ABSTRACT
The condition of urban public spaces in Egypt has been one of the major drivers of the massive social upheavals that the country witnessed from 2011. Starting from the adoption of neoliberalism in the early 1970s, the state has conceived all urban public assets as objects of economic development and tools to consolidate power, especially public spaces. This chapter explores the roots of the contested public spaces of urban Egypt, tracing their genealogical development on the longue durée. It discusses four key principles of complexity science: the rejection of reductionism and determinism; dynamic systems can shift structurally between different degrees of complexity; change in complex systems occurs in abrupt leaps between order and chaos; and change in complex systems is mostly path-dependent. The chapter provides an overview of the Egyptian socio-political landscape, focusing on its influence on urban public spaces and describes the principle of path-dependency that is used to scrutinize the socio-historical development of the contested public spaces.
