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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how Egypt's authoritarian infrastructure boom transforms urban poverty into an artefact to be consumed. It argues that within broader patterns of militarised state capitalism, infrastructure functions as a technology for inscribing class hierarchies onto the urban fabric.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how Egypt's authoritarian infrastructure boom transforms urban poverty into an artefact to be managed and consumed by the affluent. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted between September 2024 and September 2025 in downtown Cairo, where gentrification schemes renovate belle époque facades while displacing residents, I trace the dual production of "Egypt" and "Masr": two spatially and socially segregated worlds emerging from the same infrastructural logic. The paper argues that megaproject urbanism under authoritarian rule generates a peculiar aesthetics of class polarisation, where poverty becomes simultaneously spectacle and scandal—framed in state media as a blight demanding eradication, yet rendered consumable by the affluent in their search for authenticity. I situate these dynamics within broader patterns of militarised state capitalism, where infrastructure functions not merely as development but as a technology for sorting people, inscribing class hierarchies onto the urban fabric, and foreclosing spaces of political assembly.

The paper contributes to anthropological debates on infrastructure and authoritarianism by foregrounding how megaprojects function as technologies of class polarisation. In dialogue with the panel's concern for decolonial counterstrategies, I conclude by attending to moments where this sorting falters: residents who resist evacuations, workers who display false 'authenticity' in jest to get money from those who wish to consume it, and the quiet persistence of forms of sociality that refuse the spatial grammar of the polarised city.