The Arab City

Moving beyond reductive notions of identity, myths of authenticity, fetishized traditionalism, or the constructed opposition of tradition and modernity, The Arab City: Architectural and Representation critically engages contemporary architectural and urban production in the Middle East. Taking the "Arab City" and "Islamic Architecture" as sites of investigation rather than given categories, this book reframes the region's buildings, cities, and landscapes and broadens its architectural and urban canons. Arab cities are multifaceted places and sites of layered historical imaginaries; defined by regional and territorial economies, they bridge scales of production and political engagement. The essays collected here investigate cultural representation, the evolution of historical cities, contemporary architectural practices, emerging urban conditions, and responsive urban imaginaries in the Arab World. With contributions from Ashraf Abdalla, Senan Abdelqader, Nadia Abu ElÂ-Haj, Su'ad Amiry, Amale Andraos, Mohammed al-Asad, George Arbid, Mohamed Elshahed, Yasser Elsheshtawy, Rania Ghosn, Saba Innab, Adrian Lahoud, Lila Abu Lughod, Ziad Jamaleddine, Ahmed Kanna, Bernard Khoury, Laura Kurgan, Ali Mangera, Reinhold Martin, Timothy Mitchell, Magda Mostafa, Nasser Rabbat, Hashim Sarkis, Felicity Scott, Hala Warde, Mark Wasiuta, Eyal Weizman, Mabel O. Wilson, and Gwendolyn Wright.

Today cities of the Arab world are subject to many of the same problems as other world cities, yet too often they are ignored in studies of urbanisation. This collection reveals the contrasts and similarities between older, traditional Arab cities and the newer oil-stimulated cities of the Gulf in their search for development and a place in the world order. The eight cities which form the core of the book – Rabat, Amman, Beirut, Kuwait, Manama, Doha, Abu Dhabi and Riyadh – provide a unique insight into today’s Middle Eastern city. Winner of The International Planning History Society (IPHS) Book Prize.

Cities of the Arabian Peninsula reveal contradictions of contemporary urbanization The fast-growing cities of the Persian Gulf are, whatever else they may be, indisputably sensational. The world’s tallest building is in Dubai; the 2022 World Cup in soccer will be played in fantastic Qatar facilities; Saudi Arabia is building five new cities from scratch; the Louvre, the Guggenheim and the Sorbonne, as well as many American and European universities, all have handsome outposts and campuses in the region. Such initiatives bespeak strategies to diversify economies and pursue grand ambitions across the Earth. Shining special light on Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Doha—where the dynamics of extreme urbanization are so strongly evident—the authors of The New Arab Urban trace what happens when money is plentiful, regulation weak, and labor conditions severe. Just how do authorities in such settings reconcile goals of oft-claimed civic betterment with hyper-segregation and radical inequality? How do they align cosmopolitan sensibilities with authoritarian rule? How do these elite custodians arrange tactical alliances to protect particular forms of social stratification and political control? What sense can be made of their massive investment for environmental breakthrough in the midst of world-class ecological mayhem? To address such questions, this book’s contributors place the new Arab urban in wider contexts of trade, technology, and design. Drawn from across disciplines and diverse home countries, they investigate how these cities import projects, plans and structures from the outside, but also how, increasingly, Gulf-originated initiatives disseminate to cities far afield. Brought together by noted scholars, sociologist Harvey Molotch and urban analyst Davide Ponzini, this timely volume adds to our understanding of the modern Arab metropolis—as well as of cities more generally. Gulf cities display development patterns that, however unanticipated in the standard paradigms of urban scholarship, now impact the world.

This book offers a multidisciplinary approach to the medina, the traditional walled Arab city of North Africa, looking at its people, its history and architecture.

This new collection€reveals the contrasts and similarities between older, traditional Arab cities and the newer oil-stimulated cities of the Gulf in their search for development and a place in the world order.

Mixed city is a term widely used in Israel to describe areas occupied by both Jewish and Arab communities. In a critical examination of such cities, the author shows how a clear spatial and mental division exists between Arabs and Jews in Israel, and how the occurrence of such communities is both exceptional and involuntary. Looking at Jewish-Arab relations in Israel in the context of the built environment, it is argued that there are complex links between socio-political relations and the production of contested urban space. The case study of one particular Jewish-Arab "mixed city", the city of Lod, is used as the platform for wider theoretical discussion and political analysis. This city has great significance in the present global context, as more and more cities are becoming polarized, ghettoized, and fragmented in surprisingly similar ways. This book examines the visible planning apparatuses and the "hidden" mechanisms of social, political, and cultural control involved in these processes. Focusing on the spatialities of power, this book brings to the fore a critical discussion of the urban processes that shape Jewish-Arab "mixed cities" in Israel, and will be of interest to students and scholars of Urban Studies, Middle East Studies and Politics in general.

This book offers a multidisciplinary approach to the medina, the traditional walled Arab city of North Africa. The medina becomes a concrete case study for comparative explorations of general questions about the social use of urban space by opening up fields of research at the intersection of history, comparative cultural studies, architecture and anthropology. Essays by American, European and North African scholars demonstrate a variety of sources and theoretical approaches now being used in writing historical narratives framed within the city space. They shed light on recent studies by anthropologists regarding social praxis within the urban context, and analyze the urban experience of the medina and the casbah as they are represented in visual and material culture.