UC Santa Cruz

This dissertation project studies the politics of urban (im)mobility and infrastructure in Cairo, Egypt. It follows the construction of the Greater Cairo Ring Road, the city’s largest freeway and the most central node in Egypt’s national road network, as a lens onto urban restructuring, development, and inequality. Building on archival material, interviews, and fieldwork in Cairo, the project investigates how spaces, ideas, and infrastructures of mobility—like the Ring Road—are formative of patterns and processes of planetary urbanism, particularly in the Global South. Doing so, it follows the banal movements of people, motor cars, and circulating materials on the Ring Road. The dissertation fulfills two objectives. First, it investigates the Ring Road—and mobility infrastructure more broadly—as a site where the tensions, contradictions, and imaginaries of political rule in Egypt are manifested, negotiated, and contested. Second, from Cairo’s Ring Road, it identifies and theorizes the infrastructural mobility regime as part of an emergent yet overlooked set of political relations in the global city. It argues that the overlapping geographies of infrastructure and (im)mobility increasingly shape urban political life in a predominantly neoliberal political geographic order that privileges an abstract ideal of individual free and fast movement. The dissertation analyzes the politics of urban (im)mobility in rapidly urbanizing and increasingly authoritarian Cairo as part of the global landscape of declining freedoms and mobility crises. It thus makes timely theoretical and empirical contributions to debates in mobility studies, global political economy, and critical infrastructure studies.