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Salma Abouelhossein is an urban planner and geographer interested in the global history of urbanization, urban political ecology, development planning, and urban-rural linkages. Her research agenda seeks to expand the study of urbanization beyond rigid city-centric frameworks asking how territories, ecologies, subjectivities, and infrastructures in the ‘non-city’ sustain urban life, and how the city and ‘non-city’ are constantly reshaped in relation to socioecological crises and struggles for spatial justice. Bringing together theoretical and methodological tools from critical geography, feminist theories of social reproduction, and agrarian studies, Salma’s research aims to explore the history of capitalist urbanization by examining its ecological and social reproductive underpinnings. She is currently a PhD candidate in urban studies and planning at Harvard University where she is the Aga Khan doctoral fellow for the study of architecture and urbanism in the Muslim world. Her dissertation will explore what she refers to as “The Agrarian Question of Urbanization,” investigating the interlinkages of urban and rural history in the Egyptian sugar-producing region. By analyzing four regional and infrastructural planning schemes for the Egyptian Sugar Belt at different moments of its history, she will trace how socioecological dispossessions, racialized and gendered spatial divisions of labor, and environmental crises were produced by, and materialized in, the regional and infrastructural planning of primary commodity production.
RCC Research Project: The Agrarian Question of Urbanization: Infrastructure, Agroecology, and Empire in Egypt’s Sugar Belt