Architectural Cosmopolitanism, Decolonization, and Sustainable Cultural Tourism: Both “Familiarity” And “Escapism” Since Nineteenth-Century Egypt

Abstract

This paper chronologically examines the threefold relationship of cosmopolitanism, decolonization, and sustainable tourism. This association involves discursive meanings and implications that cannot be conceded without an invented architectural vocabulary. Starting with the context of the nineteenth-century Egypt, the analysis of two prominent hotels, the Shepheard’s hotel (1848) and the Old Cataract Hotel (1899), in the advent of the tourism industry, reveals that the worldly integration of forms while was intended as a statement of imperialism, it unintentionally resulted in cosmopolitan manifesto. These hotels have materialized the crucial role that cosmopolitan architecture plays in the expansion of the tourism’s terrain and decolonizing the inherited colonial representations. The expansion of tourism terrains was realized by the juxtapositions of “familiarity” and “escapism” as well as “local” and “global” exigencies. Therefore, this article argues that both hotels, materialize the articulation of the sociologist Ulrich Beck; “unintentional cosmopolitanism,” in The Cosmopolitan Vision (2006), which I will argue resulted as a ‘side effect’ of tourism activists’ efforts to materialize both Oriental myth and imperial power.” While this Oriental myth offered “escapism”, the imperial power provided “familiarity”, two necessary aspects of tourism, posited from the tourism management stand of Melanie Smith in “Space, Place, and Placelessness in the culturally Regenerated City” (2011). The development of both “familiarity” and “escapism” notions will be explored until the latest twenty-first century—passing through twentieth century’s shift from the cosmopolitanism of Heliopolis Palace Hotel (1910) to the transitory competence between imperialism and nationalism in projects like the Nile Hilton Hotel (1958). Moreover, the twentieth first century witnesses attempts of architecture decolonization and expansion of tourism’s terrains in many projects, such as the Grand Egyptian museum, Alexandria library, Cairo Festival City. This interpretation of cosmopolitanism and decolonization is a timely example of the complex cultural encounters that have always shaped the Egyptian history and the Middle East in general, given the imperialist forces of global capitalism forces which, similarly, thwarted the nineteenth century.