Tanzim meant street-laying regulation and named Egypt’s Department of Public Works.

Evidence

The Delta town of Tanta, which gained a sizeable European colony during Isma`il’s reign, was one of several provincial centres outside Cairo to undergo these new methods of ‘organisation’. ‘Its lanes were narrow and disorganised’, explained the Under-Secretary of the new Bureau of Schools, in a textbook he wrote on Egyptian geography. ‘They were damp and putrid because the air could not move and the sun could not enter.’ What was required was tanzim, a word often translated as ‘modernisation’ for this period, though it means something more like ‘organisation’ or ‘regulation’. In context it could mean simply ‘the laying out of streets’, and it became the name of the Department of Public Works. Tanta, along with most other large towns of Egypt in this period, received two officials appointed from Cairo, a Planning Engineer and a Medical Officer, under whose orders houses were pulled down to cut open the blind alleys that previously lead into courtyards, and great thoroughfares across the town were opened up. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 220

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies that tanzim was mistranslated as ‘modernisation’ when it actually meant ‘organisation’/‘regulation’ — a useful terminological correction.