Salma Abouelhossein

Salma Abouelhossein is a PhD candidate in urban studies and planning at Harvard university. She is broadly interested in the changing geographies and ecologies of capitalist urbanization, postcolonial development planning, and ‘the hinterland question’ in urban studies. Her PhD project studies the history of sugar towns in the south of Egypt and their sugarcane producing agrarian hinterlands. Discussing what she (tentatively) calls “anticolonial hinterlands”, the research shows how planning the agrarian hinterland was central to postcolonial development planning and its decolonization project during the 1950s and 1960s - and how the afterlives of these anticolonial hinterlands continue to shape contemporary market-led urbanization.