Cairo Cosmopolitan

“Fascinating and illuminating . . . valuably setting the context for debates on urban hierarchy, globalization, and cosmopolitanism in a conflict-torn region.”—Richard Falk, Princeton University

“This is how social science should be done. The Cairo School’s cosmopolitanism from below is enormously important because it is everyone’s cosmopolitanism: the global capitalism of shirt and shibshib manufacture—and of those who wear them. Their work shows the intellectually and politically generative power of ordinary Egyptians—and the importance of intensely empirical qualitative analysis for understanding politics. The Cairo School doesn’t use theory—it generates theory, for theory grows out of the particular.”—Anne Norton, University of Pennsylvania

“There is no doubt in my mind that the future of the urban world lies not in London, New York, and Tokyo or the other global cities of the North, but in the cities of the global South like Bombay, Sao Paulo, and Cairo. The new Cairo School of Urban Studies, launched in this volume, will offer both the substance and methodological insights to decipher the logic of urban articulations of late capitalism at the beginning of the twenty-first century.”—Nezar AlSayyad, Center for Middle East Studies, University of California at Berkeley