Egypt's Housing Crisis: An Etymology

For decades, images of overcrowded rooms, crumbling housing, and unpainted red-brick and concrete ‘towers’ carpeting once fertile land have regularly been beamed int our living rooms through news reports, TV and cinema, capturing a housing ‘crisis’, ‘problem’, or ‘shortage’. It is also no coincidence that during that time, almost all of Egypt’s presidents have publicly admitted to their being a problem with housing, but very carefully choosing the words used to describe it. Through speeches and official archives, this presentation examines this language, along with the myriad ideas that constituted a ‘solution’ of a crisis that stubbornly remains unresolved.