How did colonial influences change the urban form of the Arab capitals? The author here poses - and answers - many questions on globalisation and the Middle East.

Presenting the current debate about cities in the Middle East from Sana’a, Beirut and Jerusalem to Cairo, Marrakesh and Gaza, the book explores urban planning and policy, migration, gender and identity as well as politics and economics of urban settings in the region. This handbook moves beyond essentialist and reductive analyses of identity, urban politics, planning, and development in cities in the Middle East, and instead offers critical engagement with both historical and contemporary urban processes in the region. Approaching "Cities" as multi-dimensional sites, products of political processes, knowledge production and exchange, and local and global visions as well as spatial artefacts. Importantly, in the different case studies and theoretical approaches, there is no attempt to idealise urban politics, planning, and everyday life in the Middle East –– which (as with many other cities elsewhere) are also situations of contestation and violence –– but rather to highlight how cities in the region, and especially those which are understudied, revolve around issues of housing, infrastructure, participation and identity, amongst other concerns. Analysing a variety of cities in the Middle East, the book is a significant contribution to Middle East Studies. It is an essential resource for students and academics interested in Geography, Regional and Urban Studies of the Middle East.

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.

Are Arab Gulf cities, the likes of Dubai, Abu Dhabi or Doha, on their way to extinction? Is their fate obsolescence? Or, are they the model for our urban future? Can a city whose very existence is predicated on an imported labour force who build and operate these gleaming urban centres remain a viable urban entity? Could the transient nature of this urban model, its temporariness and precariousness, also be its doom? In this wide-ranging book Yasser Elsheshtawy takes on these tough, but necessary, questions aiming to examine the very nature of the Arab Gulf city and whether it can sustain its existence throughout the twenty-first century. Having lived in the region for more than two decades he researched its marginalized and forgotten urban settings, trying to understand how a temporary people can live in a place that inherently refuses to give them the possibility of becoming citizens. By being embedded in these spaces and reconciling their presence with his own personal encounters with transience, he discovered a resilience and defiance against the forces of the hegemonic city. Using subtle acts of resistance, these temporary inhabitants have found a way to sustain and create a home, to set down roots in the midst of a fast changing and transient urbanity. Their stories, recounted in this book through case studies and in-depth analysis, give hope to cities everywhere. Transience is not a fait accompli: rather the actions of citizens, residents and migrants – even in the highly restrictive spaces of the Gulf – show us that the future metropolis may very well not turn out to be a ‘utopia of the few and a dystopia of the many’. This could be an illusion, but it is a necessary illusion because the alternative is irrelevance.

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.

“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

This Open Access book is an anthropological urban study of the Emirate of Dubai, its institutions, and their evolution. It provides a contemporary history of disability in city planning from a non-Western perspective and explores the cultural context for its positioning. Three insights inform the author’s approach. First, disability research, much like other urban or social issues, must be situated in a particular place. Second, access and inclusion forms a key part of both local and global planning issues. Third, a 21st century planning education should take access and inclusion into consideration by applying a disability lens to the empirical, methodological, and theoretical advances of the field. By bridging theory and practice, this book provides new insights on inclusive city planning and comparative urban theory. This book should be read as part of a larger struggle to define and assert access; it’s a story of how equity and justice are central themes in building the cities of the future and of today.