Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

6-2026

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

Anthropology

Advisor

Setha Low

Committee Members

Sarah Muir

Mandana Limbert

Jessica Winegar

Subject Categories

Human Geography | Social and Cultural Anthropology | Urban Studies and Planning

Keywords

speculation, urbanism, political economy, corporate urbanism, crisis, subjectivity

Abstract

Since the beginning of the desert urbanization program in the early 1980s, successive Egyptian governments have maintained the importance of building cities in the desert to solve for decaying and overpopulated city centers and prompt economic growth. This study investigates the rise of luxury real estate developers and the pervasiveness of gated compounds in New Urban Communities (NUCs) by answering the following questions: 1.) What new insights emerge about global South urbanism when wealth accumulation and capture is centered as a primary site of inquiry?  2.) How is luxury real estate operating as a field in which various scales, including regional, national, urban, and home, are being continuously produced? 3.) How do these projects contribute to shaping political and class subjectivity amongst Egypt’s upper-middle and upper classes?

I answer these questions by examining the relationship between speculative urbanism, state power, and class formation in contemporary Egypt. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic research—including participant observation, interviews, and analysis of policy and marketing materials—I analyze how desert land development operates as a central site through which urban subjectivities, financial practices, and socio-spatial inequalities are produced. Building on scholarship on speculative urbanism and governmentality, the study argues that Egypt’s case offers a distinct configuration shaped by three interrelated dynamics: the production of desert ecologies, state control over land, and a financialized model of corporate urbanization embedded in a semi-peripheral political economy.

First, the dissertation explores how Egypt’s deserts are materially and discursively produced as spaces of emptiness, potential, and transformation. Rather than treating the desert as a natural backdrop to urban expansion, it demonstrates how state practices, historical imaginaries, and development discourse actively constitute the desert as a resource for capital accumulation. This process aligns with broader theories of the “production of nature,” while also highlighting the role of narrative and ideology in rendering desert land available for speculative investment.

Second, the study analyzes the political economy of desert development, emphasizing the central role of the state in mediating speculative processes. Unlike contexts where market forces dominate, the Egyptian state retains significant authority over desert land allocation, shaping both the spatial outcomes of urbanization and the distribution of future value. Corporate actors operate through a model that draws individuals into speculative real estate investment as both debtors and creditors, linking everyday financial practices to large-scale processes of capital accumulation. Importantly, this is not a story of global-city formation, but one of urban fragmentation and the partial abandonment of Cairo, as investment shifts toward privatized desert developments.

Third, the dissertation situates these dynamics within Egypt’s position as a semi-peripheral economy, where capital accumulation is oriented toward global markets and marked by recurrent crisis. It argues that speculative urbanism not only reorganizes space but also produces particular temporal experiences characterized by anticipation, delay, and uncertainty. Through the concept of “timescapes,” the study shows how multiple temporalities—acceleration, waiting, and projection—structure both investment practices and everyday life. Narratives of crisis emerge as central to how individuals interpret their actions, negotiate risk, and imagine their futures.

The dissertation intervenes in debates on urbanism in the Global South by shifting attention toward middle- and upper-class actors and the processes through which wealth is generated and secured. It demonstrates that speculative urbanism in Egypt produces not only risk-oriented subjects but also a class formation tethered to financialized housing markets and ongoing economic instability.

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