Cairo’s urban parks: space, place, and meaning

Over the last two decades or more, there has been an increasing attempt to understand the relationship between the modalities of everyday life through the complex cosmopolitan influence of Cairo’s urban history. As Ross King has suggested in Emancipating Space (1996), “There can be no emancipation without unmasking all the linkages of spatial meaning and the kinships between space, knowledge and power . . . in which spatial relations can be represented.”1 Admittedly, Emancipating Space provides a novel framework for understanding Cairo’s urban experience, but in order to situate spatial meaning, it is vital to unmask the linkages that King so poignantly noted. In thinking of the linkages of spatial meaning, the key question for us is, exactly how does the past epoch overlap the present, or how it can be referenced in the urban experience today? Here, for example, the urban landscape of Cairo and the great urban traditions of the past are both evident and ambiguous.