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I had acquired the habit, since childhood, of calling it" Egypt" instead of" Cairo."" I am going to go to Egypt,"" I'm returning from Egypt,"" I sent a courier to Egypt,"" the young girls from Egypt.... Everyone refers to the capital city by saying" Egypt" and not" Cairo," and nothing attests to its supremacy, its privileged situation better than this designation.... Cairo is a microcosm of Egypt. It is the heart of literature just as it is the heart of space and time. Gamal al-Ghitani (2001)

In less than ten years, Cairo has doubled its surface area. A new kind of unified and extensive city has come to surround and graft itself onto one of the world's densest agglomerations, leading to a bifurcation of urban development patterns. This bifurcation is linked to neoliberalization and global processes of recomposition, including the new international division of labor, the volatility and intensification of flows of information and capital, the conjunction of markets, and the emergence of a distinct, if limited, global-city role. This chapter discusses the radical transformation of economic and social metropolitan topographies in Cairo that have recently led to the inversion