Pre-modern Cairo was understood through recurring practices rather than locations

Evidence

Urban life was understood and referred to in written sources ‘by function, never by location’. Or rather, since we saw in the model village that the notion of function itself depends on the partitions of a system of frameworks, the life of the city was understood in terms of the occurrence and reoccurrence of practices, rather than in terms of an ‘architecture’ – material or institutional – that stands apart from life itself, containing and representing the meaning of what was done. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 201

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Mitchell’s enframing argument and to the way ‘function’ itself is a partition-based notion — relevant to the earlier village chapter.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what did manuscript illustrations of Cairo actually depict instead of official buildings?