This thesis examines landscapes of housing vacancy in contemporary Cairo to reveal the plural regimes of value underlying city-making. Set against a dominant tradition of viewing vacant cityscapes as being commodified by capitalist reforms, the study offers original insight by tracing the social lives of vacant homes and the trajectories of their residents, owners, and builders. In particular, it focuses on how cultural, social, and political logics of treasuring and managing homes override, distort, or disrupt the assumed market logic.

In 2017, national statistics indicated almost a third of Cairo’s total housing units were empty. In academic and public discourse, observers express concern over what is perceived as a stock of dead, dormant spaces littering the urban landscape. Market critics typically lament the millions of uninhabited apartments and half-finished buildings as a symptom of neoliberal policies financialising housing, inciting a culture of treating homes as assets. Policymakers and economists advocating for market growth, by contrast, blame vacancy on regulatory obstacles – especially rent control and insufficient finance – restraining the free market’s smooth operation. Yet, in focusing on economic forces, both market-led policymaking and politico-economic critiques overlook plural registers of interacting with vacant homes only discernable at a much closer scale of social and architectural investigation.

Addressing this gap and drawing on 15 months of fieldwork involving interviews and architectural analysis, the thesis investigates five trajectories of homemaking in four neighbourhoods traversing social class and housing typology. Going beyond an economic lens, it overlays the socio-political entanglements, affective meanings, and cultural imaginations of vacant landscapes. Conceptually, it reframes them as battlegrounds where competing registers of value are fought out. Namely, in Cairo, they are sites where financial priorities are actively negotiated against pursuits of social habitation, urban livelihood, legal stability, and collective self-sufficiency. Methodologically, it develops building vignettes as an experimental space to push the bounds of generative overlaps between spatial and ethnographic techniques of analysis. As such, the study demonstrates the vantage point of interpretive architectural research in advancing cross-disciplinary debates across critical urban studies on housing and its vacancy, geographic works on new ruins, and anthropology on value and emptiness.

Each chapter articulates a distinct category of vacancy by following a pursuit of value and interrogating the spatial, legal, and temporal interfaces of its contestation with market forces. Individually, these cases reveal how vacant homes – both at a material and perceptual level – are hardly ever empty and rarely experienced and perceived by urban residents as static or neutral. Across society, Egyptians treat yet-to-be-occupied dwellings as sacred cultural objects where multi-generational familial obligations are performed. Conversely, communities, contractors, or coops facing oppressive socio-political conflicts view their homes as risky, disruptive, or inaccessible spaces that they hope to construct and occupy but cannot do so easily. When scrutinised up close, vacant geographies suggest not the triumph of commodification or the dearth of social life but rather make legible how the entire city is consistently entangled in the flux of competing value systems.