Urban Design in the Arab World

Reconceptualizing Boundaries

Robert Saliba

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317003908
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Arab World is perceived to be a region rampant with constructed and ambiguous national identities, overwhelming wealth and poverty, religious diversity, and recently the Arab uprisings, a bottom-up revolution shaking the foundations of pre-established, long-standing hierarchies. It is also a region that has witnessed a remarkable level of transformation and development due to the accelerated pace imposed by post-war reconstruction, environmental degradation, and the competition among cities for world visibility and tourism. Accordingly, the Arab World is a prime territory for questioning urban design, inviting as it does a multiplicity of opportunities for shaping, upgrading, and rebuilding urban form and civic space while subjecting global paradigms to regional and local realities. Providing a critical overview of the state of contemporary urban design in the Arab World, this book conceptualizes the field under four major perspectives: urban design as discourse, as discipline, as research, and as practice. It poses two questions. How can such a diversity of practice be positioned with regard to current international trends in urban design? Also, what constitutes the specificity of the Middle Eastern experience in light of the regional political and cultural settings? This book is about urban designers 'on the margins': how they narrate their cities, how they engage with their discipline, and how they negotiate their distance from, and with respect to global disciplinary trends. As such, the term margins implies three complementary connotations: on the global level, it invites speculation on the way contemporary urban design is being impacted by the new conceptualizations of center-periphery originating from the post-colonial discourse; on the regional level, it is a speculation on the specificity of urban design thinking and practice within a particular geographical and cultural context (here, the Arab World); and finally, on the local level, it is an a

Chapter 1
Framing Urban Design on the Margins: Global Paradigms and Regional Implications

Robert Saliba

Introduction

The title of this book incorporates two problematic yet promising concepts: Urban Design and the Arab World. The first designates, “a [young] discipline that has been unable to develop any substantial theory on its own” (Cuthbert 2003: viii) and the second remains an elusive term, geographically, politically and ethnically. Despite these qualifications, urban design is a lively and strong emerging discipline profoundly anchored in professional practice, real world projects, and future visions. Moreover, the Arab world, despite its geographical ambiguity, is an emblematic term profoundly ingrained in common parlance, academic discourse and media diffusion, that generally brings images of a region rampant with constructed and ambiguous national identities, overwhelming wealth and poverty, religious mix, and most recently the Arab uprisings, a bottom-up revolution shaking the foundations of pre-established long-standing hierarchies. Accordingly, the Arab world is a prime territory for questioning urban design as a discipline in flux, due to its abundance of sites of globalization, sites of worship, sites of conflict and sites of contestation. Such diversity invites a multiplicity of opportunities for shaping, upgrading and rebuilding urban form and civic space while subjecting global paradigms to regional and local realities.

This book is also about urban designers on the margins, and how they narrate their cities, how they engage with their discipline, and how they negotiate their distance away from and with respect to global disciplinary trends. As such, the term margins implies three complementary connotations: on the global level, it invites speculation on how contemporary urban design is being impacted by the new conceptualizations of center–periphery originating from the post-colonial discourse; on the regional level, it is a speculation on the specificity of urban design thinking and practice within a particular geographical and cultural context (here, the Arab world); and finally, on the local level it is an attestation to a major shift in urban design focus from city centers to their margins with unchecked suburban growth, informal development and disregard for leftover spaces.

Contextualizing Arab Urbanism

In Chapter 2, entitled “Medina; the ‘Islamic,’ ‘Arab,’ ‘Middle Eastern’ City: Reflections on an Urban Concept,” Nezar AlSayyad deconstructs chronologically the web of assumptions tied with the terms Arab, city and urban. He clearly demonstrates the elusive and dynamic nature of such notions as the Islamic city, the Arab city and the Middle Eastern city (used often interchangeably) as evolving intellectual constructs spanning one century of colonialism, nationalism and globalism. On the one hand, Middle East is a geopolitical construct dating back to British colonialism, flexible enough to include Turkey and Iran, and expandable enough to encompass Afghanistan and Pakistan in a Greater Middle East under the post-9/11 Bush administration. On the other hand, Arab is mainly associated with the rising pan-Arabism of the late 1950s and early 1960s, instigated by the charismatic figure that was Egypt’s Gamal Abdul Nasser. Merging the geopolitical and the ethnic, current urban literature is using the two terms conjointly: the “Arab Middle East” (Al-Asad 2008), and the “Arab/Middle Eastern City” denote cities inhabited by Arabs in the Middle Eastern regions (Elsheshtawy 2004, 2008).

What all of these designations have in common is to question and evade the term Islamic as a qualifier of the cities in the region despite the fact that Islamic is the most enduring characterization of Arab urbanism since the turn of the twentieth century, and that it is profoundly ingrained in the Orientalist tradition as well as in contemporary regional imaginary. As argued by AlSayyad in City Debates 2012 (the international conference on contemporary urban issues that I organized at the American University of Beirut), “the point here is not to isolate the Islamic element, the point was to recognize that even though Islam existed in the background, it is not the main shaper of a particular urban process or urban form all the time or even in given moments in time.” He traces this progressive disjunction between the religious, the ethnic and the geopolitical to three successive waves of scholarship: the Orientalist tradition of the pre-1960s, the revisionist tradition of the late 1960s and 1970s, and the nationalist tradition of the 1980s. While the first, based on Orientalist scholarship, propagated a stereotypical model of the Islamic city generalized from a small number of locations, the second linked urban form to the political dynamics through which the city operated, taking an inductive approach and still partially relying on the Orientalist model. The third is mainly the outcome of nationalist scholars operating in the region, who were dissatisfied with the legacy of colonialism, and shared a common belief that national identity could be re-established by reflecting the Muslim way of life in the form and culture of cities. Founded in the 1980s and struggling with this notion of Islamic identity is the well-known Aga Khan Award for Architecture. In formulating its mission and philosophy, the organization was confronted with the dialectic between Islam, and the diversity of communal practices in the region; this is clearly conveyed by Hallaj in Chapter 3:

The positing of a Muslim collective was always problematic as the award was not concerned with a specific ideological construct of Islam but could not be made independent of it … The successive juries that served as the trend setters of the Award were carefully selected to avoid giving the Award any specific ideological bias. The focus was always on communities rather than on Islam. The world inhabited by Muslim communities was thought to be sufficiently diversified that no single ideological construct could be capable of dominating it. The main concern was to put forward alternative practices that would help these communities refocus the world around their local identities and needs. The Award thus evolved into one of the strongest advocates for regionalism in the professional spheres of architecture and urbanism.

Deconstructing Arab Urbanism

This shift from Islam to regionalism has been reinforced by the theoretical breaks introduced by postmodernism, poststructuralism and post-colonialism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The Orientalist, revisionist and nationalist views are being challenged, leading to important paradigmatic changes in conceptualizing urban form.

One reactionary track is promoting a shift from the traditional/Orientalist reading with its religious interpretation of urban form and its static vision of the past as a source of authenticity. Elsheshtawy qualifies such a view as “outdated and counterproductive,” leading to “a narrative of loss” (Elsheshtawy 2004: 4) and Hamadeh considers it as rooted in the dual city construct, “freezing the image of a society in time and space thus maintaining differentiation between the colonizers and the colonized” (Hamadeh 1992: 241–59). Through this post-colonial discourse, a more dynamic view of modernity and nationalism is strongly emerging, where the colonial urban legacy is positioned as an integral part of the national identity construct, and where the provincial city is seen as capable of shaping its unique responses to metropolitan modernity. Furthermore the provincial city is reframed within the contemporary globalization discourse where the concept of heritage conservation has shifted from the museumification of medieval cores to the manufacturing of heritage (AlSayyad 2001) for tourist consumption.

A second track positions the local actors and stakeholders as participants in the process of early modernization in lieu of being passive receivers. Colonialism is therefore interpreted as a simultaneous indicator of Western hegemony, and a conscious choice by the colonized to join Western modernity. In Urbanism: Imported or Exported? Nasr and Volait argue that “[p]lanning and architectural discourse can be shaped by domestic realities (such as economic and social structures and political intents) as much as by the experience of professional planners (whether indigenous or foreign).” Colonial heritage is therefore envisaged as a result of the hybridization between “Native Aspirations and Foreign Plans” mutually and dialectally impacting each other (Nasr and Volait 2003: xiii). This complexification of the historical discourse has permeated recent investigations of not only the urban, but also the architectural. In Weaving Historical Narratives: Beirut’s Last Mamluk Monument, Al-Harithy (2008) identifies three different narratives of post-war conservation: the religious, the archeological and the architectural. All three are woven around the same monument to serve socio-political and/ or economic ends. Such an approach is anchored in the dynamic signification of buildings as opposed to their inherent meaning, introducing a poststructuralist perspective to heritage conservation.

Reframing the Margins

Is there such a thing as Third World literature? Is it possible to establish—without falling prey to vulgarity and parochialism—the fundamental virtues of the literatures of the countries that make up what we call the Third World? In its most nuanced articulation—in Edward Said, for example—the notion of a Third World literature serves to highlight the richness and the range of the literatures on the margins and their relation to non-Western identity and nationalisms … It is clear, nonetheless, that there is a sort of narrative novel that particular to the countries of the Third World. Its originality has less to do with the writer’s location than with the fact that he knows he is writing far from the world’s literary centers and the he feels this distance inside himself … If there is anything that distinguishes Third World literature, it is not the poverty, violence, politics, or social turmoil of the country from which it issues but rather the writer’s awareness that his work is somehow remote from the centers where the history of his art—the art of the novel—is described, and he reflects this distance in his work … At the same time, this sense of being an outsider frees him from anxieties about originality. (Pamuk 2008: 168–9)

The above quote by Pamuk inspired the subtitle of this book: Reconceptualizing Boundaries. Adapting Pamuk’s quote to address urban design instead of literature, I started by asking: “Is there such a thing as Third World [urban design that] serves to highlight the richness and the range of [the new townscapes] on the margins and their relation to non-Western identity and nationalisms?” Within the post-colonial discourse, this question has been asked by many historians in recent decades in an attempt to re-appropriate colonial history into national histories and to reframe Western-imposed modernity as self-imposed and accepted local modernities (Lu 2010). This quest boils down to challenging, reconceptualizing, negating and/or reframing the classic binaries core/periphery and tradition/modernity as mediated by colonialism, postmodernity and globalism.

Interestingly, this debate is increasingly initiated by scholars coming from the periphery but operating in the core, reversing the Orientalist trend whereby the scholars from the core theorized the periphery. Some of the answers that transpired from this line of questioning include Lu’s argument for an “open globality based, not on asymmetry and dominance between core and periphery, but on connectivity and dialogue on an equal basis,” and the recognition of other modernities “as legitimate spaces of knowledge production” (2010: 24, 25); in other words Lu argues for erasing the notion of margins. Moreover, Ananya Roy (2003) maintains that economic globalization operates “through multiple and uneven geographies” both “multi-scaled and multi-sited” and “through a hardening of regionalism, parochialism and fundamentalism” (2004: 1). Therefore, “it requires stepping outside the grid of global cities,” bringing forward the necessity that “globalization must be understood at its margins [my emphasis], rather than simply at the core” (2004: 6). Such margins are conceptualized by AlSayyad as a third space, a hybrid space, a space of non-synthesis between the global and the local, a space where discourses encounter and transform each other, and where generic and overused concepts of identity are being constantly redefined and relativized. Identity is no more about rootedness, but about constructiveness; there is no longer a single history of Cairo, but histories of Cairo, or of Beirut, Damascus and Baghdad. In AlSayyad’s work, urbanism is no more a synthetic concept about the technical and design expertise for reshaping cities, but about scanning the townscapes of the margins to detect emergences, and question trends.

Articulating a Regional Geography of Urban Design

For the past two decades, the image of the Middle Eastern city has wavered in the public and professional imagination between two extremes: the global hub and the post-war city, the first exemplified by Dubai and the second by Beirut. Between the two, a vast array of intermediate landscapes exists, ranging from suburban informal settlements to metropolitan new towns and expanding holy cities. Over the past two decades, diverse attempts to classify these landscapes were made in built-environment literature. In 2004, Elsheshtawy differentiated between traditional, fringe and oil rich cities, with all three categories merging historical, geographical and economic designations. Four years later he simplified his classifications to struggling and emerging cities, referring to the great divide that exists between the burgeoning Gulf cities and traditional centers like Cairo or Damascus, with the influx of money and development models from the former to the latter termed as gulfication or dubaization.

A third categorization, advanced by Al-Asad (2008) and intersecting with the previous two, merges economic status and types of urban narratives. Al-Asad contends that, for the past decade and a half, there has been a shift from “the micro-scale of architecture to the macro urban scale” and from the search for localized architecture identities (in the 1970s and 1980s) to an attempt to fit within overall global development. This created two narratives “with one being prevalent in the area’s middle and lower-income countries [my emphasis] and the other in the affluent, oil-rich countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).” The first narrative revolves around heritage conservation at an urban scale from Sana’a, Aleppo, Cairo, Jerusalem and Hebron; it also extends to infrastructural upgrades, tourism and new master plans as main catalysts for development. The second narrative revolves around branding, with themed districts, high-end developments and massive man-made islands (the Dubai model). Applying both narratives, the reconstruction of Beirut’s Central District (BCD) illustrates the reconfiguration of “complete urban districts through large investment companies working in coordination, and often partnership, with governmental authorities” (Al-Asad 2008: 26).

Although BCD has been qualified by Al-Asad as...