Infrastructural Discontent in the Sanitary City: Waste, Revolt, and Repression in Cairo

Abstract

In this article, I examine the relationship between waste, revolt, and repression in Cairo's sanitation system from the early 20th century to the present. I coin the term infrastructural discontent in the sanitary city to describe how discontent slowly accretes around Cairo's sanitation system and becomes a powerful force in the city's politics—a force that can be mobilised for popular revolt and state repression. I detail three expressions of infrastructural discontent in Cairo's sanitation system, paying careful attention to the deeply related mundane and spectacular productions of these expressions. Tracing the formation of infrastructural discontent in the sanitary city, I show how resistance and repression are produced and contested in material infrastructural relations which contain the accretions of long-standing struggles over colonialism, development, and uneven urbanisation.