The Egyptian capital, Cairo, is famed for its bustling streets. Pedestrians weaving their way through moving cars is a commonplace sight and traffic jams are the order of the day. But besides being a source of frustration, noisy, congested, and seemingly chaotic, what role do these streets play in the lives of the people, the Cairenes?

Common Egyptian phrases like “the pulse of the street” or “the street comes alive” reveal that streets are not just roads. They are living entities, the very heart of culture. The very word “street” is used in a multitude of ways in all languages, from “the man in the street” denoting the average person to a being out on the street referring to being unemployed, homeless, or having been freed from prison.

The 2020 Routledge Handbook of Street Culture contains work by various authors, all trying to capture what street culture really is. Across 30 chapters and over 400 pages, street culture is defined as “the beliefs, dispositions, ideologies, informal rules, practices, styles, symbols, and values associated with, adopted by, and engaged in by individuals and organisations that spend a disproportionate amount of time on the streets.” Here, a street is not just about asphalt or concrete. It has life, composed of myriad features that give it its distinct character and identity. Together, makers make a city unique. 

Street culture can also be a communal, democratising force as the street is the place where people of different walks of life share the same space by necessity. Some are men in suits commuting to and from work. Some are tradesmen and shopkeepers making a living out in the hustle and bustle of things. Others, like the beggars and street sellers are drawn to the street by hardship and necessity. Drivers of microbuses, tuktuks, and taxis, all make up the bigger picture, reflected by the likes of buskers and artists who derive their inspirations from the streets to tell a story of what they see.

All of these individuals and their activities shape the cultural tapestry of Cairo. Notably, drivers of microbuses and tuktuks played a significant role in popularizing mahraganat music in the early 2000s. Vendors and sellers, on the other hand, become informal custodians of the street, assisting pedestrians and helping them navigate the unspoken rules and customs of the metropolis.

There is a darker side; one of patrolling police officers, CCTV cameras, and concrete barriers, enforcing a system of social control. The barriers around imposing government buildings stand as monuments to a system of segregated social classes consciously designed to insulate the ruling elite from the public.

Cairenes bring intersecting and sometimes conflicting interests to the streets, turning them into arenas of social and political struggle. The streets become sites of gatherings, celebrations, and consumption. The rich and the poor vie for control of public land, with the wealthy asserting their claims through exclusive spaces and the less privileged using the streets for festivities. The street thus becomes the theatre of class war. French thinker Henri Lefebvre argued that the street is subject to the suppression and the control of capitalist structures controlled by ruling elites, disenfranchising the public. 

The street is central to Lefebvre’s theories. It is the main road to a democratic, inclusive urban society. The disorder of the street, he says, increases the prospects of change and possibility, the sharing of ideas, meanings and experiences. Because the street is a meeting place where multiple, daily, random encounters are inevitable, it becomes the hub of what he called “playing and learning.”

This “play and learn” concept finds elaboration in the work of other thinkers, albeit in different ways. The Iranian thinker Assef Bayat called it street politics, describing it as “a set of conflicts and the attendant implications between a collective populace and the authorities, shaped and expressed episodically in the physical and social space of the streets – from the alleyways to the more visible sidewalks, public parks, or sports fields.” According to Bayat, what makes streets political in nature is the fact that they are subject to the control of a centralised power.

Bayat goes on to say that the fact that streets bring together people from all walks of life make them inherently political spaces. Different actors are forced to become “known to each other, talk, meet, and consciously interact with one another.” This can be the spark of organisation, communication, and networking that results in collective political action. For instance, vendors on the same street can, through ordinary conversation about shared interests, organise in collective action against forces that exploit their labour.

While the streets shape us, we also shape them. They are the physical representation of our collective memory. Their meaning transcends the pavements and the walls. The streets tell the story of who we are. Through the music of Sayed Darwich and Sheikh Imam to the poems of Ahmed Fouad Negm, the spirit of the streets resonates deeply. It is captured in countless photographs of the Arab Spring protests, taken cellphones by ordinary individuals, preserved forever by social media, the digital street. The city walls tell their own tales in graffiti and murals, while street theatre artists bring stories of the streets to life. We create the streets and they, in turn, create us. They are culture’s beginning and its end.