ABSTRACT
Prominently placed amidst a grid street pattern, open gardens and shaping the waterfront of Port Said and Zanzibar, colonial styled buildings collectively suggest an urban image and socio-cultural space for the city. The transformation from the local vernacular urbanism to European styled cities in Egypt was followed by changes in lifestyle, both European and automobile oriented. Since the time of Muhammad Ali Pasha European architects had been practicing in Egypt, employing principles of the Ecole des Beaux Arts especially visible in modern Cairo and other nineteenth-century cities in Egypt. During the rule of Ismail Pasha several new districts in Cairo were created with large colonnaded boulevards and French styled buildings such as al-tewfiqiya, al-ismailiyya in Cairo, to complement a larger modernization project associated with the Suez Canal Project. New cities such as Al-Ismailiyya and Port Said on the coasts of Egypt, manifested in their physical attributes a juxtaposition of the modern and the native. New forms were created expressing hybrid features, founded on Islamic ornaments and local tradition. These forms could be mass produced, linking these modern urban enclaves in Egypt to parallel trends in Europe in search for new ways of life that responded to the era of mechanization and industrialization. Re-planning of the industrial city in Europe and re-planning the native/medieval cities in colonies inextricably linked mechanization and the transformation of the pre-existing morphologies of the city to cater to capitalist development. The new boulevards and parks offered hygienic amenities to at least some of the public, and venues the display of the city’s monuments past and present. Mamluk, Ayyubid, and Fatimid forms that constructed the layers of Islamic Cairo were re-examined and produced to cater to modern, functional needs and organization of the Beaux-Arts tradition. During the rule of Muhammad Ali Pasha and his successors, the major cities in Egypt: Cairo, Alexandria, Ismailiyya and Port Said, were modernized following a Hausmannian fashion and hosted a large European community that was part of a cosmopolitan population: Greeks, Italians, French, Syrian and Maltese
of spatial distributions (Sherif 1997). These hybrid vernacular and cultural forms combined eclectic references to the history of Islam into a new urban order that was neither entirely the conservative vernacularism nor whole-scale historical mimicry. The new vernacularism in colonial/modern cities of the nineteenth century in Egypt manifested fragmentary heritage and an urban assemblage that embraced two distinct design approaches. At the level of the individual buildings, they unified them at the urban scale through building codes in what could be called “modern” regional urbanism also referred to as colonial urbanism; in the local/ native town building codes were less apparent. This chapter studies the strategies and effects of colonial urban assemblage of new spaces and monuments in Port Said and Zanzibar, and considers how colonial planners effectively allowed different cities to develop their own system of self-rule through cultural rituals explicated in Sufi doctrines as in the case of Zanzibar. In revisiting the postcolonial discourse, port cities along the East African coast display hybrid physical and social identities resulting from layers of cross-culturalism created by imperial powers that shaped them. Colonialism as outlined by Homi Bhabha juxtaposes local and global manifestations of vernacular architecture that create problems in an attempt to define specific national identity of this built environment in a post-colonial era. Bhabha has made a strong case for broadly eclectic strategies as means of countering simplistic and constraining models of identity that chafe under conditions of changing expectations, new and emergent patterns of life, or fundamentally excluded modes of being. He argues for pulling the local/ traditional and the global/contemporary together through similar strategies of hybridity by which fragments are assembled into new but contingent and “impure” wholes (Bhabha 1994). Links to these imperial powers separated them from their hinterlands linguistically, ethnically and on the urban/architectural level. The rise of nationalist and liberation movements in the mid 1900s further alienated these port cities from the physical hinterlands. The imported architectural persona transformed them into sanctuaries of resistance fuelled by religious ideologies and/or nationalism in an attempt to redefine their urban status. There, relation to their geographic motherlands remained oblique. These liminal spaces are problematic because of their in-between socio-cultural milieus. Port cities such as Port Said in the North East of Africa and Zanzibar in the South of the Red Sea/ Indian Ocean route were created in the nineteenth century as part of a long chain of urban enclaves that acted as stations for the western traveller en-route from Europe to India. These Port cities were shaped to perform, one argues, within an urban context that served firstly the traveller, the settler and its patrons, secondly its indigenous inhibitors. The urban skyline of these port cities formulated at times the “modern” and also the “Other” relating the urban fabric of the Port City to the identity of its patrons. The governing feature of colonial city planning in Africa as seen in Port Said and Zanzibar had always been the differentiation of “European” and “native” poles by careful “zoning”, with the two poles complementing each other. The newly established European quarters were separated from
They were characterized by wide rectilinear streets, apartment blocks and villas surrounded by gardens; they had churches and European schools, banks and large open air public spaces. In form and structure Port Said and many of its sister cities such as Alexandria, Ismailiyya and Heliopolis share the post industrial city/ garden city planning principles, they were designed as isolated units visually distinguishable from what was considered unhealthy and medieval. In colonies this was the native vernacular enclave annexed to the modern colonial quarters. In Port Said and other modern colonial towns the height of the buildings, the number of floors and the percentage of ground to be occupied were strictly regulated. The width of the roads and the truncated corners at the crossings were calculated on the basis of regulations, which took into account vehicular traffic (Ilbert 1981). Yet other cities such as Port Said were formulated to reflect the multiple possibilities of the modern colonial port city through institutionalization of religious monuments and vernacular urban fabric. Port cities such as Port Said, Zanzibar, Mombasa and Aden formed an in-between maritime corridor to India – this liminal quality or in-betweenness saved them from colonizer/colonized sociocultural clashes. On the surface, the idea here of combining explicit architectural references to a wide range of architectural elements appears coherent with some modernist compositional strategies as in Ismail Pasha’s Cairo, Casablanca and Rabat, in the sense that colonial urban policies dissolved any sense of sequential “origin”. Resonant fragments of history were deployed here to activate a heritage whose meaning cannot be divorced from the spaces of contemporary social gathering that surround and interlace with the monumental vernacular expressions. A vertically extended version of the bungalow with its preceding portico shapes the city fabric of Port Said, yet is manifested with discretion in Zanzibar. In both cities apartment buildings with projecting porticos and steel balustrades reflect the cultural bases of colonial architecture. This building typology did not undergo much modification in the twentieth century, and is seen in other colonies marking the spread of the Creole Architectural Style within the colonial realm. These houses were considered to be healthier and were socially preferred as well as climatically suitable as it allowed a freer circulation of the prevailing winds. The encircling veranda and spacious symmetrical spatial arrangement with colonnaded ground floors represented a vernacular expression with colonial in origins that was environmentally suitable and of regional value in the post colonial era (Desai et al. 2011). Both port cities display Beaux Arts neo-Classical design principles with varying extents in Port Said there the physical attributes of European planning ideals can be seen to a greater extent than in Zanzibar, which retained its local character. The contrasts between the modern/European quarter of Port Said and the Arab quarter involved sets of architectural signs and fragments of various historical styles made available, however, in the European quarters experimentation with form was regularized into formal compositions.
