The study explores the Zabaleen s contested geography and spatial strategies in relation to their right to inner city areas and future relocation to Cairo s suburban new settlements . Over the decades, the Zabaleen waste (garbage) collectors of Cairo, have created what is arguably one of the world s most efficient and sustainable resource-recovery and waste-recycling systems. Yet the continuation of this intricate relationship between community, environment and livelihood is jeopardised by the official privatisation of solid waste services through contracts with technology-intensive...

Postmodern urbanism is experiencing a new urbanity where boundaries between reality and virtuality are blurring, with fragmented multi-layered spatiality unraveling sequential images and signs through time-space compression. Viewing the postmodern city through a deconstructive lens it is possible to see multiple representations of public spaces in terms of digital collages, diagrams and screens, interwoven into real urban life, thus symbiotically celebrating the new informational needs of our media polis. This creates a 'transnational urban experience' wherein the global and local, the real...

Faced with formidable challenges to expression in Cairo's public spaces, urban blogger activists have developed new means of articulating dissent with spatial tactics from boycott campaigns, cyber-activism and protest art to innovations in mobilisation, modes of communication and organisational flexibility. Urban blogger activists have transformed Spaces of Freedom into heterotopian zones for public protest, employing urban installations and street graffiti, prompting the construction of a significant site of urban resistance and spatial contestation. This was particularly evident during...