The Naked City

 

This is a marvelous romantic interpretation of the city, whereas not only the dear memories and accustomed places are defining the city, from personal attachments and routine needs, but also highlighting the principal core discretion of both places and movement. Regardless of our key geographical preferences and spatial needs, we are mostly limited, or driven by movement constraints and options. This is where cities are efficiently integrated or forcibly fragmented.

Yasser ElsheshtawyYasser Elsheshtawy Verified • 1stAdjunct Professor of Architecture at Columbia University in the City of New YorkAdjunct Professor of Architecture at Columbia University in the City of New York
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From my Cairo project. Coming soon:

We never really live a city as a whole. We carry it in fragments—streets, corners, cafés, houses—that we stitch together into something that becomes uniquely ours. Each person builds their own city, shaped by memory, by daily rhythms, by the places that mattered most. My Cairo is no exception.

I lived there for fifteen years, from 1973 until 1988. I was nine when we moved from Germany, and Cairo became the place where I grew up, came of age, and found a sense of belonging. The only city I lived in longer was Al Ain in the UAE, nearly twenty years from 1997 to 2017. But Al Ain, as kind and welcoming as it was, never felt like home. Its people—especially my students, many of whom I still cherish—were among the warmest I have ever met. But it was not Cairo.

So how does one hold onto this elusive feeling of belonging? The Situationists of the 1960s wrestled with the same question in Paris. By drifting—what they called dérive—they made maps that showed not monuments or grids, but the hidden corners and secret passageways that revealed how the city really lived in them. They called this map The Naked City. It made me wonder what my naked city would look like.

For me, Cairo exists as a scatter of places connected not by streets but by memory. Zamalek, Downtown, Old Cairo, Sayyida Zeinab, Dokki, Maadi—each is an island in the archipelago of my life. At the center is Maadi, my home, the place every journey began and where each one ended. From there I drifted outward: to the cinemas of Downtown, the cafés of Zamalek, the shrines and alleyways of Sayyida Zeinab, the classrooms of Dokki, the restaurants along the Corniche.

This is not Cairo in its totality—it never could be. It is Cairo as I lived it, through footsteps taken, friendships made, meals shared, films watched, and hours lingered in places that became part of me. The fragments form a personal cartography, a city refracted through the lens of home.

The essays that follow return to these fragments, tracing them one by one. Together they assemble my Cairo, my version of la cidade maravilhosa—the marvellous city, as the people of Rio de Janeiro call their home. Cairo, for me, is no less marvellous.