Introduction

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.

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.

The Spatialization of Elite Belonging in Satellite Cities

Compounds and the Promotion of a Globalized Elite Culture

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).

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.

New Schools for a New Elite

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).

The International School-Compound Nexus

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.

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).

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.

Satellite City Life and the Sense of National Belonging

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.

Compound Kids

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.”

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‘.”

Satellite Cities as “Non-Places”

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.

Beyond the Bubble

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.

Conclusion

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.