1Every Ramadan in Egypt, TV commercials take center stage as advertisement agencies compete over the most popular commercial of the season. In 2020, a commercial for Madinaty, Egypt’s largest gated community to date, was the target of heated debates in the press and across social media platforms.1 Occupying an area of thirty-two square kilometers on the eastern outskirts of Cairo, the commercial captured the scale of the project, the abundance of green areas, artificial lakes, large roads, and the range of amenities available to its residents. More importantly, the commercial featured testimonials from various residents expressing the merits of living in Madinaty. For example, a woman dressed in green leather jackets, in a stylishly coiffed hairdo, and wearing bright golden accessories said that stepping into Madinaty felt like walking into “an entirely different place, an entirely different world.” An older woman claimed that Madinaty was the only place she could see herself moving into after living most of her life in Europe. “Here, life is beautiful, there is no pollution,” stated a middle-aged woman jogging, while a young mother pushing a stroller mentioned the “large spaces between the houses” and that “people understand the meaning of ‘privacy’ [in English].” Multiple residents stated that they hardly ever need to leave their gated community. Yet, perhaps the most controversial of all the testimonials was the one coming from one college-aged young woman saying, “everyone here looks alike… it’s a very nice community.”2
- 3 El-Shorouk News. 2020. “Hisham Tala‘at Mustafa: I‘lan Madinaty lam yusi’ li-ayy fard fi al-mujtama (...)
2Upon the release of the commercial, a gush of memes and clips parodying the underlying elitism and class closure of the testimonials went viral across social media platforms. Some clips played the sounds of the Madinaty commercial over homemade footage of everyday life in low-income urban and rural neighborhoods. Memes and popular posts attacked the discriminatory rhetoric of the testimonials which presented Madinaty as the haven of the elite in an otherwise decrepit city, while many commentators hinted at Madinaty’s inferior status vis-à-vis more upscale developments. Across TV talk shows and popular newspapers, Madinaty residents as well as Hisham Talaat Mustafa himself, the controversial CEO of the real estate development company that built Madinaty, defended the commercial, claiming that any classist interpretation was unfounded and misconstrued. “The whole point of the commercial was to highlight the experiences of Madinaty’s residents,” stated Mustafa in a phone call to Al-Hekaya Talk Show, “I don’t understand why this should cause problems or antagonize anyone”.3 Admittedly, Madinaty may not be the most exclusive of Egypt’s gated communities. Yet, its 2020 commercial unabashedly captured the exclusionary logic that has been driving the urban practices of the urban middle and upper classes in Cairo over recent decades, a logic that was easily recognizable to its viewers.
3In this paper, I situate the controversy around the Madinaty commercial within broader social transformations shaping a new elite culture in twenty-first century Cairo. Specifically, I examine how concerns over the spatial segregation of upper-middle and upper-class Egyptians inside gated communities in Cairo’s satellite cities (Mitchell 1999; Denis 2006; Bayat 2012; Abaza 2016) resonate with anxieties about elite nonbelonging that I encountered during more than two years of fieldwork in and around Cairo’s international schools. The paper will outline the class logic that animates elite urban and educational practices in contemporary Egypt, and argue that their convergence in the socialization of Egypt’s young elite has intensified the “symbolic and social boundaries” (Lamont et al. 2001; Lamont and Molnar 2002) around them, to the extent of producing a sense of isolation and nonbelonging among this privileged youth group. By elite nonbelonging I refer to the vernacular idiom “‘adam al-intima,” by which my interlocutors expressed the social and cultural boundaries, real or imagined, that insulated international school students within a Western-inflected class enclave, away from a wider Egyptian national community that purportedly shares cross-cutting socioeconomic and cultural ties. In this context, the notion of nonbelonging carries both a descriptive dimension that foregrounds socioeconomic and cultural sources of exclusion/inclusion, as well as a normative dimension that accuses this elite youth group of appropriating foreign (read Western) cultural and social practices with the underlying intention of disassociating from the Egyptian national community. While elsewhere I address in more detail the cultural production of this class-based conception of belonging/nonbelonging in Egypt (Roushdy 2021), this paper explores its socio-spatial configuration.
- 4 This is an English-medium private school that follows the centralized curriculum of the Egyptian M (...)
4My analysis is based on extended ethnographic research conducted between 2016-2017 and 2020-2022 that followed discourses about elite (non)belonging across multiple sites of upper middle-class social reproduction in New Cairo, including international schools, university campuses, gated communities, shopping malls and a range of recreational areas. During this period, I conducted over eighty formal and informal interviews with international and national school parents, school owners, educators and former students, and engaged in numerous informal conversations with teachers, parents and students in various public and private social settings. My interlocutors were affiliated with sixteen different international schools that reflected the range and diversity of the 250 international schools that currently exist in Egypt. In addition, I spent the greater part of the 2016/2017 academic year following classroom discussions, and school and extracurricular activities that aimed to strengthen student’s knowledge of Egyptian culture and history and to promote civic engagement at one international school in New Cairo. In as far as it created an institutional and pedagogical framework for students’ engagement with questions about belonging and Egyptian identity, this school offered an ideal window onto day-to-day negotiations as well as more in-depth reflections on these issues among students and teachers. Finally, in order to situate international schools within the broader educational field in Egypt, I regularly visited a private nationally-based language school,4 conducted fifteen formal interviews with education experts, activists and policy makers, including a former Minister of Education, attended school fairs, Cairo’s first international education conference, and various public lectures and seminars on education reform in non-governmental organizations and in public and international universities.
5Drawing on these ethnographic encounters, I suggest in this paper that a specific urban imaginary links international schools to gated communities, and ties both to the unique spatiality of satellite cities. Building on scholarship on gated communities and neoliberal urbanization more broadly, I argue that international schooling contributes to the social construction of satellite cities as “non-places” (Augé 1995) that are both physically and symbolically separated from the “real Egypt” located beyond the built and natural borders of satellite cities. I suggest that in constructing satellite cities as bubbles or non-places, international school communities not only fail to recognize the embeddedness of “satellite city life” within the local and national context of Egypt (El-Husseiny 2015), but also restore and intensify class boundaries by symbolically “excluding” elite youth from the national community.
- 5 Scholars and pundits rarely recognize that the urban area bordered by El Katameya Desert in the so (...)
6The urban expansion of Cairo in the early decades of the twenty-first century saw the rise of “satellite cities” as the up-and-coming center of the city. An outcome of economic liberalization and IMF-driven structural adjustment reforms, these newly established urban settlements on the eastern and western outskirts of the “old” city have come about through the selling off of public lands to development contractors (Mitchell 1999; Adham 2004; Wahdan 2009; Sims 2010). Following neoliberal trends in urban expansion and real estate development, they feature a concentration of upscale shopping and recreational areas, exclusive residential gated communities, corporate headquarters as well as private international universities and school campuses (Adham 2004; Abaza 2014; 2016; Shaalan 2014).5 While an important body of literature examined the history and political economy underlying the planning and development of satellite cities (Mitchell 1999; Denis 2006; Singerman 2009; Adham 2004; 2005; Wahdan 2009), whether and how these new spaces of elite sociality are redefining everyday practices and experiences of class and urban belonging has not been fully explored.
- 6 ISN (pseudonym) is a K-12 coeducational school that delivers a US-based curriculum to a predominan (...)
7I was new to “satellite city life” in Egypt when I started my fieldwork in 2016. Six months into my fieldwork, I was extended an invitation to sit through classes in one of the oldest and more exclusive international schools in New Cairo, which I will henceforth refer to as the International School in New Cairo (ISN).6 Thereupon, I moved into a gated condominium development in New Cairo, from which it was only a fifteen-minute drive to ISN. Initially, I was quite pleased with the relatively low traffic I had to navigate to move around New Cairo, and the proximity I enjoyed to many of my field sites, including international university campuses, and the residential and recreational sites where I met my interlocutors from within the community of parents, teachers and students. Yet soon I realized that enjoying the low traffic on my drive to field sites in New Cairo also meant driving at least forty kilometers to attend events organized by NGOs in the central districts in and around Downtown Cairo and even further to reach other schools and interlocutors living in the northwestern suburbs in 6th of October and Sheikh Zayed cities. My experience crossing massive distances to move around the city was not unique to the circumstances of my field research in Cairo. They reflected the massive rescaling of urban life and the creation of a new spatiality around satellite cities, which constructed this new urban life materially and discursively as an isolated “bubble” in Cairo. The following is an attempt to analyze this new enclosed spatiality by juxtaposing two of its most remarkable forms: the compound and the international school.
- 7 Al-qariya al-siyahhiya (touristic village), for example, is the term used to refer to res (...)
- 8 A most recent law in 2021 restricted land sale in newly developed settlements to real estate devel (...)
8In scholarship on neoliberal urban transformations in Egypt – of which New Cairo is an important outcome – “compounds” figure as emblematic of a new form of urbanity and the exclusive and globalizing lifestyle with which it is associated (Mitchell 1999; Adham 2004; Kuppinger 2004; Bayat 2012). The English word compound7 is the vernacular Egyptian word for walled private residential developments that enclose private independent villas, townhouses, semi-detached houses, condominium or high-rise buildings. Most compounds are situated in Cairo’s satellite cities as well as in other edge towns and urban settlements outside of large urban centers across the country. While variation in degrees of exclusivity is noted, all compounds feature one or multiple securitized gates that control entries and exits around the clock. Since their emergence in the 1990s, they have transformed the housing market in Cairo.8
9The proliferation of compounds in satellite cities as the most desirable residential arrangements for Egypt’s middle and upper classes in the twenty-first century has been closely tied to shifts in real estate, housing and city planning in line with neoliberal global trends. Asef Bayat (2012) proposed that compounds relate to a divergence in urban practices in contemporary Cairo that map onto class and spatial privilege. On the one hand, he associated the urban poor with various practices of “stretching out” on the streets in search of informal economic activity, inexpensive leisure, or shelter in central districts. He maintains that well-off segments of society, on the other hand, engage in various practices of “urban enclosure” (Denis 2006, Bayat 2012), a withdrawal from public spaces into residential, social and business enclaves in satellite cities.
10Ethnographic studies of gated communities in Brazil, the United States, Turkey, China and India highlight how this new housing form materializes growing middle and upper-class anxieties about security, a desire to escape from the population density and environmental pollution of modern cities and present them as a new locus for globalized middle-class longing for a lifestyle grounded in material well-being, domesticity and self-transformation (Low 2003; Candan and Kolluoglu 2008; Zhang 2010; Srivastava 2012). The inward-looking and isolated life of gated communities is a cross-cutting theme in the ethnographic literature, which links the desire for gated housing to a more generalized withdrawal of the middle and upper classes from public life and civic engagement.
11In Egypt, the geographical location and architectural design of compounds establish elite withdrawal and closure by separating compound residents twice; first, away from the center of Cairo into satellite cities in a manner that shares many of the characteristics of suburbanization; and second, within walled developments that enclose an elite lifestyle from its immediate urban surrounding. Yet, compounds do not only draw physical boundaries with the “outside world.” Through their names, architectural design and in their advertisement, compounds appeal to aspirations about class-specific conception of global belonging that almost always promise to separate residents from their immediate local surrounding (Kuppinger 2004; Adham 2004; Abaza 2016). These aspirations are grounded in a historically specific configuration of social distinction, in which spatial segregation is a feature of a broader and more complex process of class reproduction premised on a cosmopolitan-inflected distance from the local culture (Adham 2004; de Koning 2009; Peterson 2011; DeVries 2021).
12Across research on Egyptian class culture, the term “cosmopolitan capital” is used to express this generalized construction of social distinction. It denotes in one sense proficiency in English language and other related social skills that are highly valuable in the job market and that are, by and large, foreclosed to those who did not attend private schools (Barsoum 2002; Haeri 1997; Schielke 2012). Yet, a more in-depth analysis of cosmopolitan cultural capital links proficiency in one or multiple European languages to a holistic lifestyle orientation towards Euro-American trends in taste, consumption and social practices that define a so-called cosmopolitan class. To speak fluent English (and/or French) and to be able to mix English and Arabic casually in conversations is one of the most indicative markers of cosmopolitan class belonging that indexes a person’s early exposure to European languages at home and/or in private foreign or language schools. As cultural capital, cosmopolitan capital also implies a situated subjectivity, a habitus, that predisposes cosmopolitan Egyptians to perceive and respond to the social world in a manner that sustains and reproduces their privilege (Bourdieu 1977). As used in scholarship on Egypt, cosmopolitan capital is a category of analysis that reflects an underlying binary in local categories of classification, according to which local and traditional cultural forms and social practices (sha‘bi or baladi) are associated with the poor and working classes, whereas those associated with the middle and upper classes are categorized as modern, Westernized or international (Armbrust 2003; Adham 2004; de Koning 2009; Peterson 2011).
13This emphasis on cosmopolitan-inflected cultural and spatial distancing integral to elite belonging was clearly illustrated in the Madinaty commercial that we encountered earlier, which in promoting real estate, offers a remarkably detailed representation of the kind of “elite” lifestyle practices and patterns of sociality that purportedly distinguishes Egypt’s new globalizing elite. Enclosed within the gates of Madinaty, the commercial showed Egyptians leading lives that strongly echo mass-mediated renditions of American suburbia. Two-story houses, a modern interior, and a grass loan are some of the standard images in compound commercials, which almost always feature women strolling, working out in open spaces, working or dining while dressed in remarkably trendy fashions. Besides passing references to various amenities, an emphasis on similarities between residents (kollena hena shabah ba‘d) and a shared understanding of privacy are foregrounded. Key details about luxurious living in Cairo, such as a heavy reliance on domestic workers for housekeeping, childcare, cooking as well on private drivers are omitted from an American-inflected representation of a middle-class life in this and across popular compound commercials, where family members are shown preparing a meal together and hosting gatherings where all the guests are young, fashionably dressed and unmistakably modern-looking.9
14What this and many others compound commercials in Egypt appeal to is not a romanticized childhood or an idealized construction of community as proposed in research on gated communities in other countries (Low 2003) but to an “elsewhere” – or possibly even an “outside” – to which compounds take Egyptians (Kuppinger 2004; Adham 2004; Abaza 2016). In her examination of Egyptian compound advertisements in the early 2000s, Petra Kuppinger (2004) proposed that the aesthetic appeal to architectural forms, images and sensibilities associated with “life elsewhere” to the exclusion of local forms manufactures a “sense of exterritoriality” that connects Cairo’s upscale market for housing, goods and services. Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman’s (1998) notion of exterritoriality, Kuppinger (2005) suggested that this sense of exterritoriality is the key feature connecting the geographically dispersed exclusive spaces of neoliberalizing Cairo.
15Nowhere is the nexus of exterritorial spaces more pronounced as through the conjunction between gated communities and international schooling, an indispensable element in the construction of this new globalized elite culture in satellite cities. Like compounds, international schools are key sites for the reproduction of cosmopolitan capital in contemporary Egypt. As urban forms, international schools share many of the characteristics of gated communities. If compounds are the site where a new elite domesticity is imagined, international schooling is the vehicle for its cultivation.
- 10 At least 250 international schools have been licensed by the Egyptian Ministry of Education to del (...)
- 11 International school tuition is in the range between 50,000-2000,000 EGP (US$ 2,600-11,000). A mar (...)
16Much like the urban transformations of Cairo, the expansion of an international school marketplace is the outcome of an aggressive educational privatization agenda that created a highly stratified schooling system in Egypt where parents’ financial ability is the only guarantor of their children’s access to quality education (Springborg 2021; Krafft et al. 2019; Sobhy 2012; Faruq 2008). Within short two decades, for-profit international schools have completely supplanted nationally based schooling for growing segments of the upper-middle and upper-classes.10 Following global trends in K-12 international education (Bunnell 2019), these schools deliver an imported educational program from select Western countries (US, UK, Canada, France, Germany) and charge tuition fees only within the reach of high-income households. 11 Students graduate from these schools with accredited secondary school diplomas from the country whose education they received or with an International Baccalaureate Diploma (IB). Today, international schools occupy the highest tier in the Egyptian education system. They have completely supplanted nationally based schooling as the primary school choice of the country’s elite and are widely associated with superior academic and career opportunities.
17Prior to this period, US or UK-based international pre-college education was exclusive to a tiny niche within the cosmopolitan elite which educated its children alongside the children of foreign expats, diplomats and other non-Egyptian residents in less than a handful of schools affiliated with foreign embassies. These so-called standard or traditional international schools that principally target foreign expatriate communities were by and large off-limits to most Egyptians, including affluent families, due to their exorbitantly high tuition fees compared to other private schools and the overall foreign (read: Western and liberal) school culture. Since they did not prepare students for national examinations or offer any Arabic classes, studying at one of these schools also presumed that parents were willing to educate their children abroad or at the American University in Cairo, the only private university that existed in Egypt until 1995. The more mainstream schooling trajectory for middle and upper-class urban families in the past were English or French-medium private language schools that delivered more or less the exact same curriculum and used the same textbooks of public schools, the only exception being that a European language was the principal language of instruction (Haeri 1997; de Koning 2009; Peterson 2011). This includes not for-profit missionary and foreign schools that were nationalized in 1956 and operated as so-called national institutes for languages (al-ma‘ahid al-qawmiyya li-l-lughat) (Salama 1962) as well as for-profit language schools that were established in the 1980s and later. A higher tier of English-medium public schools, al-madaris al-tagribiyya li-l-lughat, also catered to middle-class families during the 1980s and 90s. Until the 1990s, almost all of these schools prepared students for the national secondary school examination, al-thanawiyya al-‘amma (Herrera and Torres 2006; Cochran 2008).
- 12 The most obvious reason for the concentration of private for-profit schools in New Cairo and other (...)
18While education research has shown how the privatization, marketization and internationalization of education in recent decades has exacerbated educational inequalities between Egyptian students in public and private schools (Sobhy 2012; Krafft, Elbadawy, and Sieverding 2019), how disparities in educational trajectories are mediated through the neoliberal restructuring of urban life in Egypt has not been fully addressed (Nambissan 2021; Lipman 2011; Cucchiara 2008). Yet, this relationship is most striking in the overlapping expansion of private for-profit schooling and real estate development in Cairo’s satellite cities. International schools are by and large concentrated in and around the satellite cities of New Cairo and the 6th of October/Sheikh Zayed, located at the southeastern and northwestern edges of Greater Cairo. In the following, I show how international schools not only serve the vitalization of the ongoing development and expansion of satellite cities, but are ideologically imbricated in the creation of satellite cities as “lifestyle enclaves” (Lamont et al. 1996) that facilitate the socio-spatial and cultural segregation of the elite from more economically integrated public spaces.12
19Like compounds, the campuses of international schools are by and large walled enclaves enclosed physically and symbolically from their immediate surroundings. The campus of ISN, for example, covers an area of 5,200-square meters between a gigantic shopping mall and a government complex. All three developments are securely enclosed behind cement walls. Five other international schools are located in the same vicinity as ISN, including a Canadian, British, German and American international school. Like ISN, all of these schools were established in the early 2000s and occupy similar fortified campuses. Other than the flags of Egypt and the foreign country with which the school is affiliated (the UK, Canada, Germany and the US), no other structures were visible behind the campus walls.
20Surrounding the school area are construction sites stretching into the horizon in all directions; the desert remaining the most pervasive feature of the landscape. One hardly sees any pedestrians on the streets that separate the school campus from the adjacent complexes: a gated commercial center, apartment buildings, and other school campuses. As across New Cairo, the rare pedestrians on the streets are most commonly domestic or other blue-collar workers who do not have work-related transportation privileges and need to walk from the main road (Road 90), the final stop of most shared buses, towards their place of work.
21As an outsider to the community of ISN, entering the school required the daily routine of leaving my national identification card at the security office at the gate, being handed a red band that I had to wear around my neck throughout the entire duration of my visit until I exchanged it for my ID card upon leaving the school premises. Inside the school building, a security guard would escort me all the way to the high school administrative office where I waited for the teacher who had invited me to sit in on her classes, to walk me to the classroom where she held her classes. Although my movement around campus became less restricted as I got to know some of the teachers and students better, the strict guidelines I had to follow in order to honor the invitation to visit the school reflected the enclosed space of the school. While restricted access is a standard feature in Egyptian schools, the size of the ISN campus and the absence of any encroaching buildings in its immediate surrounding create a sense of physical insulation that isolates the school culture from the world outside it.
22While not all private schools may afford the same sense of spatial enclosure of the ISN campus, the social construction of the international school campus as a place that is physically and culturally detached from the broader urban space within which it is located is a dominant theme that cuts across all the promotion of international schools distributed in school fairs, featured on school websites, or on billboards across the streets of Cairo.13 In this new educational market, the school campus stands front and center. References to open fields and greenery that promise a healthy and safe environment as well as images of happy children running freely are recurrent themes in the marketing of international schools (Figure 1). Classrooms are almost often described as spacious and air-conditioned, equipped with the latest technology, or well-lit and ventilated . Some promotional material even include reference to heated indoor swimming pool, smart boards, computers, etc. These common themes in the promotion of international schools suggest a material and spatial dimension to international schooling that emphasized their distinction from the modest facilities of national schools and the separation of the school culture from an “outdated” national educational culture.
Figure 1. School promotional flyer showing European-looking boys running in an open green field foregrounding a modern school building
23Explicit reference to Western educational trends, foreign educational boards or institutions and native English speakers cut across international school advertisement. With the exception of school names that explicitly signal an Islamic identity, such as al-Bashayer, al-Hayat or al-Noor, almost all schools bear English names while almost all promotional material is communicated primarily in English. French schools commonly distribute promotional material in French. Few schools include any specific information about the educational program or type of training or expertise of its teachers, and most indicate adopting the latest trends in American education or describe their teachers as native speakers. The strong appeal to imported educational trends and expertise is moreover visually represented in the promotional material. An image of a Western (white) teacher is commonly featured in international school brochures (Figure 2 and 3).
Figure 2. School promotional flyer showing a European-looking teacher helping a boy and a girl in school uniform identify English names for different activities
Figure 3. The homepage of the Cairo English School Website showing Egyptian-looking children encircling a European-looking teacher in a shaded outdoor space surrounded by trees and green bushes
24Like the promotional rhetoric of gated communities, the marketing rhetoric of international school appeal to an elsewhere that can be appropriated and enjoyed within the enclosed space of the school campus, where children will be exposed to the same education English students (or American or German or French or Canadian) receive, and even to learn to do so with a native-like accent. Notwithstanding multiple gaps between what is promoted about compounds and international schools, and the everyday reality of using these spaces, their construction as exterritorial, decontextualized and insulated spaces remained one of the most recurrent themes in my fieldwork interactions with parents, teachers, students and former students.
25During fieldwork, many international school teachers and parents described the life of the privileged youth educated in these schools as a “bubble” or used the designation “compound kids” as a shorthand for the unique spatiality that tied them to the gated communities of Cairo’s satellite cities. Few of the internationally educated youth in my study contested their characterization. Many openly accepted their likeness to “strangers” or presented themselves as “not very Egyptian,” “like foreigners,” “a minority” and many other variations of ways of expressing an ambivalent sense of belonging among this elite youth group. In the following, I show how such idioms were integral to dominant constructions of satellite city life, and how these in turn patterned the way in which this young elite understood its relationship to a broader national community.
26The strong association between international schooling and satellite city life reappeared during conversations with people from within and outside the international school communities with which I was interacting during my fieldwork in Cairo. This association was never favorable. At ISN, teachers commonly referred to their students as “compound kids,” as shorthand for the sheltered and segregated life they lead in satellite cities. Although all these teachers identified with many of the lifestyle practices of their students, they did not share the degree of wealth common across ISN families. Most ISN teachers were also born and/or raised abroad, mainly in Europe and North America, and carried dual nationalities. A widely shared assumption among these teachers was that international school students grow up in a compound, attend school in walled up campuses – many of which are located inside compounds –, hang out with friends in other compounds or in shopping malls and private clubs and ultimately attend one of Egypt’s private international universities (unless they attend college abroad), without ever having to interact with people from outside of their “bubble.” Most of the students and parents I met recognized this itinerary and found it an accurate representation of their and their children’s lives. Echoing dominant tropes in public debates about gated communities, these conversations constructed satellite cities as insulated places, “bubbles,” that bar privileged youth from acquiring an understanding and appreciation of the day-to-day challenges of navigating life in Egypt and, more specifically, an awareness of class disparities. Exposure to “international education,” according to this discourse, helped further alienate this young elite in Egyptian society.
27Ambivalence about the implications of these class-specific urban and educational practices was clearly articulated in my interviews and conversations with parents, who were often concerned about how this new urban elite culture was shaping their children’s sense of belonging in Egypt. For example, during a lunch party hosted by international-school parents in their villa in El Shorouk gated community, one of the guests described international school students as “part of a big experiment.” An architect in his early forties, and father of two children at a primary international German school in New Cairo, Mustafa (pseudonym) claimed that
“neither our generation nor the generation of our parents or grandparents has ever led a life of this sort… Hopping from one compound to the other... We really have no way of knowing what will come out of our children.”
- 14 Al-Tagammu‘ al-khamis (The Fifth Settlement) is one of the districts of New Cairo.
28Although Mustafa lived in Maadi, an old upper-middle class neighborhood in the southern part of Cairo popular among foreign expats, his son lived on permanent basis with his ex-wife in a compound in New Cairo. He had supported his ex-wife’s choice to live in New Cairo because it was also where her family lived and it was close to his son’s school. He recognized the convenience of living inside a compound in New Cairo: the greenery, the accessibility to most entertainment venues for children as well as the low traffic and relatively cleaner air. Yet, he was glad that his choice to stay in Maadi was exposing his son to life outside of New Cairo, “to see how the world outside of Tagammu‘14 is like.”
29Muna (pseudonym), the hostess, described her children’s life in Egypt as a movement between “islands.” She admitted that she did not grow up in an egalitarian society herself in the 1970s and 80s, and that access to exclusive spaces, like the sports club, private schools and the exclusive Mediterranean beaches in Alexandria and al-‘Agami shaped her own childhood and youth. She insisted, nonetheless, that there was something fundamentally different about her children’s lifestyle:
“We were privileged, but we were not as afraid of crossing these boundaries when we wanted to. Some of us rode public buses… We used to walk to each other’s homes… My children wouldn’t know how to stop a taxi on the street… I don’t think they walk anywhere outside of our compound or the mall… They feel too distant and strange to attempt to engage with others outside their circles (dawa’irhum)”
30While parents’ narratives about their past may be mediated by a nostalgic reminiscence of “the good old days,” their characterizations of their children’s lives emphasized a sense of social distance that they did not share or identify with, one that was hardly contested in the self-presentation and personal narratives of international school students who grew up in and around satellite cities.
31In the class discussions that I observed at ISN and in conversations with former students, these young people mostly supported and reiterated their characterization as socially “disconnected” (munfasilin) and “isolated” (mun‘azilin) and attributed a fraught sense of belonging to their privilege as children of affluent families in Cairo, who did not share experiences and practices that they assumed all other Egyptians shared. This included their ability to skip mundane and everyday activities like “standing in line” to process paperwork in a government office by paying someone to run such errands on their behalf, or to the unlikelihood to be unduly stopped by police officers for questioning or interrogation in their expensive cars. Not needing to walk on the streets or to use public facilities, including schools, were other ways in which this elite youth group articulated their privilege-based sense of isolation in Egypt. In students’ accounts, these everyday activities were presented as part and parcel of an “Egyptian life” that they imagined existed outside the social and spatial bounds of their community.
32At ISN, a pedagogical concern with students’ sense of belonging was central to a range of curricular and extracurricular activities that aimed to engage students in community service and other volunteer activities, and to expose them to issues of inequality in specialized classes on Egyptian society and culture. During multiple conversations with the teachers who oversaw these activities over my years of fieldwork, the most consistent objective they all articulated was to raise students’ awareness of their secluded lifestyle and their narrow perspective on Egyptian life, to expose them to what one of the teachers referred to as “the real Egypt.” In class discussions, these teachers regularly highlighted the “uprootedness” of ISN students and emphasized the cultural, economic and social gap that rendered them blind to what life was like for the majority of Egyptians, the “people who exist outside of their little compound in Tagammu‘.”
- 15 Removing the determiner al and other specification of place names and using an indefinite shortene (...)
33Notwithstanding their dedication, many of these teachers were skeptical about the ability of school activities, including the ones they oversaw, to effect meaningful change in the way in which their students understand and relate to the broader society. Besides the burden of securing institutional and governmental permissions in order to develop a course or organize an extracurricular activity, teachers regularly highlighted the socio-spatial bubble within which many of the students lived, where “in a country of 100 million, they always end up bumping into the same faces.” Outside of Cairo, this geography extended to the coast of the Mediterranean in the northwestern part of the country during the summer seasons, and to the beaches of the Red Sea at Ain Sokhna and El Gouna to the southeast of Cairo during other holidays, what one of the teachers, herself a graduate of ISN, liked to refer to as the extended bubble of Sahil-Sokhna-Gouna (al-Sahil al-Shamali – al-‘Ayn al-Sukhna – al-Guna).15
34“Bubbles” are ubiquitous in both lay and scholarly debates about urban elite communities, where they express the conjunction of socio-spatial, structural, and cultural factors in demarcating class boundaries. Yet, what is particularly remarkable about the symbolic configuration of the bubble that encloses the gated community-international school nexus is its binary construction of the space inside/outside the bubble along an inauthentic/authentic axis. Similar to the way in which the Madinaty resident quoted above described stepping into her gated community as “stepping into an entirely different world,” the narratives of the international school parents, teachers and students examined above articulated a sense of spatial enclosure that constructed elite spaces as socially disconnected and removed in a manner that strongly echoes Marc Augé’s (1995) dualistic conception of places and non-places.
35While places, according to Augé, are anthropological constructions of space grounded in a cultural, historical and geographic context, a non-place is a “space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity” (77-8). Augé’s notion of non-places focused primarily on contemporary places of transit, like airports, hotels or shopping malls, which articulate globalized and postmodern constructions of spatiality. He contrasts the decontextualized configurations of these non-places with anthropological places, which “want to be – people want them to be – places of identity, of relations and of history” (52 – italics are mine). Augé’s distinction between places and non-places offers a compelling analogy to the binary spatial imaginary that infused the narratives of parents, teachers and students, and provides a new vantage point for thinking about the ways in which globalizing architectural forms and neoliberal urban patterns might interact and reproduce decidedly local practices of class closure.
36In dividing Egypt into a real and unreal Egypt, outside and inside the bubble respectively, anxieties about elite nonbelonging appealed to an ideological conception of space where places, and the people that occupied them, were either authentic, grounded in history and culture, or they were not. According to this spatial imaginary, gated communities and other global architectural forms in satellite cities, just like international schools, were inherently external to this “anthropological place”. As non-places, they produced a socially and culturally uprooted elite.
37This understanding was clearly articulated in the school activities and pedagogical discourses about inequality and privilege that I observed at ISN. While these aimed to expose the students to the embeddedness of their privileged lives within a broader socioeconomic and political context, they produced a fixed and possibly essentialized construction of a “real Egypt” and “real Egyptians” unaffected by the broader economic and political transformations reshaping urban life in Cairo. Likewise, community service activities organized by the school only allowed students a momentary exposure to life beyond their elite spaces, an experience that validated, rather than contested, students’ ambivalent sense of belonging. At their graduation, many of the students I met reiterated a sense of “living like strangers in Egypt” and presented wealth and a globally oriented lifestyle as inherently incompatible with an Egyptianness defined by poverty, steeped in local cultural forms and practices, and impervious to the Western-inflected cosmopolitanism of the educated upper-middle and upper classes.
- 16 During my research, many international school students mentioned improving their Arabic language, (...)
- 17 Given a significant gap in the quality of education offered in international schools compared to s (...)
38Ironically, this emphasis on the “unrealness” and “bubbled up” geography of elite lifestyle reverberated the marketing tropes of gated communities and inadvertently reproduced the class logic that animated the urban and cultural flight of affluent families to gated communities and private international schools in the first place. The question is not about the existence of strong material and symbolic boundaries that separate the everyday life of young people growing up privileged in and around Cairo’s satellite cities. This is an undeniable reality. Rather, it is about how discourses about the bubble attribute a symbolic and moral quality to class boundaries that obscure, rather than highlight, its material underpinning. Instead of engaging policies and practices that intensify structural inequalities, for example, “the bubble” – as idiom – foregrounds romanticized conceptions of authentic and inauthentic Egyptianness that reduces social inequalities to elite lifestyle choices. Not only does this framing of elite segregation place the burden of challenging class boundaries on individual practices (be it cultural or social),16 but it also fails to recognize the global structures of inequality that inform and guide these local elite practices. Like the promotional material of gated communities and international schools, the narratives about compounds kids and the “bubble” present elite nonbelonging as the outcome of a calculated and targeted urban and educational choice with thought-out consequences. However, this clearly differs from the narratives of the parents, teachers and students examined above, many of whom express a general sense of ambivalence and uncertainty about the ramifications of these choices – what Mustafa described as an “experiment.” Like the teachers discussed above, many of my interlocutors from within international school communities articulated a desire to carve a path out of the “bubble” while suspecting that considering any such path would not be viable.17
- 18 Cairo proper is 600 km2, 410 km2 “formal” and 190 km2 “informal” (Sims 2020).
39Notwithstanding multiple references to the restrictive geography that circumscribed the movement of internationally educated youth across the city, it is hard to imagine that any person, especially a school-aged adolescent, who lives in a city as big and populous as Cairo, has ever been exposed to more than the few neighborhoods or districts where their home, school and a few other intimate places are located. Moreover, New Cairo and its extensions, for example, stretches over an area about 777 km2 (Sims 2020), larger than most central districts of Cairo combined.18
- 19 The more exclusive sports clubs in Cairo were established during the colonial period to serve the (...)
40As mentioned above, few parents, especially those who attended foreign schools themselves, were able to claim having been exposed to more diverse and less segregated spaces as their children. Although all foreign private schools were centrally located in more mixed-class neighborhoods in and around Downtown Cairo, many foreign educated parents spent their childhood and youth outside of school in one of Cairo’s private sports clubs that were exclusive to members. Since club memberships was inherited from parents or grandparents, the club formed a closely-knit community where everyone claimed to know everyone (de Koning 2009).19 Parents who attended public schools almost always lived in the same neighborhood as their school and often remained within their neighborhoods for most social and commercial activities. In probing families about their patterns of mobility across the city, a few revealed moving from New Cairo, at the southeastern edges of Cairo, to 6th of October City, at the northeastern edge of the city at least a few times a month. Many visited relatives or friends who lived in central districts or in other cities on regular basis. Yet, rather than challenging elite segregation, patterns of mobility between and within satellite cities and across Greater Cairo appear to intensify young people’s sense of isolation and nonbelonging.
- 20 Ahmed’s family moved to El Shorouk City a few months after this meeting.
41Take Ahmed’s narrative for example. Ahmed (pseudonym) attended the International School in New Cairo before starting college at the American University in Cairo, which, in 2010, also relocated to its new campus in New Cairo. He was a senior in college when we met and was in the process of applying to graduate programs in Europe and was quite eager to travel right upon graduating. “Getting out of the bubble” was one of Ahmed’s main motivations behind pursuing post-graduate education abroad; an argument in favor of travelling that was reiterated among a few of the parents I met who were sending their kids off to attend college abroad. Although Ahmed’s “bubble” was not as spatially confined to New Cairo because he lived in Masr al-Gedida at the time,20 an upscale neighborhood in eastern Cairo, and he went out with friends in Zamalek, an upscale neighborhood near the old center of the city to the west, he described his relationship to the city, and the country at large, as highly circumscribed within these “islands”.
42One day, I was meeting Ahmed with another female friend of his, Lina (pseudonym), in a Starbucks Café in the mall right outside of his university when he recounted an incident that happened to him a few days earlier. He was driving his car to Zamalek from school when he had an accident on the road (that passed by the cemeteries of al-Wafa’ wa-l-Amal). He called his regular mechanic, but he was not available and suggested that Ahmed drives his car to one of his mechanic friends in al-Hirafyin, a workshop district on the eastern outskirts of Cairo, not too far from New Cairo. Ahmed felt extremely nervous about driving all the way to al-Hirafyin, a neighborhood of which he knew nothing but recognized as a low-income neighborhood. He recounted his sudden uneasiness with his choice of clothing, his ear piercing, and his ignorance of the Arabic words for car parts. It was not his safety that he was worried about, but what this encounter confirmed about his privileged life in Egypt, that he even lacked the linguistic ability to venture outside of his “bubble.” Lina sighed upon hearing Ahmed’s account. As a girl, it was nearly impossible for her to even imagine going through such an experience because as most girls in her social class, she would immediately call on her father, a guy friend or someone her family hires to take care of her broken car. She would just order an Uber and leave the car to whoever came to help.
43While my exchange with Ahmed and Lina stood out for their self-critical engagement with their privilege, it ideally captures many of the contradictions that structure the education and socialization of elite youth in and around Cairo’s satellite cities. Rather than projecting a sense of freedom, control and agility in their socio-spatial practices, their narrative relates feelings of estrangement, insecurity and flight from the city. While their young age or personal characteristics may have been the source for their sense of vulnerability, it was in fact the very social, economic and cultural practices that secured their position among the urban elite, that which they blamed for their shared, albeit distinct, estrangement. The extent to which their narratives reflect an honest projection of reality and whether they may be intensified or possibly exaggerated due to the young age of these interlocutors are valid concerns that, nonetheless, do not alter the broader structural and socio-spatial conditions that inform their perceptions. In their emphasis on a sense of social disconnectedness and social isolation, their narrative resonates with wider concerns about elite nonbelonging shared across international school parents and teachers, and serve almost as a confirmation of the pertinence, if not success, of elite segregation as an urban and educational objective.
44While compound commercials offer a tangible documentation of the centrality of spatial segregation in the development of upscale housing projects, they do not capture the everyday ways in which this desired spatial form is produced and solidified through social and cultural practices. In this paper, I proposed that the expansion of international schooling into a vital institution of elite production in contemporary Egypt presents an important vantage point for tracing the mechanism by which urban practices engender cultural and symbolic class boundaries, and how these boundaries in turn give meaning and solidify material and spatial practices (Bourdieu 1977).
45I have taken the ambivalent sense of belonging that I found widespread among Egypt’s young elite as an analytical puzzle from which to interrogate the relationship between globally oriented socialization practices and the spatial rearrangement of upper-middle and upper-class urban life around newly established satellite cities. I argued that as key vehicle in elite belonging in contemporary Egypt, this urban-educational nexus expresses a new configuration of longstanding practices of social distinction under changing urban and socioeconomic conditions in the context of neoliberal globalization. In this new historical context, globalizing class aspirations are imbricated with a colonially inspired and Western-inflected conception of cultural capital as both the motivation behind as well as the ultimate objective of elite educational and urban practices.
46Central to the analysis was how critical and socially progressive discourses about privilege and inequality that circulated across the international school communities I encountered in my fieldwork, and which are more widely shared across public and private debates in Egypt, appropriate rigid and normative conceptions of national belonging and nonbelonging, which inadvertently validate and intensify self-exclusion among this elite youth group. Here, the “bubble” serves both as an idiom for criticizing elite closure and segregation as well as the implicit objective behind globalizing educational and urban practices. If we go back to the Madinaty commercial, “here everyone looks alike” appears both as marketing slogan that attends to class desires for spatial segregation, as well as an explanation for the ambivalent sense of belonging of compounds kids. Yet, critics of the “bubble” are not only those excluded from it. As this paper has shown, anxieties about the implications of spatial and educational segregation run across the communities that enjoy these privileges. The accounts of parents, teacher and the students themselves suggest a Janus-faced notion of social privilege in contemporary Egypt, wherein guaranteeing children’s academic and professional success in a globalizing world seems to come at the cost of – or at least challenges – their sense of national belonging.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Marine Poirier and the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback on multiple drafts of this paper. Betty Anderson, Hania Sobhy, Ian Morrison and Agnès Deboulet have offered valuable feedback on earlier iterations. The writing of this paper was supported by the CEDEJ-IFAO Common Field Fellowship.