City of Fragments: Walking through Memory in Contemporary Cairo

Amid the violent urban transformations taking place in Cairo — from demolitions and forced evictions to the erasure of the city’s landmarks — walking emerges as an alternative research methodology. It offers a way to understand the city through the body and senses, immersed in the textures of place and memory. Here, walking is not merely a physical act, but a tool for critique and deconstruction — a sensory and temporal exploration that reveals absence as much as presence, and invites us to question our familiar relationships with the city.

Within this framework, the concept of dérive, as developed by the Situationists, offers a critical approach to engaging with a city that is weary and strained. Walking is not simply aimless wandering or solitary exploration, but a drift away from prescribed paths — into chance encounters and buried memories etched into the walls of the streets. It is a research practice that does not seek to collect data, but rather to listen to silences, summon ghosts, and reassemble memory from fragments — from what has been erased or denied. The city becomes both an open text and a torn archive, one we read and rewrite with our steps, stories, and senses.

Walking does not merely trace the surface of maps — it ruptures them, redrawing them from within. It exposes how the movement of bodies has been shaped by the will of power or the market, and how that will can be disrupted through stray, stumbling, or resistant steps. The aim is not to restore a whole city, but to dismantle it through fragments — not presented as evidence, but as alternative ways of thinking and storytelling. The fragment is not a loss, but a methodological stance — a site of resistance to forced forgetting, and a space for another voice to emerge: fragile, yet alive.

In this context, the workshop takes the area of Qal‘at al-Kabsh in the Sayyida Zeinab district as its focal point — a site where material and symbolic memory intersect. Through four walks and field routes that begin from various locations, pass through, arrive at, and depart from Qal‘at al-Kabsh, the city is explored through movement, memory, and the act of drifting.

Instructor

Is a history lecturer in Queens College and doctoral candidate in the history department in the City University of New York, the Graduate Center. His current research project focuses on revolutionary temporalities, generational memories and gender in Egypt between 1967 and 2011. He graduated from the political science department in Cairo University and has a Master's degree in Arab Studies from Georgetown University, where he wrote a thesis on the history and memory of banditry and folk outlaws in early 20th-century Egypt.