ABDELRAHMAN HUSSEIN

Alexandria my hometown has been encountering a brutal privatization process to public spaces – space not a place - and due to the problematic use of the word “

Public Space” within the Egyptian context; I propose to use “Hybrid-Public Space” alternatively and discuss its potential as an alternative notion in this project.

There is no clear definition of public space in the realm of

Egyptian laws and regulations. Although there is an official definition of “public place” in the Egyptian environmental laws which are a comparable term to “public space”, I avoid using it as a reference for its impairment and limitation.

 

This led me to find common features in public space and hybrid-public space in the local context, to differentiate them from the other more stable contexts, for example: the western European context. I believe ownership, accessibility, and democracy are the main features in any public or hybrid-public space, and these features are negotiable to an extent, except for ownership as any piece of land is owned by the Egyptian government unless it has a legal owner who has all the required official papers.

 

Since the late 1990s, Alexandria encountered unsystematic privatization and gentrification processes for public spaces. In the aftermath of the 25 January Revolution, this transformational process increased drastically and recently became more of a systematic process under the supervision of the state. It is also usually justified verbally from responsible and beneficiaries as a gentrific solution to save the local Egyptian socio-economic system by profiting from these spaces.

 

Alexandria’s map consists of orthogonal streets in downtown, and its old neighborhoods make it like a chessboard. This orthogonal map is surrounded by relatively new residential colonies of narrow streets. The lack of open spaces and leisure spots in the city forms a restrict journey for the residents in the city. Accordingly, the Corniche plays a vital role for the Alexandrian citizen as the most expanded public space in the city, and more importantly, as it is where the city relates to its identity as a significant historical port city. Due to this privatization process, the Corniche has become an arena for competition between corporates, mega-capital institutions, and internal governmental forces. This process expanded to reach the small hybrid-public spaces on the Corniche such as the ship workshops in

El-Anfoushy and the small cafes in Bahry.

 

A presence of authority is easily felt in both spaces such as public beaches where they have rare governmental supervision, and semi-public spaces where they have been taken over by large-scale capitalist forces; the binary relation between the public and private space complicated and many uncategorized spaces started to appear within.