After decades of geography and area studies drifting apart, I argue there has been an area studies turn in geography. The long divergence between the two, however, has resulted in a certain misunderstanding by geographers of what area studies scholarship is and what this field can contribute to the discipline. Area studies should not be considered as an approach that merely concentrates on the representation of difference but rather as a milieu in which difference is practiced and geographical concepts can be ‘diffracted’. Area studies can offer geography new ways to think about its place in, and entanglement with, the world.

The Egyptian military regime of Abd al-Fattah el-Sisi has announced as part of its Vision 2030 its intention to eliminate informal urban areas. The regime has identified these areas – commonly known by the Arabic term ‘ashwa’iyyat (which means haphazard) – as a threat to the nation. The Egyptian state, however, has no clear conception of what urban informality constitutes or what exactly it is eradicating. To understand how and why the state has placed urban informality as central to its politics, I contend that we have to examine the political processes through which this uncertain yet powerful concept is produced. Urban informality, I argue, is a political intervention that is always fleeting and geographically specific in an otherwise haphazard context. Haphazard urbanisation points to the complex power struggles by a range of actors, both within and beyond the state, through which the formal and informal divide can mark urban life. In a critical reading of the first major study of informality in Egypt, I show how the urban was divided into the formal and informal through outdated laws. I detail, by engaging sources in English and Arabic, how the Egyptian state militarised urban informality from the 1990s onwards. I argue that it is through this historical framing that we must understand el-Sisi’s current war against urban informality. In turn, I argue that the regime’s attempt to eliminate informality has not resulted in greater control over what and how urban informality appears but has deepened the hazardisation of urban life.

Contemporary warfare is urban warfare. Conflicts across the world target sites of urbanitypublic spaces, cafes, and schools -and the infrastructure that makes urban life possible, basic urban services, such as electricity, water and roads. The wars raging across the Middle East that have decimated historic urban centres, such as Aleppo and Baghdad, are often cited by analysts as illustrations of how conflict has been urbanised. In response to the urbanisation of conflict, militaries around the world are engaging with how to conduct operations in urban areas. Armies are not only focusing their efforts on learning how to destroy cities more effectively but also how to operate, plan, control, and build the urban battlefield. The US military, for instance, has recently established its first urban warfare planners' course. 1 War does not just enter the city. Conflict creates, acts through, and transforms it.Recent scholarship on the urbanization of violence and conflict stresses that to comprehend this phenomenon we should not only be attentive to how war destroys the built environment but how it constitutes the urban form. This literature has shown how urban warfare can include a range of policies and practices that construct, design, and organise the built environment, including discriminatory planning and building regulations; restriction and use of certain materials; introduction of surveillance systems; emplacement of 'steel rings' or checkpoints; and the construction of infrastructure and logistical systems, such as roads and tunnels. 2 Warfare can not only result in the destruction or eradication of urban life; it can lead to the organisation, extension and intensification of urbanisation and the transformation of built fabrics. This has implications for how we think about how war is waged but also urban processes in conflict settings, such as reconstruction. I have written, for instance, on how reconstruction should not be thought of as a process that simply arrives in the aftermath of conflict, but a process deeply embedded within it. 3 In thinking about how war is not merely the destruction of urban contexts but the planning and organisation of it, urbanists should be attentive to how the very materiality of the city can be part of war. Concrete (a mixture of cement, water, and aggregates) -the

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