GRIDS AND PARAGRAPHS
Parallel Transformations in the Architecture of Texts and the City in Late 19th Century Cairo2020, MA Dissertation, UCL, 9000 words
Grids & Paragraphs explores the intervening period between the French Napoleonic expedition (1798-1801) and British colonial rule (1882-1952). Through examining historical maps of the city and archival Arabic written accounts focusing on the late 19th century, it attempts to situate the city as text discourse within Cairo's urban development and textual culture in the advent of modernity and colonialism. It argues that both city and text underwent analogous transformations in the form of grid-planned developments and punctuated texts. It aims to contribute to a body of literature on the correlations between architecture and language in the context of the Arab City. It asks: How did Egyptian writers react to the ongoing transformations of the city in late 19th century Cairo? How can we trace the change, depicted by the maps, from the traditionally dense to the grid-planned urban fabric through the lens of Arabic texts? Or, how did the text echo the city?
This dissertation was part of the UCL MA Architectural History symposium that took place November 5-6, 2020. An extract of it is published on the UCL MA Architectural History website. It was supervised and reviewed by Tania Sengupta, UCL.
Visual comparison between traditional urban mass and dense text (right) and modern urban fabric and punctuated text (left).