The knowledge economy has become an important part of contemporary development for cities in a time of globalization and expansion. Examining theories of knowledge transfer and urban advancement allows for better adaptation in a changing global society. Knowledge-Based Urban Development in the Middle East provides emerging research on the contemporary practices of architecture, urban design, and implementation in contemporary Middle Eastern cities. Highlighting a range of pertinent topics, such as creative economy, knowledge development, and learning communities, this book is an important resource for academics, researchers, practitioners, and decision makers seeking current research on the issues and challenges of implementing knowledge-based urban development in Middle Eastern cities.
The great cities of the Middle East and North Africa have long attracted the attention and interest of historians. With the discovery and wider use over the last few decades of Islamic court records and Ottoman administrative documents, our knowledge of Middle Eastern cities between the seventeenth and early twentieth centuries has vastly expanded. Drawing upon a treasure trove of documents and using a variety of methodologies, the contributors succeed in providing a significant overview of the ways in which Middle Eastern cities can be studied, as well as an excellent introduction to current literature in the field.
As oil-rich countries in the Middle East are increasingly associated with soaring skyscrapers and modern architecture, attention is being diverted away from the pervasive struggles of social housing in those same urban settings. Social Housing in the Middle East traces the history of social housing—both gleaming postmodern projects and bare-bones urban housing structures—in an effort to provide a wider understanding of marginalized spaces and their impact on identities, communities, and class. While architects may have envisioned utopian or futuristic experiments, these buildings were often constructed with the knowledge and skill sets of local workers, and the housing was in turn adapted to suit the modern needs of residents. This tension between local needs and national aspirations are linked to issues of global importance, including security, migration, and refugee resettlement. The essays collected here consider how culture, faith, and politics influenced the solutions offered by social housing; they provide an insightful look at how social housing has evolved since the 19th century and how it will need to adapt to suit the 21st.
The turn of the century has been a moment of rapid urbanization. Much of this urban growth is taking place in the cities of the developing world and much of it in informal settlements. This book presents cutting-edge research from various world regions to demonstrate these trends. The contributions reveal that informal housing is no longer the domain of the urban poor; rather it is a significant zone of transactions for the middle-class and even transnational elites. Indeed, the book presents a rich view of "urban informality" as a system of regulations and norms that governs the use of space and makes possible new forms of social and political power. The book is organized as a "transnational" endeavor. It brings together three regional domains of research--the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia--that are rarely in conversation with one another. It also unsettles the hierarchy of development and underdevelopment by looking at some First World processes of informality through a Third World research lens.
Irregular or illegal housing constitutes the ordinary condition of popular urban housing in the Middle East. Considering the conditions of daily practices related to land and tenure mobilization and of housing, neighborhood shaping, transactions, and conflict resolution, this book offers a new reading of government action in the cities of Amman, Beirut, Damascus, Istanbul, and Cairo, focussing on the participation of ordinary citizens and their interactions with state apparatus specifically located within the urban space. The book adopts a praxeological approach to law that describes how inhabitants define and exercise their legality in practice and daily routines. The ambition of the volume is to restore the continuum in the consolidation, building after building, of the popular neighborhoods of the cities under study, while demonstrating the closely-knit social relationships and other forms of community bonding.
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.
Bringing together a distinguished interdisciplinary group of scholars, this volume explores what happens when new forms of privatization meet collectivist pasts, public space is sold off to satisfy investor needs and tourist gazes, and the state plans for Egypt's future in desert cities while stigmatizing and neglecting Cairo's popular neighborhoods. These dynamics produce surprising contradictions and juxtapositions that are coming to define today's Middle East. The original publication of this volume launched the Cairo School of Urban Studies, committed to fusing political-economy and ethnographic methods and sensitive to ambivalence and contingency, to reveal the new contours and patterns of modern power emerging in the urban frame. Contributors: Mona Abaza, Nezar AlSayyad, Paul Amar, Walter Armbrust, Vincent Battesti, Fanny Colonna, Eric Denis, Dalila ElKerdany, Yasser Elsheshtawy, Farha Ghannam, Galila El Kadi, Anouk de Koning, Petra Kuppinger, Anna Madoeuf, Catherine Miller, Nicolas Puig, Said Sadek, Omnia El Shakry, Diane Singerman, Elizabeth A. Smith, Leïla Vignal, Caroline Williams.
In The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World, Cyrus Schayegh takes up a fundamental problem historians face: how to make sense of the spatial layeredness of the past. He argues that the modern world’s ultimate socio-spatial feature was not the oft-studied processes of globalization or state formation or urbanization. Rather, it was fast-paced, mutually transformative intertwinements of cities, regions, states, and global circuits, a bundle of processes he calls transpatialization. To make this case, Schayegh’s study pivots around Greater Syria (Bilad al-Sham in Arabic), which is roughly coextensive with present-day Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel/Palestine. From this region, Schayegh looks beyond, to imperial and global connections, diaspora communities, and neighboring Egypt, Iraq, and Turkey. And he peers deeply into Bilad al-Sham: at cities and their ties, and at global economic forces, the Ottoman and European empire-states, and the post-Ottoman nation-states at work within the region. He shows how diverse socio-spatial intertwinements unfolded in tandem during a transformative stretch of time, the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, and concludes with a postscript covering the 1940s to 2010s.
“Through elegant ethnography and nuanced theorization . . . gives us a new way of thinking about violence, development, modernity, and ultimately, the city.” —Ananya Roy, University of California, Los Angeles Beirut is a city divided. Following the Green Line of the civil war, dividing the Christian east and the Muslim west, today hundreds of such lines dissect the city. For the residents of Beirut, urban planning could hold promise: a new spatial order could bring a peaceful future. But with unclear state structures and outsourced public processes, urban planning has instead become a contest between religious-political organizations and profit-seeking developers. Neighborhoods reproduce poverty, displacement, and urban violence. For the War Yet to Come examines urban planning in three neighborhoods of Beirut’s southeastern peripheries, revealing how these areas have been developed into frontiers of a continuing sectarian order. Hiba Bou Akar argues these neighborhoods are arranged, not in the expectation of a bright future, but according to the logic of “the war yet to come”: urban planning plays on fears and differences, rumors of war, and paramilitary strategies to organize everyday life. As she shows, war in times of peace is not fought with tanks, artillery, and rifles, but involves a more mundane territorial contest for land and apartment sales, zoning and planning regulations, and infrastructure projects. Winner of the Anthony Leeds Prize “Upends our conventional notions of center and periphery, of local and transnational, even of war and peace.” —AbdouMaliq Simone, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity “Fascinating, theoretically astute, and empirically rich.” —Asef Bayat, University of Illinois — Urbana-Champaign “An important contribution.” —Christine Mady, International Journal of Middle East Studies
Textbook on the causes and consequences of urbanization in North Africa and the Middle East - studies the social implications, demographic aspects and political aspects and economic factors of modern urban development, considers rural migration and occupations and social structure within towns, and examines cultural change, behavioural and social change resulting from urbanization, etc. Bibliography pp. 114 to 118, graph, maps and statistical tables.
