Cairo’s streets lacked the representational codes Europeans used to perceive a plan

Evidence

Melville could find no point of view within the city, and therefore no picture. What this meant, in turn, was that there seemed to be no plan. As I suggested earlier when discussing world exhibitions, the separation of an observer from an object-world was something a European experienced in terms of a code or plan. He expected there to be something that was somehow set apart from ‘things themselves’ as a guide, a sign, a map, a text, or a set of instructions about how to proceed. But in the Middle Eastern city nothing stood apart and addressed itself in this way to the outsider, to the observing subject. There were no names to the streets and no street signs, no open spaces with imposing façades, and no maps. The city refused to offer itself in this way as a representation of something, because it had not been built as one. It had not been arranged, that is, to effect the presence of some separate plan or meaning. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 125

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s earlier world-exhibition analysis; also resonates with de Certeau’s walking the city and with how spatial perception is culturally trained.
• SEED: An essay angle: how cities that were not built as representations resist the tourist/observer gaze — what ‘no plan’ does to perception and why visitors panic without it.