Cairo’s ‘informal’ neighbourhoods face demolition in the name of modernisation with generations of local communities disbanded and re-homed in new residential blocks. Photographer Mohamed Hozyen (he/him) documents the impact on his family as his grandmother faces the continual threat to her home and way of life.
Mohamed‘s photography features in The Quick + The Brave Journal 003: ‘Advocates + Allies’ out February 2025.
Pre-order yours from our shop on Ko-Fi now.

In 2011, the Egyptian authorities decided to demolish all the old ‘informal’ residential buildings and districts across the country – unplanned areas that have been inhabited for decades without the authorities getting involved. Since 2016, they have razed many buildings.
My grandmother’s home in Cairo is one of the neighborhoods set to be demolished.
My grandmother has lived here since 1952, when she was 14 and married my grandfather. My own childhood and so many of my memories are from this home. My mother was raised here, and we visited often when I was a child.

Now that my grandmother’s area is set to be demolished, I don’t want us both to have to experience another loss. My mother died in 2020. Losing 70 years of my grandmother’s memories in this area is opening those wounds of grief all over again. It is like losing another part of myself.
My grandmother tells me:
“I spent all of my life here in this house. This area has witnessed all of my ups and downs. This is where I started my life, had my children, and lived happy and sad moments. But now after my kids have left and have their own lives, I’m alone. But I still have my neighbors around me. I’m still surrounded by my neighborhood, the familiar sounds that go on until late into the night.
“I am old and tired now, I can barely stand and I really don’t want to leave my house. I own this house, why on earth would I leave it and pay rent for a place that isn’t my own? I don’t want to leave here. This is my soul, my life, my everything. I would love to live in the dead silence instead of taking buildings down and forcing me to leave. My soul goes with this home and area. If they move me…I die.”

When the doctor said my mother’s days were numbered, I was speechless – silent for a week.
Two weeks later I received a call from my brother. “Mohamed, come, something is happening.”
I asked him to just tell me if she was dead or alive. He said to just come home. I dropped everything and took the metro. When I arrived, she had already left.
I stopped everything. I did not photograph at all. I continued living in the same house with my brother. When I come back to an empty house, I miss my mother’s voice. Sometimes, even though she has gone, I see her empty bed and hear her calling to me “Mohamed, are you home?”.

After my mother died, my grandmother – who had lost four children already – went to the hospital for forty days. I came back to my grandmother’s home like I was young again. I saw how she was living, how strong she was after all she had lost. I stayed after work through the night. I knew when she’d sleep. Sometimes we don’t talk and just watch what she wants to watch on the TV.
My mother used to ask me to get married. Now my grandmother does, telling me I need to make my own family, get my own home. She says I need someone to care for me the way I cared for my mother.
My grandmother’s life is simple but she is connected to her community. She is 83 and doesn’t go out. My aunts and uncles bring her the necessities – if she needs something she goes out on her balcony and calls down to the street, sending money down in a basket on a string to purchase her vegetables from local vendors.
Everybody knows her.

All over her neighborhood buildings are set to be demolished to make away for new developments. My grandmother’s will be next. She’s afraid this kind of life will not be possible for her if she must move to the new buildings being constructed – where people from different neighborhoods who don’t know each other are mixed together.
My family’s graveyard is under threat of being demolished: to transport the bodies of my mother, my father, my uncle and my grandfather to the edge of the city an hour and a half away. It was not just our family. I realized that this was all over Cairo. They take the places that hold our memories and turn them into a building or a highway.

You wake up one day with an ‘X’ on your home it means you are next.
First they cut out the water then the electricity. They dig the ground outside non-stop until you get so fed up that you leave. They take you to a big compound of people from all over Cairo where there are no cafes, no green areas, no spirit or soul.

I am afraid to lose my grandmother’s neighborhood.
I want to document every moment in her life.
I feel she is weak but many times I see that she is very strong, that she can stay for more years. I see my mother in her. Most of all I am afraid to lose my grandmother, that if this happens to her that she won’t want to go anywhere else – that this will be her destiny.
It’s another kind of death.

Mohamed‘s photography features in The Quick + The Brave Journal 003: ‘Advocates + Allies’ out February 2025.
Pre-order yours from our shop on Ko-Fi now.
Follow Mohamed Hozyen: @mo.hozyen