The New School
Key urban writings
Abu-Lughod, J. (1971a) Cairo: 1001 Years of the City Victorious. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Abu-Lughod, J. (1980) Rabat: Urban Apartheid in Morocco. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Abu-Lughod, J. (1989) Before European Hegemony: The World System, A.D. 1250â1350. New York: Oxford University Press.
Abu-Lughod, J. (1999) New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: Americaâs Global Cities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Abu-Lughod, J. (2007) Race, Space, and Riots in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. New York: Oxford University Press.
Introduction
Janet Lippman Abu-Lughod was a leading figure in the evolution of urban studies. She made major contributions to world systems theory, social analysis, historical method, and comparative urbanism. She was also a tireless institution builder, founding and leading a series of urban programs and research centers, and cultivating a worldwide network of faculty, students, activists, and professionals committed to more just and equitable cities. As an early adopter of computer-based data processing and a gifted statistical modeler, she broke new ground in the integration of quantitative and qualitative methods in social research. Her scholarship moved deftly between the longue durĂ©e of empires, trade routes, and wars, and the fine-grained human relations found in a Cairene souk or Chicago neighborhood. One of her key accomplishments was to assert the importance of cities in world systems theory, preparing the ground for the development of âglobal citiesâ scholarship.
When she died in 2013, Abu-Lughod was Professor Emerita of Sociology and Historical Studies at The New School in New York, and Professor Emerita of Sociology at Northwestern University.
Academic biography and research focus
Janet Lippman was born in 1928 in Newark, NJ. She formed her commitment to cities early in her life: in high school she read the works of Lewis Mumford, and devoted her senior project to the literature of the Harlem Renaissance. She graduated with honors from the University of Chicago in 1957 and then entered the Universityâs experimental new urban planning program where she earned her MA in 1950. After completing her Masterâs, Lippman served for two years as Director of Research for the American Society of Planning Officials (ASPO), headquartered in Chicago. In 1951, she married Palestinian-born scholar and activist Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, and they moved to Princeton the next year so that he could complete his PhD in Political Science. During that time, Janet Abu-Lughod served as a research associate at the University of Pennsylvania and as a consultant for the American Council to Improve Our Neighborhoods.
In 1958, the Abu-Lughods moved their young family to Cairo. While Ibrahim directed research for UNESCO, Janet taught at the American University in Cairo and immersed herself in the language, culture, and life of the great city. She worked with the Egyptian government on an analysis of the countryâs census, published as the Cairo Fact Book (1963). She also launched what would become a decade-long project resulting in her first major book, Cairo: 1001 Years of the City Victorious. The family returned to the U.S. in 1960, where Abu-Lughod continued to publish work on Cairo and Islamic cities, supported by the National Science Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute. In 1963, she applied to doctoral programs in sociology. Rejected by Yale because the university would not accept a married woman with four young children, she completed her PhD at the University of Massachusetts in 1966. During that time she lectured at Smith College and regularly booked âmachine timeâ on computers at the MIT-Harvard Joint Center for Urban Studies to process the large data sets for the Cairo book.
In 1967, Janet and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod took positions at Northwestern University. For the next 21 years, she built a strong urban research network and gained a reputation as a provocative and original thinker. With a grant from the U.S. Department of Education, she launched the Program in Comparative Urban Studies at Northwestern, and published the groundbreaking collection Third World Urbanization (1977), co-edited with her graduate student Richard Hay, Jr. As early as 1969, Abu-Lughod had begun preparing for large-scale comparative research on cities in Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco. While in Rabat she worked with government officials on a statistical analysis of the recent Moroccan census, which they completed in 1975. In 1976, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete her comparative study. When data from Egypt and Tunisia failed to materialize, she focused her study on Morocco, published as Rabat: Urban Apartheid in Morocco in 1980. Throughout the 1980s, Abu-Lughod published research on the growth and development of Middle Eastern and North African cities, as well as the impact of Islam on urban forms and cultures. She devoted increasing attention to relations between men and women and the dynamics of family formation in cities. Her work also grew broader, taking in wide sweeps of geography and temporality, presaging the 1989 publication of her landmark book Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250â1350.
In 1988, Abu-Lughod left Northwestern University for an appointment as Professor of Sociology and Historical Studies at The New School in New York. There she directed the Urban Research Center, chaired the Department of Sociology, and mentored several new generations of doctoral students. She also published some of her most influential work in urban studies, shifting her research back to the U.S. after what she described as âlengthy digressionsâ into the longue durĂ©e of world systems (Abu-Lughod, 1999: x). Her first major U.S.-based book, From Urban Village to East Village (1994), presents an innovative return to âChicago Schoolâ community research, updated with due attention to structural conditions and global contexts.
Abu-Lughod retired from The New School in 1999, though remained highly productive. That year saw the publication of her book New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: Americaâs Global Cities. Funded by a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies, her research pulled the U.S. urban system squarely into the global cities debates. She followed the book with a sequel focused on urban unrest, Race, Space, and Riots in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, published in 2007. Janet Abu-Lughod passed away on 3 August 2013 in New York City at age 85.
Key ideas
At root, Abu-Lughodâs work emerges out of the productive tension between normative commitments to rights and justice and the quest for a quantitative science of human society â a tension that increasingly defined social research in the 1960s and 1970s (cf. Brian Berry, David Harvey). Abu-Lughod approached her work first and foremost as a moral inquiry. In the introduction to Rabat, she explains that her purpose is not to engage in an âantiquarian exercise in reconstructing the past,â but rather to âexplain the present and to pose a moral problem for the futureâ (1980: xviii). For her, the problem is twofold. First, can the postcolonial state create a new order after decades of colonial rule? Second, can scholars trained within national disciplinary frameworks contribute meaningfully to this project? As sociologist Christopher Chase-Dunn (2014) noted, this latter concern led Abu-Lughod to develop a sustained challenge to the Eurocentrism of Western social science.
Abu-Lughodâs experience living in Cairo fundamentally reshaped her scholarship. Confronting the limits of the Chicago School to provide an explanatory framework for North African urbanism, she turned to the work of Annales historians in the 1960s, absorbing their commitment to the longue durĂ©e. However, she rejected the Annales view of climate and geography as determinative of culture and history. She agreed with her contemporaries Immanuel Wallerstein and Manuel Castells that cities are not simply spatial isolates, but rather emerge out of large-scale extra-territorial forces such as trade, technology, wealth accumulation, and state formation. But she argued that cities are not reducible to these forces, and that every city reveals unique characteristics grounded in particular cultural, religious, demographic, and historical factors. One of Abu-Lughodâs key accomplishments, then, was to assert the importance of cities in world systems theory, preparing the ground for the development of âglobal citiesâ scholarship (cf. Saskia Sassen).
Dissatisfied with the political and economic lacunae of Annales historiography, Abu-Lughod turned increasingly to the Marxist tradition, with its focus on forms of labor, modes of production, and structural inequalities. However, like many of her contemporaries, she acknowledged the limits of Marxism to explain the differential impacts of race, religion, gender, and other categories of experience. She also rejected the notion common among Marxists that the city is merely an epiphenomenal product of economic forces, arguing instead that cities have manifold, autonomous, often ancient patterns of development, and must be taken on those terms. In Rabat, she demonstrated that a Marxist interpretation alone could not account for the viciousness of racial apartheid favored by French colonial officials (1980: xvii).
In an effort to reconcile Marxist structuralism with social research methods sensitive to diverse cultural experiences, Abu-Lughod turned to world systems theory. Like many of her colleagues, she was excited by the publication in 1974 of Immanuel Wallersteinâs landmark book The Modern World System. However, several key points of Wallersteinâs thesis did not square with Abu-Lughodâs detailed knowledge of Middle Eastern and North African cities, particularly h...
