Alexandria might drown in the near future due to rising sea levels, but few people “give it a thought that the drowning might eventually be caused by those who speak and write about the city with a deep sense of nostalgia,” Berit Schuck writes in Cairobserver. Stories about the city’s past “overshadow every contemporary discourse. The predominant belief that there is ‘nothing to see’ and a lost sense of ownership in regards to both Alexandria’s Ottoman, Belle Époque and modernist architecture leave little space for the few who are trying to enact a future, especially when they are dreaming of something more complex than reanimating a once famous café, republishing earlier descriptions of the city or reintroducing the culture of the flaneur.” Schuck cites Mahmoud Khaled, who suggests that “Alexandria’s future lies with those who go looking for new urban narratives and find a way to share them widely through art works, films or writings.” Schuck presents three artistic attempts that indirectly help “escape the virus of nostalgia when you happen to live and work in Alexandria or come for a visit. One of those attempts was Khaled’s, who staged informal gatherings consisting of a series of collective readings at iconic sites of the city, creating “a public space that every city needs to be able to breathe.”