Egypt's Housing Crisis: A Virtual Book Talk

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Join us for the virtual book talk with Yahia Shawkat, Housing and urban policy researcher, to discuss his book "Egypt's Housing Crisis: The Shaping of Urban Space" (AUC Press, 2020). Ursula Lindsay will moderate the talk.

You can purchase the book from AUC Bookstores in Egypt, major bookstores worldwide, and online book retailers like Amazon and bookshop.org.

About the book:

From the 1940s onward, officials deployed a number of policies to create adequate housing for Egypt's growing population. By the 1970s, housing production had outstripped population growth, but today half of Egypt's one hundred million people cannot afford a decent home.

Egypt's Housing Crisis takes presidential speeches, parliamentary reports, legislation, and official statistics as the basis with which to investigate the tools that officials have used to 'solve' the housing crisis—rent control, social housing, and amnesties for informal self-building—as well as the inescapable reality of these policies' outcomes. Yahia Shawkat argues that wars, mass displacement, and rural-urban migration played a part in creating the problem early on. Still, neoliberal deregulation, crony capitalism and corruption, and neglectful planning have made things steadily worse ever since. In the final analysis, he asks, is affordable housing for all that hard to achieve?

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