Deserted factories: The recent decay of the industrial red brick production in Egyptian construction sector and cities

Résumé En

Red brick is one of the most common building materials in Egypt and is produced in three main types of factories : massive automated ones, semi-automated ones concentrated in industrial areas south to Cairo and semi-automated ones on the banks of the Nile.Although the country is witnessing a construction boom with the development of public infrastructures and new cities in the desert, the red brick sector has slowed down for the last six or seven years. Most of the factories are now closing, being merely abandoned, sold as scrap in public auctions or converted into other activities. This paper will explore different explanation leads to understand this apparently paradoxical decay of a whole economic sector and its industrial infrastructures.Starting from a description of this supply chain industrialization and the progressive delocalization of the factories from the Nile banks to the peripheries of the valley since the 1980s, this communication will argue that the contemporary physical decay of these factories is at crossroads of technical, economic, social, environmental and political issues.Looking at the factories’ recent evolution provides indeed an insight in the Egyptian public policies and in the transformation of Cairo’s urban and industrial peripheries. The growing competition with the cement block, directly sponsored or produced by the military actors, the standardization of the urban architecture, the institutional pressure towards the use of natural gas and the government grabbing on the construction and real estate sectors are among the main factors behind the physical, economic and social decay of red brick factories.This proposal relies on a PhD fieldwork of six months between 2021 and 2022. I have realized interviews with red brick producers in different regions, but also architects, civil engineers, sellers and contractors in order to grasp the functioning of the whole red brick supply chain, from the production to the construction sites. I will also resort to many secondary sources (press articles, archives, satellite images and legal framework).