David Sims challenges popular wisdom on property-rights regimes in non-Western nations by questioning the relevance of formal property titling for poor urban households in Egypt, where informal and semi-formal solutions provide the majority of households with surprisingly secure forms of possession.

In light of this—and in the absence of a strong national state—can something as complex and culturally idiosyncratic as property relations be objectified as a development problem in need of a technocratic fix?