Egypt's housing crisis : the shaping of urban space

Egypt's Housing Crisis takes presidential speeches, parliamentary reports, legislation, and official statistics as the basis with which to investigate the tools that officials have used to "solve" the housing crisis - rent control, social housing, and amnesties for informal self-building - as well as the inescapable reality of these policies' outcomes. Yahia Shawkat argues that wars, mass displacement, and rural-urban migration played a part in creating the problem early on, but that neoliberal deregulation, crony capitalism and corruption, and neglectful planning have made things steadily worse ever since. In the final analysis he asks, is affordable housing for all really that hard to achieve?