This dark passage is from Mike Davis’ new book Planet of Slums: “The most unusual example of an inherited housing supply is undoubtedly Cairo’s City of the Dead, where one million poor people use Mameluke tombs as prefabricated housing components. The huge graveyard, the burial site of generations of sultans and emirs, is a walled urban island surrounded by congested motorways. The original residents, in the eighteenth century, were tombkeepers for rich Cairene families, followed by quarry workers, and then, in the modern era, by refugees uprooted from Sinai and Suez during the 1967 war. “The invaders,” observes Jeffrey Nedoroscik, a researcher at the American University of Cairo, “have adapted the tombs in creative ways to meet the needs of the living. Cenotaphs and grave markers are used as desks, headboards, tables and shelves. String is hung between gravestones to set laundry to dry.” Elsewhere in Cairo (formerly a city with 29 synagogues), smaller groups of squatters have taken over abandoned Jewish cemeteries. “On a visit in the 1980s,” writes journalist Max Rodenbeck, “I found a young couple with four children cozily installed in a particularly splendid neopharanic vault. The tomb dwellers had unsealed the columbarium inside, finding it made convenient built-in shelving for clothes, cooking pots, and a color TV set.”” Mike Davis is in top form.