European-style boulevards in Cairo destroyed hundreds of inhabited houses.

Evidence

There followed the greatest period of construction and demolition in the city since the growth of Mamluk Cairo in the 1300s. A new structure was laid out between the northern and western edges of the existing city and its new gateway from Alexandria and Europe, the railway station, with plots made available to anyone who would construct a building with a European façade. ‘The transformation of the city of Cairo from an aesthetic point of view’, as it was described by one of those responsible, required ‘the filling in and levelling of the waste land around the city, the opening up of main streets and new arteries, the creation of squares and open places, the planting of trees, the surfacing of roads, the construction of drains, and regular cleaning and watering’. This spatial ordering in turn required ‘the removal of certain human agglomerations from the interior’, for as the map overleaf shows the new streets did not leave the existing city intact. From Khedive Isma`il’s new palace of Abdin, close to the palace on Darb al-Gamamiz housing the new schools, the Boulevard Muhammad Ali was ploughed diagonally through the old city. It was two kilometres long, and in its path stood almost four hundred large houses, three hundred smaller ones, and a great number of mosques, mills, bakeries and bath-houses. These were all destroyed, or cut in half and left standing like dolls’ houses with no outer wall, so that when the road was completed the scene resembled ‘a city that has recently been shelled – houses in all stages of delapidation, though still inhabited, giving most odd views of domestic interiors, frowning down upon you’. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 216

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Haussmann’s Paris boulevards and the general 19th-century project of ‘opening up’ old cities — a pattern echoed in the ‘Grafting & Growth’ piece’s theme of infrastructure reshaping urban life. — connects to: Moses’ highways displaced 250,000 people and destroyed whole neighborhoods.
• SEED: Essay angle: the modernist boulevard as a technique of erasure — what it costs to ‘open up’ a city, told through the doll’s-house cut-open buildings that remained inhabited.