Rethinking “City as Archive”: Rumors and the Subterrain in Istanbul and Cairo 

• In Event: Urban Politics in the Middle East and North Africa

Abstract

With the material turn in the social sciences, there is a recent wave of scholarship grounded in urban studies that has turned to the city as an archive in itself. While this scholarship is inviting us to interrogate the built environment as a repository of past, present and future archives, the ways in which this approach has been deployed in practice has tended to remain quite discursive in its understanding of the archives unearthed through the city. In this piece, I re-center the materiality of the built environment in our understanding of the city as an archival repository through a grounded analysis of a multi-sited ethnography of urban transformation projects in contemporary Istanbul and Cairo. In particular, I focus on how we can understand the politics of conspiracy theories and politicized rumours differently if we understand how they get enmeshed in a history of the subterranean materiality of the city in both Cairo and Istanbul. A focus on how the archival repository found in the layered subterranean ecologies of both cities allows us to see the linkages made between past, present, and future through the city’s materiality, and ultimately re-center a material-cultural modality for mobilizing the “city as archive” in our study of the political. 

Author

• Sarah El-Kazaz, SOAS, University of London