My Cairo

A warm and deeply evocative exploration of Cairo through fragments of memory, urban spaces, and everyday life

“Looking back, I realize that Cairo’s meaning for me was never in its grand monuments but in the fragile, ordinary places where life unfolded.”—Yasser Elsheshtawy, from My Cairo: A Cartography of Belonging

My Cairo is a deeply personal yet critically informed exploration of Cairo as a city lived, remembered, and imagined. In vivid, evocative detail, Yasser Elsheshtawy draws on his formative years in the city during the 1970s and 1980s to reconstruct an intimate urban geography shaped by walking, drifting, lingering, and return. Blending memoir with urban history, architectural reflection with cultural observation, he approaches Cairo as a constellation of fragments—neighborhoods, streets, cafés, cinemas, schools, and everyday rituals—through which his own sense of belonging to the city gradually took shape. He guides us into spaces that were central to daily life yet rarely documented, many of which have since disappeared or been radically transformed. Photographs, maps, and visual fragments reinforce the idea of the city as a mosaic laced with memory. Elsheshtawy shows us that home is not a fixed place but something carried within, sustained by remembrance, intimacy, and fleeting moments of belonging.