Politics in the Crevices

Urban Design and the Making of Property Markets in Cairo and Istanbul

SARAH EL-KAZAZ

In Politics in the Crevices, Sarah El-Kazaz takes readers into the world of urban planning and design practices in Istanbul and Cairo. In this transnational ethnography of neighborhoods undergoing contested rapid transformations, she reveals how the battle for housing has shifted away from traditional political arenas onto private crevices of the city. She outlines how multiple actors—from highly capitalized international NGOs and corporations to city dwellers, bureaucrats, and planning experts—use careful urban design to empower conflicting agendas, whether manipulating property markets to protect affordable housing or corner luxury real estate. El-Kazaz shows that such contemporary politicizations of urban design stem from unresolved struggles at the heart of messy transitions from the welfare state to neoliberalism, which have shifted the politics of redistribution from contested political arenas to design practices operating within market logics, ultimately relocating political struggles onto the city’s most intimate crevices. In so doing, she raises critical questions about the role of market reforms in redistributing resources and challenges readers to rethink neoliberalism and the fundamental ways it shapes cities and politics.

Sarah El-Kazaz is Associate Professor in the Department of Politics and International Studies, SOAS, University of London.

Gaza on Screen

NADIA YAQUB

August 2023

304 pages

Middle East Studies / Postcolonial and Colonial Studies / Media Studies / Film

Rights: World

Gaza’s long association with resistance and humanitarian need has generated a complex and ever shifting range of visual material, including not just news reports and documentaries, but also essay, experimental, and fictional films, militant videos, and solidarity images. Contributors to Gaza on Screen, including scholars and Gazan filmmakers, explore the practice, production, and impact of film and videos from and about the Gaza Strip. Conceptualizing screens—both large and small—as tools for mediation that are laden with power, the volume explores Gazan film and video in relation to humanitarianism and human rights, care, community, environment, mobility and confinement, and decolonization. The volume includes visual material ranging from solidarity broadcasts on Lebanese television, mid-twentieth-century British Pathé newsreels, and fiction films to breaking news, visuals of contemporary militant resistance, documentaries, and found footage films, arguing for visual ecosystem in which differing types of film and video affect and inform each other. Throughout, they demonstrate that screens shape and sustain relationships between Gaza and the world, and help to sustain the possibility of a different future.

Nadia Yaqub is Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, author of Pens, Swords, and the Springs of Art: The Oral Poetry Dueling of Palestinian Weddings in the Galilee and Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution, and coeditor of Bad Girls of the Arab World