Citizen Cairo: Maintenance and Ornament Part 2 Project 2019 Marwa Shykhon University of Cambridge | UK Citizen Cairo proposes a bottom-up shift in the responsibilities of urban maintenance, calling city inhabitants to take on this role and building social infrastructure through localised maintenance infrastructure. The project begins in Historic Cairo, which, caught between colonially inherited classifications of ‘heritage-value’ and increasing crackdowns on informal construction, exemplifies the everyday tensions between different perceptions of ‘urban-value.’ Formally in the hands of authorities, maintenance responsibilities allow the city to be slowly and dramatically shaped according to their shifting definitions of ‘monument’, ordinary (dispensable), UNESCO-protected, informal, or ‘uncivilised’. Meanwhile, residents’ lives and futures must negotiate these complexities. Citizen Cairo asks: Can the successful assumption of more responsibility to make and maintain the city engender real leverage for communities to negotiate their urban needs and futures? Using local informal construction methods, the interventions facilitate community-organised maintenance, accommodating waste disposal, storage and collection, communal equipment storage, repair workshops and organisational spaces, whilst different surface treatments and ornamentations highlight the different areas of human inhabitation. The project is conceived as a long-term shift in urban responsibilities, with a narrative unfolding over decades, questioning what the long-term effects of such a shift may be? How could it develop the known structures of citizenship and nation-state? Marwa Shykhon Tutor(s) Aram Mooradian James Pockson Ingrid Schröder