David Sims is an independent consultant specialized in urban development and habitat. He has worked in a number of Middle Eastern and North African countries, as well as elsewhere in Africa and Asia, but has been based in Egypt for many years now. In addition to a long series of reports for institutions such as the World Bank and UN‑Habitat, he is the author of a reference work on the development of Cairo, Understanding Cairo : The Logic of a City Out of Control (Cairo, American University in Cairo Press, 2012 [2010]), and a fundamental analysis of speculative desert developments in Egypt titled Egypt’s Desert Dreams : Development Or Disaster ? (Cairo, American University in Cairo Press, 2015).