资源环境科技发展态势分析平台

Haram City is Egypt's first affordable' gated community, hosting both aspirational middle-class homeowners and resettled poor urban residents. Amidst legal ambiguity during Egypt's 2011-2013 revolutionary period, the management team of this public-private partnership was tasked with creating a fully self-sufficient' city. While Haram City is the product of top-down seeing like a state' master planning (Scott, ), the day-to-day resolution of class vulnerabilities and disputes over reasonableness' in city life requires forms of interpersonal adjudication otherwise addressed through local urban lawseeing like a city' (Valverde, ). This article uses ethnography of management techniques aiming to upgrade behaviour' to theorize that a private entity, in a strategically indeterminate relationship with the state, reconciles future-oriented planning and storied prejudices by merging two visions of governance. Imitating the repertoire of urban law, managers plan the very realm of bottom-up decision making. They then adapt top-down urban planning to bottom-up dispute resolution to spatially consolidate the consensual' outcomes of a rigged game. Evoking both colonial Egyptian vagrancy laws and neoliberal paternalist welfare, seeing like a city-state' governance amounts to authoritarianism that conceals itself within custom, appearing neutral so as to plan streets, codes and inner lives at once.