by following “Cloud” technologies across the Global South. 

Mai Taha is Assistant Professor in Human Rights at the Department of Sociology. Her research explores the different scales of revolution that draw out historical tensions arising in workers’ movements, feminist movements and anticolonial liberation movements.