One flew over “the Colony’s” nest: a silent revolution for the right to live
On a Friday night in February 2017—six years after Egypt’s Revolution—Mahmoud El-Naggar took the microphone at his son’s wedding in a neighborhood known as “the Colony.” “On my life,” he declared to the crowd, his voice carrying across the narrow courtyard, “tonight will be a good night, and it will go on no matter what anyone says. We haven’t harmed anyone. But if someone harms us, we’ll respond.” (*)
The words were meant for the outside world that refused to recognize them, that shadowed their celebrations with investigations and threats of eviction. Here, in this neighborhood that had grown out of a broken promise, a wedding was never just a wedding. It was a declaration of existence, an act of defiance against a reality that had told them for six years that their presence was temporary.
Mahmoud was one of hundreds who forced their way into abandoned apartment blocks in El-Nahda Housing in early 2011. Over time, he became a crucial mediator between the residents of this parallel urban enclave and the official state besieging them. That night, before his impromptu speech, Mahmoud had spent hours at the nearby police station negotiating the release of the DJ, who had been detained for working without a permit. When he finally came out, the celebration resumed.
A new geography
“The Colony” is the name residents gave to dozens of massive social housing buildings in El-Nahda, on the far northeastern edge of Cairo. Built in the 1980s, the apartment blocks had stood empty for more than two decades.
Their hulking concrete forms posed a troubling urban and moral puzzle: How could a state build “social housing” with public funds then leave it vacant for years? That question lingered for decades, until the 2011 Revolution created a radically different reality.
After Jan. 28, 2011, while the country’s attention was fixed on the squares, a quieter transformation unfolded across the forgotten edges of the city. Security forces withdrew and administrative authority faltered. Amid this unprecedented institutional retreat, many families suddenly faced an urgent existential choice. Some had been evicted from fragile informal housing, while others had spent years trapped in temporary rooms that had slowly hardened into permanent arrangements with no future.
In that moment, the empty Nahda buildings appeared as a tangible answer to a basic question: where can we live? Breaking into the apartments was not a chaotic rush but a deliberate collective decision discussed among families themselves. After all, they asked one another: were these buildings not constructed with public funds? Had the state not classified them as social housing? And had it not, in practice, abandoned them—and the people they were supposedly built for?
The anger that had shaken Egypt’s squares was transformed into something more immediate and material. Not slogans about dignity or speeches about justice, but a door opened for children who had no room of their own and a roof against the rain. People turned the abstract idea of an administrative vacuum into something concrete: a toilet, electricity and fragile neighborly relations forming in dim corridors.
Seen from this angle, January cannot be understood only as a political rupture. The city itself must be read as a shifting landscape where popular action, urban voids and decades of housing policy collided. To understand what happened in Nahda is to confront a deeper question: what does it mean for a city to be abandoned, and what happens when the poor occupy state-built homes that were meant for them—but were never inhabited?
Why “occupation,” not “encroachment”?
What happened in Nahda Housing cannot be understood simply as criminal trespass against state property. It is more accurate to describe it as an occupation.
The word “encroachment” is a narrow legal label. It isolates the act from its social and political context, reducing it to individual wrongdoing rather than recognizing it as a collective phenomenon produced by a deeply flawed housing system. Using the term “occupation” does not morally justify the act, nor is it a call to repeat it under different historical conditions—where the costs would likely be far higher. Rather, it is an attempt to align language with a concrete material reality.
These were apartments built with public funds, classified by the state as social housing and left empty for decades while entire families were systematically excluded from the housing system. Housing, in this sense, is not merely a social demand but a site of struggle—over property, urban space and the right to shelter and to the city itself.
The state built these units and designated them as “social housing,” yet effectively suspended their use. At the same time, the very social groups they were meant to serve were pushed out—administratively and economically—from the mechanisms meant to grant them access.
During field research conducted for a master’s thesis in Integrated Urbanism and Sustainable Design at the University of Stuttgart, 21 cases of social housing occupations were documented between 2011 and 2012. These incidents occurred across 10 governorates, most of them in Greater Cairo. In every case, the occupied units had been built by the state and left vacant for years. The concentration of these events in both time and place transforms them from isolated incidents into a social phenomenon tied to a specific political moment and to long-standing distortions in housing policy.
The poor did not occupy homes that were never meant for them. They entered homes officially designated as social housing—homes abandoned in a city already suffering from a structural housing crisis. This contradiction is precisely why describing the act as mere “encroachment” falls short. The occupation was, in effect, a direct interrogation of housing policy itself.
How “the Colony” was made
What happened in El-Nahda Housing was not a chaotic invasion nor a spontaneous burst of social disorder. It was a conscious and necessary response to a long-standing housing crisis that erupted during an exceptional political moment.
Most of those who moved into the buildings belonged to Egypt’s precarious labor force—people with no contracts and no stable income. They were microbus drivers, construction finishers, street vendors, freelance nurses and factory workers from nearby El-Obour city. A significant number of households were also headed by women—after divorce, imprisonment or the death of a spouse.
They were not activists, nor were they the “thugs” often invoked in official narratives—though moments of confrontation inevitably occurred. Many had been living under unstable hosting arrangements in relatives’ homes or shared apartments. After January, with the first shocks of economic uncertainty and the collapse of security, many of them were expelled.
The January moment did not create the need for housing. What it did was break the invisible barrier that had prevented people from touching what they had long known was there: rows of locked social housing blocks just meters away while families crowded into single rooms or were pushed onto the street.
With the disappearance of police presence and the collapse of administrative control along the city’s edges, the urban void became a real option rather than a symbolic one. What residents found, however, were not livable homes but stripped concrete shells—doors stolen, bathrooms looted and no electricity, running water or sewage infrastructure.
Before establishing ownership, they first established survival. Each apartment contributed 50 Egyptian pounds to install a single light bulb in the building, and residents then cooperated to connect water, sewage and electricity through improvised systems. This cooperation became the first form of social community to emerge in the neighborhood—long before any language of rights or revolution appeared.
Equally important was how residents understood their own actions. They did not see what they had done as a crime. They knew the units belonged to the state rather than private owners, and many described their actions as correcting an obvious injustice. In that sense, the “colony” was both a response to poverty and a quiet challenge to a state logic that produces housing as a commodity while punishing those who use it as a right. Housing itself became a political act—without a single chant being raised.
Housing as a store of value
Decades of misguided housing policy gradually transformed housing into what might be described as an administrative commodity. This logic produced the prolonged vacancy visible in parts of El-Nahda, yet that emptiness was not simply the result of planning mistakes or bureaucratic dysfunction.
An administrative commodity is reduced to a numbered unit—an item to be cataloged and distributed through paperwork. Its value is measured not by its ability to host everyday life but by its conformity to procedures and administrative files. In this system, the apartment existed physically but remained “uninhabitable” in the eyes of the state until it entered a closed circuit of returns, control and political loyalty. The unit was ready for living but not ready to enter the state’s logic.
Planning itself, in this context, ceased to function as a tool for organizing life and instead became an instrument of suspension. When the already lengthy timeline of construction is separated from the urgent timeline of housing need, a project becomes paradoxical: complete yet unfinished. Walls stand upright, but the social life they are meant to shelter remains absent.
This logic produced a fracture within the neighborhood itself, dividing a southern section integrated into daily life and services from a northern section suspended between construction and allocation. The main axis running through the district became a social boundary separating a lived urban space from an abandoned one.
The void was no longer merely a planning error. It became a political instrument—a means of postponing rights and controlling distribution. But when emptiness lasts too long, its moral legitimacy erodes in the face of urgent need. At that point, the existence of a vacant apartment becomes more violent than occupying it.
The occupation therefore was not merely a breach of the law. It exposed the legal logic itself: a system that produced units without life while prohibiting their use in the name of order. Through direct action, society effectively declared something simple—when planning detaches itself from everyday life, it produces a void that only social action can fill.
The January moment: when the system stalled
The moment of January 2011 was not simply a fleeting political shift. It represented a profound rupture in the material texture of everyday life.
In neighborhoods like El-Nahda, the mechanisms that had governed space for years suddenly faltered. Security forces disappeared first, followed by administrative authority, turning the area into a fragile zone open to reinterpretation.
Two interconnected systems temporarily broke down: the market logic that turned housing units into speculative assets and the logic of control that protected that system through security and surveillance. The state did not vanish entirely, but its immediate instruments lost effectiveness.
Those who rushed to occupy the abandoned apartments did not see their actions as the overthrow of property rights. Rather, they viewed them as a temporary suspension—an opportunity to secure shelter and later negotiate legalization.
The act quickly took on a collective form. Families spread across the buildings according to informal geographic patterns shaped by kinship and neighborhood networks. The action was not directed against the state as an abstract idea but against the void itself—against the violence of closed apartments while families remained without roofs.
Unlike a protest in a square, this was a permanent physical transformation that was difficult to reverse. Without raising a slogan, it threatened the very idea of regulated property. The question shifted from “Who owns the apartment?” to “Who needs it?” In that moment, legitimacy moved from the text of the law to the balance of need and power on the ground.
Why was the act left alone?
While grand speeches echoed through the squares, another kind of action was unfolding in neighborhoods like Nahda. People were quietly transforming administrative emptiness into lived housing.
This separation between the political and the everyday was not accidental. It reflected a long-standing structure of struggle focused on central authority while overlooking the city itself as a terrain of daily conflict.
When the revolutionary wave erupted, attention turned to sweeping political questions such as elections, the constitution and political violence. Amid this momentum, housing occupations—despite their deep social roots—remained outside the prevailing political framework.
When people stormed the state’s homes, the revolution found no one able to politically represent that act. The result was a painful split: a revolution in the streets without tools to represent material needs and people on the ground without organizational structures to protect their gains. The lesson was stark—political liberation remains incomplete if it does not address the foundations of everyday life.
An open ending: housing as a postponed revolution
What happened in “the Colony” was deeper than a protest. It was a harsh revelation about a deeper crisis—the crisis of the city itself.
Empty apartments exposed a fundamental contradiction: a state that builds houses only to leave them vacant and a population searching for shelter in a city governed by maps and paperwork.
Occupying those empty units became a material answer to a question housing policy had long failed to resolve: for whom is the city built?
Fifteen years later, the question feels even more urgent. The structures that produced this urban emptiness have not changed—if anything, they have deepened.
The state increasingly operates as a real estate developer, viewing land as an opportunity for value rather than a space for life. Housing has become part of a speculative market where apartments are sold on paper before they are built, reproducing exclusion through even harsher mechanisms.
The city itself now reflects the defeat of the right to housing.
Yet the core conflict remains unchanged: who has the right to shape urban space and for whose benefit the city is produced.
The postponed revolution—the revolution for the right to housing and a just city—has only become more urgent. It is postponed not because it is optional but because it remains unfinished, because the material needs of millions cannot wait forever.
The question now is not only what happened but what we will do with this understanding. Will the city continue to be measured in square meters and sale prices, or will it be measured by its capacity to sustain dignified life for everyone?
(*) Names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.