ABSTRACT
On 25 October 2015, Alexandria, Egypt, experienced heavy rainstorms, which overwhelmed the city’s sewer and drainage systems. The storm flooded the city and caused the death of seven residents. How the causes of the 2015 Alexandria floods would be narrated and explained became a subject of national contestation; the Egyptian state claimed that the floods were caused not by failures of urban environmental governance or climate change as others suggested but by an act of terrorism. In this article, I draw on geopolitical ecology and situated urban political ecology to examine the production and contestation of the Egyptian state’s narratives of the floods. In doing so, I argue against using the term authoritarian, which predetermines the state’s function through an inherited set of characteristics. Rather, I start with the how and why of state power to carefully examine the complex relationship between the state and urban environments. This situated approach reveals how failures of urban environmental governance are being reframed by repressive regimes to further justify their rule.
