New Republic animated by ghosts: ethnographic reflections on project-making in an ‘open’ Egyptian desert city

This article examines socio-economic future-making in Badr City, a desert town located 47 km east of Cairo. Planned in the 1970s as an industrial city purpose-built for President Anwar Sadat's export-oriented economic policies (infitah), Badr long languished as a ghost town: industries did not take off, inhabitants did not arrive, rumours about crime and Bedouin mafias abounded. After President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi's 2015 decision to build a New Administrative Capital nearby, however, Badr has transformed beyond recognition. Today, construction workers, state bureaucrats, real-estate investors and military contractors flock to Badr, turning it into a focal point of the regime's touted 'New Republic'. Based on urban planning visions, media archives and ethnographic fieldwork with men launching small investment projects (mashari'), the article examines why Badr is deemed particularly 'open' for projects-making. Through a sparse urban texture and not-yet-gelled social networks, the city is understood as both spatially and socially open. Often, this openness arises from tensions between superimposed projects from different eras. Materially, symbolically and spatially, the ghosts of President Sadat's industrial city permeate the veneer of President el-Sisi's New Republic, and it is precisely the lingering ghosts that animate Badr's flourishing project economy.