In the Last Days of the City is about how resistance defines architecture — in creation and destruction. Cairo’s political upheavals are understood first, in relation to its volatile urban growth; then through a single instance of building, the naadi on Gezirat el-Warraq.
Cairo is caught in a cyclical loop of regime and resistance. Each revolution begets more dysfunction. In the Last Days of the City asks: How can a limited urbanism be defined within a city on the brink of change? The project offers a novel other within the framework of Cairo’s informal building culture — one that resists precarity, demolition, and forced change — and formulates a space that is familiar, yet foreign. A way of working with Cairo, not in opposition to it.
Through the guise of a naadi (loosely defined as a community center), the case study conceals a midan: communally inhabiting the public square. The naadi on Gezirat el-Warraq is one possibility, on one site. But the project points to possibilities latent across Cairo. A city where the act of design suggests a model of being after its last days.
