How does the city meet the river?

On my last trip to Cairo I was very lucky to be the guest of Omar Robert Hamilton and Ahdaf Soueif on their houseboat in Kit Kat. I woke up to waterbirds and paddlers and merchants selling produce off little boats. I spent the long mornings writing and studying, with the flow and filth of the river and the city just there. I walked into Imbaba to buy groceries, drink tea or watch a football match. The nights were split open by party boats blasting shaabi music or Despacito at alarming volume. As difficult as it might be to sleep, I also took comfort in the sheer madness of the Cairo cacophony. Living close to the Nile struck me as one of the longstanding pleasures of the city. 

Now, out of nowhere, the government has resolved to destroy these homes, many of which are historic. Given a week’s notice, residents were presented with two options: watch their homes be destroyed or pay exorbitant fees to have their houseboats tugged and stored elsewhere while they apply for new licenses that are strictly commercial. 

Families cleared. Homes compelled into business. 

I grew up in a heartland American city that turned away completely from its waterfront, and many of the cities I’ve lived in since have been defined by how urban realities form along that crucial line between solid and fluid. 

The Belgrade waterfront is lined with improvised pontoons that serve as homes or small, informal cafes and restaurants. During the Milosevic years, a decommissioned tugboat served as a key meeting place for the counterculture. Being on the water meant the machinations of the mafia state could be kept momentarily at bay, even if only in one’s mind. Budapest’s Danube shore is much tamer, with ferries for tourists and large vessels for corporate events. My Hungarian friends look at Belgrade’s more colorful waterfront with envy. 

For decades there was a unique, off-the-grid culture of boat repairmen, commercial divers and dropouts that gathered in front of Istanbul’s Persembe Pazari along the Golden Horn, but like so much in that city, it’s been paved over by forces that see wildness not as an essential aspect of a thriving and thrilling metropolis, but as a threat. 

In New York, where I live, the banks of the Hudson in Upper Manhattan represent some of the last unregulated patches of the city—also currently under threat by huge urban development programs that will disrupt, perhaps eradicate, some of the only free pastimes for the people of the neighborhood. 

These development schemes, usually justified under the guise of safety or to promote access to the water, are really about selling contracts, concentrating control of resources and leaving no part of the urban landscape unstructured. It’s as if the waterfront way of life is an affront to systems of control. The inevitable result of top-down development is to blandify the city, reducing diversity of experience and thought. 

Ahdaf and Omar’s awwama was both a refuge — that same sense of keeping the forces at bay we felt back in Belgrade — but also a place of connection. Watching the clumps of water hyacinths float by, it brought me close to the natural life of the city, the complex interplay of forces that gave rise to it. And surrounded by walls of books in many languages subtly bobbing as the wake of a boat set the house in motion, it suggested Cairo as a place of literary and intellectual expansiveness.

I suspect there are particular imaginings, commitments and insights that might only emerge from these homes afloat in urban-border country. Is there any doubt that the commercialized version of this historic waterfront is going to be anything but an abomination?