Research on Urban Emotions in Cairo Accepted for an Academic Book

I am delighted to share that my research proposal, “The City Must Disappear: Development Fever and Visual Urban Emotion in Cairo,” has been accepted as a chapter contribution to the edited academic volume The Modern City Mediated: Emotion, Space, Image, currently being developed with Peter Lang Oxford, with the intention of publication as part of the series The City as Place: Emotions, Experiences, and Meanings.

The research takes Cairo, a city undergoing accelerated urban transformations, as its point of departure to critically examine the relationship between development fever and the reshaping of the urban landscape. It explores how images of modernization and development become instruments for producing urban emotions and reconfiguring our relationships with the city, its memory, and the power structures that reshape it.

What happens when the disappearance of the existing city becomes an imagined prerequisite for the birth of a new one? How do the images and visual narratives of development produce feelings of desire, pride, nostalgia, and loss, while contributing to the formation of political alignments? And how do these visual regimes redefine what can be seen and remembered of a city with Cairo’s layered history, and what is destined to disappear from its image and collective memory?

My proposal was selected as one of five contributions through an international call for chapters, joining five chapters developed by researchers from the Urban Emotions Research Group, established within the European Architectural History Network (EAHN).