Today, the desert suburb of Cairo counts some one hundred gated communities, finished or under construction, called "compounds", produced by private real estate. This urban shape, introduced at the beginning of 1990s, results from an association between public actors and Egyptian or foreign businessmen; districts are heterogeneous both at the level of the degree of enclosure, the type of housing and their social composition. Originally, compounds were separated from other districts by a no-man's-land desert but they are now interconnected by thousands of heterogeneous constructions: they multiply by two the surface of the city. However, the opposition between compounds and Cairo testifies of a symbolic, social and functional fragmentation which questions the Cairo based citizenship.
