1In March 2022, a civil engineer working as a contractor in 10th of Ramadan City on the outskirts of Greater Cairo told me, “Masr Brick produces the best red brick you can find on the market.” However, this factory closed in 2015 and four years later, its four automated production lines were sold in a public auction as scrap.
2This factory, which was the biggest in Egypt, was created at the beginning of the 1980s by the Egyptian government. The company running it, Masr Brick, was mainly owned by the Ministry of Housing. The factory was located in Arab Abu Said, south of Cairo, and employed around 340 workers. Its decay is visible on satellite images (Figure 1). This process is not isolated and concerns all of Egypt’s automated red brick factories, but also the whole red brick production sector, which has been going through a serious crisis for the last six or seven years.
Figure 1. Masr Brick, from the biggest red brick factory in Egypt to an industrial ruin
© Google Earth
3Although the Egyptian construction sector is expanding with the development of public infrastructure and new cities in the desert—the New Administrative Capital being the flagship of this urban development—red brick production is indeed facing several forms of decline. Hundreds of factories are closing, either being abandoned, sold as scrap, or converted to other activities. This situation may be all the more surprising given that Hosni Mubarak’s government directly invested in the industrialization and modernization of red brick production in the 1980s. The involvement of the Egyptian state in the production of good quality, mass-produced red brick is still visible in the reputation of Masr Brick. But it contrasts with the current material and economic “ruination” of the sector, ruination being defined here as the various processes leading to ruin, including political projects that lay “waste to certain peoples and places” (see Stoler 2008).
4Beyond this apparent paradox, studying industrialized red brick production provides an alternative insight into the established chronologies that contrast Nasser’s welfare state and industrialization policies with Mubarak’s privatizations and overall neoliberalism. What we see instead is that the transformations in the landscapes of red brick production have been linked with shifting political projects from Nasser to al-Sisi, from the industrialization of the sector in the 1980s to the twofold process of disinvestment and regulation that has been occurring since the 2010s. Furthermore, the analysis of the sector’s ruination highlights a reorientation in the welfare policies of the Egyptian state, from enabling the production of this building material for the whole population to providing housing and large-scale infrastructure. So, how has this sector been progressively abandoned by the Egyptian state over the last thirty years? What are the abandoned factories becoming? Why are the most advanced industrial infrastructures, imported by the Egyptian government for its people in the 1980s, now turning into ruins in the desert?
5Industrial ruins are commonly studied through the various ways they are reused or converted into other functions. Deindustrialization and its socio-spatial impacts have been abundantly studied in cities of the Global North through the analysis of gentrification or marginalized neighborhoods in post-Fordist cities. The focus on this process in urban areas of the Global South is more recent (Rodrik 2016; Schindler et al. 2020; Gillepsie and Schindler 2022). Some authors have analyzed the “new practices and meanings” that ruination produces (Audin 2021), while others examine the emotional and political effects linked to these “relics of industry” (Schwenkel 2018). Following on from urban studies through the study of building materials (Fry 2013; Mishra 2020; Choplin 2020), this article looks at “the relationship between deindustrialization and urban transformations in cities of the Global South” (Schindler et al. 2020). However, as the Egyptian red brick production sector has undergone a very recent ruination process, it is difficult to gather information on the long-term social consequences of this deindustrialization or on the potential touristic use of abandoned industrial infrastructures. Hence, in this article, I mainly study the landscape transformations it has caused so far, the reasons for the current situation, and the relationship of this process to different generations of urban development policies.
- 1 “’Ummâl masr brîk ba‘d ighlâq al-sharika: qarrabnâ nishhat [Egypt Brick Workers after the Company S (...)
6This article relies on PhD fieldwork of six months between 2021 and 2022, when I conducted interviews with red brick producers in several areas around Cairo and talked to architects, civil engineers, sellers, and contractors to grasp the functioning of the whole red brick supply chain, from production to construction. However, given the general circumstances of qualitative research in Egypt linked with the country’s authoritarian context (Fahmy 2022) and the difficulty of accessing factories (including closed ones), I also had to rely heavily on secondary sources. The very recent decay of the sector has provoked social anger among workers,1 which makes it complicated for a foreign observer to look deeper into the situation. Moreover, online information about fully automated factories is limited to a few press articles dealing with factories closing. The analysis of press articles, archives from the Housing and Building Research Center (HBRC), satellite images, and legislative texts have been useful in gathering complementary data on these factories.
7After presenting an overview of the current situation of the industrial red brick sector (localization of factories, production techniques, reconversion of closed factories, etc.), I will review historical developments in the sector since the completion of the High Dam in the late 1960s. I show that the decay of this industrial activity has been both progressive and out of sync with the established industrialization chronologies in Egypt. Finally, this case study highlights the shifting welfare priorities in public urban policies. Both in terms of production and construction, the public actors’ will to modernize the sector is turning factories into partially reconverted, but mostly abandoned, ruins.
- 2 The term “red brick” (tûb ahmar) usually refers to the traditional brick made of Nile silt. However (...)
8Egyptian red brick2 is made of shale clay (tafla), extracted from quarries in mountains around the Nile, mainly to the south of Cairo. This clay is a sedimentary rock formed from ancient marine or Nile mud and the location of the quarries results from the progressive shift of the riverbed. Red brick production involves several steps: mixing clay with sand and water, molding, drying, and firing. Beyond this standardized process, one can distinguish three main types of factories, depending on their level of industrialization, the date of their creation, and their location.
9The oldest factories are concentrated along the Nile or other watercourses around Cairo and in the Delta region. These factories, which were mostly created in the 1960s and 1970s, may be clustered next to urban areas like Mit Ghamr or Kafr al-Zayat in the Delta or isolated among agricultural fields. Production is semi-automated: there is machinery for mixing, molding, and cutting the bricks, but further steps, like transportation to drying areas and kilns, loading of delivery trucks, etc., are handled manually (Figure 2).
Figure 2. The unfired bricks transported from the drying area to the kiln, Mit Ghamr
© Author, 22/05/21
10A second type of factory appeared after the Egyptian government made the use of tafla mandatory in 1983 (see Section 2 below), causing some producers to move closer to the quarries and establish their factories in those areas. This movement led to the progressive constitution of four main industrial areas specialized in red brick production, all located between Helwan and Beni Suef: Arab Abu Said, al-Saf, Kafr Himayd, and Girza. These factories are semi-automated and follow the same process as the factories on the banks of the Nile, but have access to natural gas and electricity provided by public utilities.
- 3 This means that all the steps are operated by machinery, including the drying, the transport of the (...)
- 4 “Ittihâd al-sinâ‘ât: istrâtijiyyât tatwîr masâni‘ al-tûb [Federation of Industries: the Strategy fo (...)
11Finally, fully automated factories3 were imported by the Egyptian government in the 1980s from France and Germany.4 They were scattered in every governorate, close to major cities and even in the remote al-Kharga oasis, and produced bigger, more standardized, and more expensive clay blocks than the traditional red bricks. None of these factories still operates, the last one having closed in 2021. It is to note however that a private company, Singer Brick, imported a new automated production line to Arab Abu Said in 2017; it is the only factory producing clay blocks in Egypt today.
12The red brick production sector is experiencing an economic slowdown. Yet the fate of the factories is very diverse, depending on their localization and on the type of producers. Before I return to the economic and historical reasons for these closures, it is necessary to explain the current situation of the factories, which have either been reconverted, abandoned, or torn down.
13Apart from the Singer Brick factory, all the fully automated red brick factories have been shut down since the beginning of the twenty-first century, and none of them have been converted to another activity. As we can see on the satellite images, some of the factories, as the one in Qena, have just been abandoned and remain in a state of neglect while others, including the one in Beni Suef, have been removed, leaving an empty plot of land (Figure 3). For factories in the latter group, though precise information about their fate is unavailable, one can assume that, as in the case of Masr Brick, the production lines have been sold as scrap at auction. One exception is a production line that has been bought and re-established for use by a big red brick producer located in Arab Abu Said: “It was an auction and I bought one production line from the auction. After this, all the people who bought the other production lines were not producers, they were scrap sellers” (interview, May 2022).
Figure 3. The rapid disappearance of the Beni Suef automated factory
© Google Earth
- 5 “Bay‘ sharikat Banî Suwayf al-wataniyya li-l-tûb al-taflî wa-l-‘ummâl yutâlibûn bi-sarf mustahaqqât (...)
14The factory in the Beni Suef Governorate was founded in 1986 with imported machinery from France, and was closed in 2019 due to rising production costs. The Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank initially bought the factory but sold it again a year later for only LE7 million, whereas the equipment was valued at LE25 million, according to the workers.5 As we can see on satellite images (Figure 3), the factory has now disappeared, leaving an empty land plot and a chimney stack.
- 6 “Gawla li-l-bûrsa… Samt al-madâkhin yakshif azmat masâni‘ al-tûb bi-‘Arab Abû Sa‘d [al-Borsa’s Tour (...)
15This decay has not only beset the automated factories, but also those on the banks of the Nile and even in the specialized areas, where the state of abandonment is particularly visible. For example, according to a survey I made using Google Earth, among the 325 factories concentrated in Arab Abu Said, only 92 were still working in 2022, 197 had been shut down, and 36 were abandoned.6 However, the fate of these closed semi-automated factories is highly varied.
16Since the beginning of the red brick sector’s crisis in 2014-2015, some former producers have decided to close their factories on the banks of the Nile or to slow down production and move to other activities: one producer in al-Rihawi, north of Cairo, is using empty space next to his kiln to clean and rehabilitate large pipes (Figure 4). Inside Cairo, other factories are reused as parking lots, and in the Delta, some have even been replaced by agricultural production, leaving their chimney stacks sticking out in the middle of fields. Another company, which had been producing industrial red bricks from the 1970s, established a fabric bag factory in 2020, next to its brick kilns, which are now inactive. This economic diversification is also visible in the industrial areas. According to a big producer located in Arab Abu Said, some producers have just stopped their activity, waiting for a return in the demand for red bricks, but “most of them have started to sell their factories or have moved to other investments, like marble production, concrete block factories, iron factories, etc.” (interview, May 2022). The development of concrete block factories (blûk asmantî) to replace the red brick ones is particularly visible in the al-Saf area (Figure 5). This building material is mainly made of cement, sand, and fine gravel, and, in contrast to red brick, does not need to be kiln-fired.
Figure 4. In a context of decreased demand, the red brick producers diversify their sources of income, al-Rihawi
© Author, 09/03/22
Figure 5. Some red brick producers turn to concrete blocks, al-Saf
© Author, 19/02/22
17Thus, the state of ruination of the closed red brick factories is extremely diverse, from their abandonment and neglect to their removal or replacement through conversion to other activities. Ruins are taking different shapes and forms: empty desert land, damaged warehouses, abandoned chimney stacks, and more. The particularity of these ruins is that most of them are very recent and the fate of some are still undecided. What will they become? Will the closed factories become abandoned places, will they work again, or will they be converted to another productive activity?
18The panorama of red brick production and of its decay should not be seen as overly static. To fully understand these processes, it is useful to follow the work of Ann L. Stoler on the ruination of factories as an “active process” (2008) occurring over the long term. Abandoned infrastructures and chimney stacks are not only as memorialized monumental structures or relics of the past: “the focus […] is not on inert remains but on their vital refiguration” (Stoler 2008, 194). Egyptian red brick factories, whether they are abandoned, converted, or still working, are the result of successive political projects and of a historical process dating back to Gamal Abdel Nasser’s reforms and large public works projects. The goal here is to understand these ruins as the “afterlives” (Salem 2019) of previous governments’ construction policies. But the process of ruination also results from industrial, agricultural, and land issues. This analysis leads to the observation that, in hindsight, the red brick sector’s history seems to run counter to the established economic and political chronologies in Egypt.
19The Egyptian industrial red brick sector initially underwent radical change with the construction of the Aswan High Dam between 1960 and 1970, one of the biggest projects of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s mandate (Fouda 2001; El-Hamawy 2020). Until then, red brick was mainly handmade in small ovens on the banks of the Nile; producers would collect the silt deposited by the annual river floods as the raw material for this process. The completion of the High Dam deprived these producers of this renewable natural resource and made them dig the surrounding agricultural lands to use their mud. The criminalization of dredging, called tagrîf in Arabic, has been one of the main arguments to close the factories located on the banks of the Nile.
20Among his vast land and agricultural reforms, Nasser promulgated the first major laws forbidding such dredging for industrial activities; he also forbade the encroachment of housing on agricultural land. Article 150 of Law 53 on Agriculture of 1966 forbids tagrîf on agricultural lands. It also stipulates that the machinery used for the digging and transporting of silt will be confiscated. More specifically, Article 153 of the same law prohibits the establishment of red brick factories and workshops on agricultural land.7
- 8 For full text, see: https://manshurat.org/node/12487; the law is also mentioned in the following ar (...)
- 9 As Deborah MacKenzie (1985, 10) puts it, “all in all, Egypt is losing a lot of farmland to brick pr (...)
21Though passed under Nasser, these laws were not fully implemented until the 1980s. Law 116 of 1983 amended the 1966 Agriculture Law and renewed the prohibition on using Nile silt and earth from agricultural lands to produce red bricks; it also renewed the ban on using agricultural land for non-agricultural purposes.8 The pressure on agricultural land seems to have intensified during this period, in a context of demographic growth and increasing demand for land and food.9 The state’s reaction to this situation was visible through this 1983 Law and a presidential decree, promulgated in 1984 by Hosni Mubarak, saying that “by 11 August this year, every red-brick factory in the country that relies on mud for its raw material must close” (Mackenzie 1985, 10). But if it was possible to implement these legislative texts, then it was because they came in the context of the active involvement of Mubarak’s government in providing alternatives to traditional production.
22The first alternative concerned the main raw material used to produce bricks. To find a substitute for Nile silt, the Egyptian government’s Housing and Building Research Center (HBRC) conducted a series of field studies to prospect for shale clay (tafla) quarries (Abû Husayn 1973; HBRC 1975). This research was carried out in the 1970s and was associated with notes on production techniques which favored both automatization and the development of traditional red brick factories.
- 10 “Hâdhihi al-masâni‘ tuwaffir lak al-tûb al-gadîd; al-badâ’il tughattî ihtiyâgâtinâ ‘âmayn” [These F (...)
- 11 “Hâdhihi al-masâni‘ tuwaffir lak al-tûb al-ahmar al-gadîd [These Factories Provide You the New Bric (...)
23The Mubarak government also directly developed a shale clay industrial brick sector. As previously mentioned, in 1985, twenty-four automated factories were established through the importation of production lines from France and Germany.10 Among them, eight were state-owned, thirteen were semi-private, and three were private. These factories were scattered across the whole country and were meant to provide affordable building materials to every inhabitant.11 According to a text message exchange with one employee of Ceric, the French company that provided most of these factories (including Masr Brick), these imports were carried out with the financial support of the European Union; I have not yet found other evidence to confirm this.
- 12 Decree 3435 of 2016, which fixed the prices of the natural gas provided to red brick factories. For (...)
24Finally, the state tried to push individual producers to use shale clay instead of Nile silt. The specialized industrial areas in Arab Abu Said, Girza, al-Saf, and Kafr Himayd were set up in the late 1980s through an unplanned and progressive move of the producers to these areas. According to one producer in al-Saf area, they established new factories close to the shale clay quarries to reduce transportation costs, given that “raw materials are available, energy is available, workers are available” (interview, February 2022). It seems that the local authorities, through the city council (maglis al-madîna), were assisting willing producers in the process of getting land to build their new factories. As the same producer put it, “The transition to the industrial areas has been managed by the city council, which provided the energy, the land, and the electricity” (interview, February 2022). In these areas, Egyptian public actors are still providing electricity and natural gas at fixed prices, as well as ensuring water supply by digging groundwater wells.12 Although this displacement of producers was not completely planned by public actors, all these incentives were part of an overall strategy to reduce dredging in the agricultural areas of the Nile Valley.
25This short overview of the historical evolution of red brick production suggests that it is out of step with the policies of successive Egyptian regimes as they are usually understood. Although Nasser’s project was based on the principles of nationalization, massive industrialization, and development of state-owned enterprises, this building material was still produced by individuals and families in factories with basic equipment until the 1980s. In comparison to other building materials like cement or steel, that were part of the industrial activities nationalized by Nasser, especially in Helwan (Makram Ebeid 2012), the red brick sector looks like an exception.
26Surprisingly, as stated above, the state-led industrialization of the red brick sector happened during Mubarak’s presidency instead. Mubarak was better known for neoliberalizing the Egyptian economy, following IMF recommendations, and continuing the free-market “Open Door (Infitâh)” policy led by Anwar al-Sadat (Gobe 1999). Despite this, Mubarak managed to forbid dredging by the red brick producers and it is during his presidency that twenty-four automated factories were set up. The fact that these factories were mostly owned by public actors like the Ministry of Housing (through Masr Brick) might also seem all the more unusual given that debates and criticism about the poor efficiency of state-owned enterprises were already circulating in Egypt at the time (Labib 2021). Thus, these apparently anachronistic evolutions of the red brick sector remind us that Mubarak’s regime was not monolithic in its privatization and liberalization-focused approach to the economy, at least not in the 1980s, and that state intervention remained important, as other scholars have already demonstrated (Mitchell 2002; Soliman 2011; Adly 2020).
27The industrialization of red brick was late when compared to other building materials due to the broad-based use of red brick, to the scattering of small- to medium-sized factories along the Nile, and to the general informality of the production process, which made the industry more difficult to control. But it could be also seen as evidence of a continuity between various political projects, as Sara Salem has argued (2019). In spite of the defeat of the Nasserist project in 1967, Salem argues that it had afterlives, and that it continued to influence the public policies of the following regimes. This continuity may contradict the traditional opposition between Nasser’s nationalizations and Sadat and Mubarak’s privatizations. It can also be seen in the common struggle against destruction of agricultural land. Still very present in current debates and measures by the al-Sisi regime to curtail residential encroachment, this has been a political issue since Nasser’s presidency. To draw on Salem’s (2019) terminology, the necessity of fighting tagrîf might have “haunted” every government after Nasser, but it has also been linked to political discourses about food self-sufficiency and defense of an agricultural economy (Ayeb 2008; Acloque Desmulier 2017). Once again, this leads us to qualify established chronologies linking the welfare state with Nasser and neoliberalism with Mubarak. In other words, by finally forbidding the dredging of Nile agricultural land by red brick producers and through the establishment of state-owned factories across the country, Mubarak seems to have implemented those parts of Nasser’s project that dated back to the 1966 Agricultural Law.
28In this context, the creation of automated red brick factories resulted from a “symbiosis between public and private sector” (Gobe 1999, 209), which was enabled by a series of investment laws promulgated in the 1970s. These factories were hybrid infrastructures, resulting from several industrial, investment, and land policies. But their ruination was also linked to reorientations in national industrial policies and construction policies more broadly.
29Although automated factories were designed to compensate for the closing of small to medium-sized individual factories, they closed less than forty years after their opening. The two main reasons cited to justify these closures are technical and economic.
30According to one of the main red brick producers in Arab Abu Said, the automated factories closed because of the competition with small- to medium-sized semi-automated factories, which had imported production lines from China: “These companies started to find it difficult because the cost of production with the Chinese lines is very small compared to the fully automatic ones” (interview, May 2022). If the quality of the product was better in the fully automated factories, the price was also too high and inappropriate for the local market. The smaller factories were able to maintain their production by meeting this local demand.
- 13 “Dhabh sharikat Masr Brîk al-hukûmiyya li-sinâ‘at al-tûb.. Makhâwif min tashrîd 340 usra.. wa-l-Isk (...)
31Another reason was suggested by a former sales manager at Egyptian Greek, a company producing bricks with a factory in Minya, mainly owned by Orascom Construction. He told me that automated factories suffered from the high energy and electricity consumption needed to fire bricks and operate automatic dryers (interview, May 2022). Regular increases in gas prices led to a dramatic surge in production costs, plunging these factories into debt and making them non-competitive on the market. The technical difficulties faced by the automated factories also were reflected in the labor protests at the Masr Brick factory upon the announcement of the plant’s closure. Among other reasons, workers pointed to the fact that their French production line had been designed in the 1960s and that no modernization had occurred since the creation of the factory.13 Moreover, while automation enables a standardization of products and a concentration of production in bigger factories, the bricks being produced did not fit with the Egyptian market at the time, when most of housing production was financed by private individuals (Shawkat 2020).
- 14 “El-Tahrir’s Mugamma to Transform into ‘World Class’ Hotel,” Egyptian Streets, August 11, 2022, htt (...)
32After their closure, and unlike buildings such as the Mugamma‘ on Tahrir Square that is to be turned into a luxury hotel,14 automated factories were not converted to other functions owing to technical and geographical reasons. Their heavy infrastructure was only appropriate for red brick production and could not be easily used in another way. The factories are often far from urban centers, in desert areas on which land pressure is weaker than in inner Cairo.
33Although ruins cannot be seen only as “dead matter or remnants of a defunct regime” according to Stoler, it is necessary to “attend to their reappropriations and strategic and active positioning within the politics of the present” (Stoler 2008, 196). Based on this understanding of ruins and ruination as the result of political projects and imaginaries, I argue that the shutting down of these red brick factories has also been intertwined with broader urban policies and a reorientation of the welfare state’s priorities.
- 15 “Wazîr qita‘ al-a‘mâl yu‘lin tasfiyat sharikat al-nasr li-sina‘at al-kûk [The Minister of the Busin (...)
- 16 “Egypt Closes National Iron and Steel Company Ahead of Liquidation,” Middle East Monitor, June 1, 2 (...)
- 17 “Mahalla Textile Workers Initiate Partial Strike, Warn of Comprehensive Industrial Action,” Mada Ma (...)
- 18 “State Responds to Recent Labor Protests with Heightened Repression and Exceptional Legal Measures, (...)
34The progressive closing of the automated factories, some of them under the control of public or state-affiliated actors (ministries, state-owned banks, etc.), can be viewed as part of the recent series of liquidations of state-owned factories. The Al-Nasr Company for Coke and Chemicals15 and the Iron and Steel Company16 are examples of public sector companies which have been liquidated or whose shares have been sold to private investors. According to the government, these closures were justified by the debt or heavy losses of these companies, or by the need to rehabilitate factories. This phenomenon is not new, of course, with debates in Egypt on the efficiency of state-owned companies dating back to the 1980s (Labib 2021), but it seems to have accelerated in the last decade, affecting industries that were previously sheltered from privatization pressure. These closures and the generally poor management of these factories raised massive labor protests, especially in the Masr Spinning and Weaving factory in Mahalla in 201717 or in the Alexandria Shipyard Company, where workers were violently repressed.18
- 19 “Bil-vidiyû wa-l-suwar.. Akbar masâni‘ al-tûb al-taflî fî al-Saff tusharrid 450 usra wust tagâhul a (...)
- 20 Op. cit., al-Bawaba, November 23, 2015. This special and favored relationship between a big constru (...)
- 21 Op. cit., Cairo 24, August 4, 2020.
35The closing of Masr Brick in 2015, which employed around 340 workers and employees, can be seen as another example of this recent wave of liquidations. The company was in debt to Petrotrade, the state-owned natural gas provider, but also to water and electricity providers, which led to an electricity cut at the factory; production never restarted after this cut.19 According to workers, the state, particularly the Ministry of Housing, which owned 74% of the company, did nothing to save the factory. In 2015, the general debt of Masr Brick was estimated at LE26 million. However, workers also highlighted mismanagement and corruption issues that led the company to its bankruptcy. In addition to citing a lack of modernization of the production lines, they charged Hassan Abdel Magid Hassan, the president of the board of directors (appointed by the then-Prime Minister Ibrahim Mahlab) with mismanagement. According to them, he wasted public funds with excessive private expenditures and was responsible for the destruction of part of the factory’s equipment. The workers also highlighted the discounts granted by Hassan to Arab Contractors on products and transport, which they claim had never happened before.20 All of these complaints from workers in a state-owned factory were not isolated, with staff from the National Company of Beni Suef for Red Brick also demanding to be compensated after the factory’s shutdown.21
36These liquidations and mismanagement issues could be interpreted as a disengagement of the Egyptian state from industrial activity: as one of the Arab Abu Said producers put it, “the government doesn’t invest in the industry anymore” (interview, May 2022). However, shutting down or selling its industrial assets does not mean that the government has completely given up its interventionist mission. On the contrary, al-Sisi’s regime is characterized by a strong discourse about state intervention in industry, housing, and infrastructure development. Far from abandoning these interventionist missions, the government is selecting some activities and some producers at the expense of others.
- 22 “Wazîr al-sinâ‘a: harîsûn ‘alâ al-irtiqâ’ bi-l-anshita al-intâgiyya fî kâffat al-muhâfazât [Ministe (...)
- 23 Saudi and Emirati investments concerned some specific state-owned companies, like the Egypt Aluminu (...)
- 24 “al-Sîsî yuwaggih bi-inshâ’ akbar mugamma‘ sinâ‘î li-l-bûlî ithîlîn [al-Sisi Directs the Establishm (...)
- 25 “Na’ib: insha’ akbar masna‘ li-l-ghazl wa-l-nasîg sa-yusâhim fî ihyâ’ al-qutn al-misrî ‘âlamiyyan [ (...)
37The Trade and Industry Ministry has been very active in the last few years with three identifiable and declared objectives: first, to develop exports in order to obtain foreign currency; second, to boost national production across all governorates;22 and third, to attract foreign investment, especially from Saudi Arabia and more recently from the United Arab Emirates.23 The state’s attention and investments are targeting specific industrial products, like leather (with production being relocated from inner Cairo to Badr City (Florin and Garret 2021)), polyethylene24 or aluminium. Some older industries are also being redeveloped and extended, like the spinning and weaving industry in Mahalla.25
- 26 This authority was initially created in 1957 in a context of national industrial planning, but it w (...)
- 27 “Ra’îs al-wuzarâ’ yukallif bi-i‘âdat takhtît al-manâtiq al-sinâ‘iyya al-‘ashwâ’iyya bi-l-muhâfazât (...)
38The red brick sector does not seem to be part of these strategic industries. Automated factories have all been sold and closed progressively, and the specialized areas where individual factories are located are targeted by the Ministry of Trade and Industry to be replanned. Through the Industrial Development Authority (IDA),26 the state is aiming to “develop” the “informal industrial areas,” according to presidential priorities defined in May 2021.27 On the ground, this policy has resulted in the establishment of offices inside industrial areas: for example in Arab Abu Said for red brick production. According to one of the producers, the IDA settled in this area in 2020 with the intent to legalize land ownership, which is mostly informal. This is one reason among others (energy prices, decreased demand, etc.) why factories in this area are closing: “Everything now is stopped because of the work licenses. Now, we don’t have a license because the IDA is asking us to buy the land again. It’s a very big problem” (interview, May 2022).
39This targeting of small- to medium-sized industrial producers is not specific to red brick production and to Arab Abu Said, but is a more general policy of the Egyptian state, probably to get more revenues from these activities through taxes. The creation of such new industrial areas as Tarboul City, “The Industrial City of Egypt,”28 south of Helwan, may also be included in this overall effort to boost national production according to the criteria and orientations defined by public actors. Although the red brick sector has been slowing down for the last five to six years, it is not reflective of a more general, structural deindustrialization. Some red brick producers are still active and have been able to adapt to this crisis, especially by proposing more standardized products or by working with public actors. Thus, the slowdown rather appears to be the result of economic and political selection among national industries and producers.
- 29 Op. cit., al-Gomhoreya, August 9, 1985.
40As far as building materials are concerned, the ruination of the red brick sector is advantaging the cement and concrete block industries. According to the main red brick producer in Arab Abu Said and a former sales manager at Egyptian Greek, the balance between red brick and concrete block has completely changed: in 2012, red bricks represented 80% of the market and concrete blocks 20%, whereas in 2022, both materials shared the market equally (interviews, February 2021 and June 2022). Concrete blocks are not a new building material in Egypt. In the 1980s, they were presented as one possible alternative to the traditional red brick made from Nile silt.29 However, the industrialization and massive development of concrete blocks has only occurred in the last five years. This switch from red bricks to concrete blocks, visible in such huge construction projects as the New Administrative Capital, is mainly justified by technical arguments: the production of concrete blocks is quicker and “cleaner” (notwithstanding cement production) because blocks do not need firing; factories can be located anywhere, even directly on the construction sites, contrary to red bricks, for which kilns are fixed and need large areas. These characteristics of concrete blocks result in direct savings in energy and transportation costs.
41However, as I have shown for the general decay of the red brick sector, economic and technical arguments do not fully explain the whole process. Based on a science and technology studies approach (Farias and Blok 2017) and on Ann Stoler’s understanding of “ruination” (2008), which highlight the political dimension of objects, infrastructure, and ruins, I argue that this switch from red bricks to concrete blocks is also linked to political projects. The very rapid development and industrialization of concrete block production, which is mainly explained by skyrocketing demand, can be linked to the recent seizure by the Egyptian army of cement factories.30 Others have studied the role of the military in the Egyptian economy (Abul-Magd 2018; Amar 2018; Sayigh 2019); suffice to say that the red brick sector has been a priority neither for public actors nor for the army. The shutting down of automated and semi-automated red brick factories may be linked to this lack of interest and to the reorientation of these actors towards the production and use of cement and concrete blocks. Small- to medium-sized entrepreneurs, which make up the majority of red brick producers, are being excluded from this new economic system.
- 31 Op. cit., al-Gomhoreya, August 27, 1985.
42A quick look at the informal neighborhoods in Cairo is sufficient to understand that the main and historical users of the red brick have been small- to medium-sized private actors (see Shawkat 2020). In the 1980s, automated factories were established to provide affordable building materials to precisely these citizens. The reports published by the Housing and Building Research Center (HBRC) during these years always insisted on the need to meet the demand for bricks. They showed calculations and estimations about increasing demand and what should be done to meet it. These welfare preoccupations were also visible in the geographic distribution of factories and in the initial decision to regulate automated brick prices: “These factories provide you the new red brick. Fixed prices for the concrete block and the tafla brick,” said an accountant from the Ministry of Housing in 1985.31 Yet this welfare goal of providing building materials to the population has been progressively replaced by new welfare priorities based on profit. The development of cement and concrete block production, mainly controlled by military institutions, appears to illustrate this shift in welfare priorities from providing citizens with the ability to produce and build their own housing to providing them directly with ready-made housing and large-scale infrastructure. This process can also be read as a reorientation of state investment towards its own profit-making: “The new consensus that emerged around al-Sisi was largely a consensus around this announced relocation of development to the state itself, with the army as guarantor” (Vannetzel 2017, 42).
- 32 “Facelift with a Brush: Egypt’s President Orders Red-brick Buildings be Painted,” Ahram Online, Jan (...)
- 33 “Al-Sîsî yamna‘ al-binâ’ fî Misr li-‘ashr sanawât.. Al-fi’ât al-mutadarrira min al-qarâr [al-Sisi F (...)
- 34 For more information, see the analysis by the Built Environment Observatory: https://marsadomran.in (...)
43This shift in welfare priorities is not only visible through the transformation of industrial landscapes, but also on the construction side. In public actors’ speeches, red brick facades became a symbol of informal construction and even of an “uncivilized” face of the country, to use Prime Minister Mustafa Madbouly’s expression early 2019.32 This vision has resulted in massive demolitions, but also in the recent moratorium on construction by individuals in urban areas for the next ten years.33 This announcement followed a six-month construction freeze decreed in 2020 that mainly affected private and individual construction.34 The example of red brick production and use demonstrates a progressive shift in welfare policies, from providing the population with good and affordable building materials to the state becoming a developer or a “broker state” (Khalil 2021) that develops massive social housing and reorients both the production and construction sectors towards its own profit.
44The current decay of the red brick sector is not the product of a deindustrialization process, but rather follows the prioritization of specific industrial activities and sectors by public actors. In the 1980s, the goal was to develop and modernize a building material and its industry for the Egyptian citizens; by contrast, the current strategy is to favor building materials produced by the military and governmental institutions through their use in large-scale infrastructure and housing projects.
45This article analyzed the ruination process of the red brick production sector in Egypt. From mounting energy prices to the competition of concrete blocks and to public actors’ wishes to regulate production and construction, the article shows that ruined factories are the result of a series of political projects. The legacies of the red brick industrial sector are varied, including automated factories sold as scrap (Masr Brick), the closing of most factories in the country, and adaptations to the state’s new orientations. Taken together, these legacies embody the successive economic policies pursued by the Egyptian state. But the evolution of the red brick sector also highlights the more recent shift in its welfare priorities, from providing citizens the means to build affordable housing on their own to directly developing social housing and large-scale infrastructure. Moreover, this case study shows that the combination of welfare policies and more profit-oriented development plans leads not only to an accumulation of capital, but also to decay, abandonment, and closures on the margins of urban areas.
46The case of automated brick factories needs further and deeper research, especially as online information is scarce and direct access to factories and their former managers is difficult in the current political and social context. While geographical, economic, and historical approaches have been used in this article for methodological reasons and due to fieldwork conditions, the experience of workers is crucial and allows a better understanding of the disappearing factories. Since most workers seem to have worked their whole lives in automated and the semi-automated factories, one route of further study would be to investigate their personal links to these infrastructures, the skills they have developed, their fates after the closure of factories, and more broadly the social consequences of this sector’s decay. This further research will undoubtedly help understand how industrial labor and factories transformed workers and cities in Egypt.
Acknowledgements
I thank Nicholas Sowels, senior lecturer at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, and the issue’s coordinators for their precious feedback.
Conflict of interest
Alice Franck, one of my PhD supervisors, is part of ESMA’s editorial board.