Market mechanisms and spontaneous urbanization in Egypt: the Cairo case *

Urbanization processes in third world cities have led to the emergence of novel forms of land control and housing production. Concepts such as marginality, underintegration and squatting have been used to identify certain types of production. But these concepts have tended to create a distinction between two forms of production one illegal (seen as transitional) and the other state controlled and have underemphasized the interrelations between them. It is in fact the 'transitional' fonn which has proved most long-lived and has expanded to become the form of housing production used by the largest number of people. ln many towns in Mediterranean countries, the proportion of residents living in spontaneous or 'underintegrated' neighbourhoods continues to grow unabated. This is evidence of a process of exclusion which affects not only new rural migrants and the temporary or permanent unemployed, but also industrial workers, clerical workers, civil servants and teachers. In other words, it is a process affecting both the lower social strata and the middle strata with regular incomes. While these strata are unable to afford housing available on the market which is built to conform to planning and construction norms, they are advantageously placed in other spheres of consumption. To this variety of social strata there corresponds a diversity of forms of reproduction. The so-called illegal land and real estate market is differentiated not uniform. It consists of invaded land which will be used for self-built housing, private plots of ambiguous legal status, apartment blocks for rentaI, small scale production of rentaI property often linked to capitalist property development; not