Pre-modern Cairo’s order came from enclosure orientation, not street frameworks.

Evidence

In the case of pre-modern Cairo, for example, building usually involved opening up an enclosure, such as a courtyard enclosed by rooms or columns, polarised in many cases according to the direction of Mecca. This was so not only with mosques, but with ordinary housing as well, at least up until after the Ottoman conquest. In fact it has been shown, for Cairo, that the orientation of building, of worshipping, and of receiving guests, the direction of Mecca, the path of the sun, the forces of the zodiac and the properties of the prevailing winds were all precisely correlated. With larger houses, the interior space carved out as courtyard and rooms was aligned precisely with such ‘polar’ directions and forces, rather than with the street or with neighbouring buildings. The house, or the shared housing in the case of poorer dwellings, then expanded around this enclosure, in whatever shape and size the presence of neighbouring buildings allowed. Its generally blank and irregular exterior seldom corresponded to the shape, or represented the purpose, of its carefully oriented interior. In this sense there were no exteriors, and the city was never a framework of streets on which structures were placed. As we will see, streets too were enclosures. The city was the spacing of intervals or enclosures forming a continuous materiality. Its order was a question of maintaining, within such enclosures, the proper relationships between directions, forces and movements, not its ability to reveal in material form the determining presence of a non-material plan or meaning. It was an order without frameworks. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 187

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Lewis Mumford and Spiro Kostof on how cities differ when organized around enclosures vs. street grids — the organic vs. planned city debate.
• SEED: An essay angle: how the modern ‘order without frameworks’ — navigation by orientation to forces (sun, Mecca, wind) rather than gridded plans — contrasts with contemporary urban planning assumptions.