The question of how to write about the city constantly plagues designers, me included. The urban condition is such a complex and multifaceted phenomenon that it is more often than not impossible to distil it into any one clear or linear narrative. One has to go backward and forward, left and right, east and west, in order to congeal a narrative of something that is by its very nature dispersed. To attempt otherwise risks reductive compartmentalization of the richness, variety, and spatiality of the city. As a result, it is not uncommon for writing on urbanism to come across as disorganized, incoherent, and lacking a clear argument or stream of thought.

In Cairo Cosmopolitan, Diane Singerman and Paul Amar edit what might be termed a multi-author ethnography, which offers a portrait of Cairo through not just one image of the city but also several contemporary snapshots. The book calls to mind David Hockney's portraits, made up of a patchwork of Polaroid photos that present an arguably more complete view of a subject, such as his mother, than one photo alone could convey. Together, the twenty-three voices of Cairo Cosmopolitan present in nineteen essays a thorough and superbly edited sampling of the city. The volume represents a significant contribution to contemporary Middle East ethnography and urban studies.

Cairo is such a heterogeneous city that one feels—and paradoxically can find—a comforting sense of belonging that transcends national identities. The editors’ use of the word “cosmopolitan” in this study's title challenges ideas of the nation–state, suggesting at once a more global and personal reading of the city than is generally the case. The volume takes a broad sampling of the social life of contemporary Cairo and assembles it inside one cover. The diversity and range of the essays reflect Cairo's polyvocality and the scope of the book is one of its distinguishing features. One critique of such an approach is that constructing a complete image of the city would require a critical mass of essays. However, this book does not claim to be complete. It is as deliciously incomplete as the city itself, which can always be expanded upon.

The editors claim to be the voice of the self-coined “Cairo School of Urban Studies,” centered in the American University in Cairo. The Cairo School, which on an institutional level implicitly draws comparisons to the Chicago and Los Angeles schools of sociology and urbanism, respectively, aims to

The attempt to situate the everyday within the global and to tap into the multiple scaled networks that envelop the city is in my view a noble one because in urban analysis, designers tend to neglect the personal and the universal and the areas wherein they overlap. Although there is something slightly crass about self-styling a school, the authors do attempt to unravel new spatial economies.

Ultimately, the contributions in this volume are refreshingly speculative and beg to be applied in practice. As the editors put it in their introduction, “we have rediscovered how the operations of the authoritarian state, city administration, social control agencies, and national identities are contingent, internally contested, often fragmented, and pregnant with multiple possibilities” (p. 10). Many of the authors work in anthropology, design, geography, or urbanism; the book would be of interest to scholars in each of those fields. It is a compilation of ethnographies from researchers who for the most part did not have the opportunity to do fieldwork for extended periods of time. The individual pieces making up the whole, however— as with Cairo itself—derive their power from being assembled alongside other voices and positions and from the relationships forged as a result. This group work culminates in what I term a “multiauthor ethnography” as opposed to the multisite ethnographies more in vogue in anthropology. Multiauthor ethnographies allow for an even more comprehensive reading of the city; different authors investigate different sites from different perspectives, from the local to the universal, and each essay contributes to an ethnographic representation vastly broader than one ethnographer alone can accomplish.

Cairo Cosmopolitan is organized into five sections: “The City Cosmopolitan,” “Consumer and Investor Geographies,” “Heritage and Touristic Globalization,” “Subcultures and Media Contestation,” and “Celebratory Spaces and Vernacular World-Crossing.” It also includes an incisive afterword by Nezar AlSayyad, in which AlSayyad asks, “Whose Cairo? . . . Which Cairo do we talk about and in whose name?” AlSayyad answers that “there are many Cairos, and many other Cairos in metropolitan Cairo itself” (p. 539). Cairo Cosmopolitan goes a long way toward lending some of multitudinous Cairo a voice.