Cities and Metaphors

Beyond Imaginaries of Islamic Urban Space

Somaiyeh Falahat

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317916635
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Introducing a new concept of urban space, Cities and Metaphors encourages a theoretical realignment of how the city is experienced, thought and discussed.

In the context of 'Islamic city' studies, relying on reasoning and rational thinking has reduced descriptive, vivid features of the urban space into a generic scientific framework. Phenomenological characteristics have consequently been ignored rather than integrated into theoretical components. The book argues that this results from a lack of appropriate conceptual vocabulary in our global body of scholarly literature. It challenges existing theories, introduces and applies the concept of Hezar-tu ('a thousand insides') to rethink the spaces in historic cores of Fez, Isfahan and Tunis. This tool constructs a staging post towards a different articulation of urban space based on spatial, physical, virtual, symbolic and social edges and thresholds; nodes of sociospatial relationships; zones of containment; state of intermediacy; and, thus, a logic of ambiguity rather than determinacy. Presenting alternative narrations of paths through sequential discovery of spaces, this book brings the sensual features of urban space into the focus.

The book finally shows that concepts derived from local contexts enable us to tailor our methods and theoretical structures to the idiosyncrasies of each city while retaining the global commonalities of all. Hence, in broader terms, it contributes to a growing awareness that urban studies should be more inclusive by bringing the diverse global contexts of cities into the body of our urban knowledge.

1
The idea of the ‘Islamic city’

Two approaches to understanding space have been developed in the body of discourse and knowledge on cities in the Middle East and North Africa. Most scholarly conceptualisations of the city and space are based on cognitive interpretations in which the city is understood through rational relations, producing a model which is very close to what de Certeau calls ‘the concept city.’¹ The other approach lies in the realm of immediate perception and sensual experience represented by the accounts of both scholars and visitors. Although the two sometimes coexist in a single description, a certain degree of distance between them has been retained: while the former has been the basis for most analytical discussions, the latter has remained confined to descriptive formulations. Reviewing the development of these two approaches reveals the dominance of cognitive conceptions in the discourse, highlighting that conceptualisations of the cities have not taken into account their sensual characteristics. It also reveals which urban features have been overseen or misrepresented in the process.

In the following pages I review conceptions from a range of valuable studies, chosen because they exemplify both the diversity and the key approaches that have had salience in international scholarship on Islamic cities. Some of the views represent the most commonly referenced ideas and some hint at themes to which I will refer when discussing the ideas central to the thesis of this book. I begin with theories of the city, and then address descriptions of the immediate perceptions of both scholars and travellers. Each approach has developed a set of vocabulary, terms and prototypes, many of which have become keywords and key concepts in the body of knowledge connected to the notion of Islamic city. While these examples are fragments, they do come together to produce an enduring picture of the Islamic city; they represent and shape the dominant narrative that in turn shapes the study of Islamic cities, which this book revisits. The results show that the phenomenality of space has not been used as the foundation for theorising cities, but rather as a rationalisation, and among the concepts applied when representing the Islamic city, labyrinth is a keyword that spans rationality and phenomenality.

Theories and maps

The Islamic city and its space have been cognitively interpreted and conceptualised from diverse angles and disciplinary backgrounds including urban, architectural and social history, geography, social geography, archaeology and symbolic philosophy, each presenting a particular spatial representation of the city. The level of focus varies from individual case study cities in specific timeframes, to regional inductive conceptions, to more holistic theorisations. Similarly, the focus of study has varied widely from physical elements and patterns, through architectural monuments and urban form, to social structures and functional systems.

While the descriptions and analyses discussed below might at a first sight seem to be fragmented or mutually exclusive, most of them share some key points and fill out the mosaic to form a whole picture. All have contributed to building a body of knowledge which shares the belief that the Islamic city represents a distinctive type of city-making which has a specific form, pattern, sociocultural structure, administrational system and urban logic, and needs to be studied as a unique system of urban relations and elements. Resulting conceptualisations have mainly been textually presented, yet have also been accompanied by modern cartographic maps and diagrams. While terms and concepts are the elements of discursive constructions, lines and figures are the means of expression in diagrammatic representations. By conceiving and representing the studied city through a select set of factors, each author spatialises it on the basis of a defined set of elements and spatial relationships and ‘represents the city as a certain kind of place’² embodied within a particular constellation of codes, signs and metaphors.

Different understandings of space that have been constructed in the historiography of Islamic city display two major trends: the first pays greater attention to physical layout; the second has a more anthropological perspective.³ In the texts produced during the early decades of the twentieth century, as in the dominant modernist trend of the time, understandings depart from rational-analytical comparisons between the patterns of streets in Islamic cities and the regularity of normative, modern street patterns. Yet the results of the comparisons were often expressed using phenomenological descriptions involving sensual spatial concepts. In these texts the space of the city was constructed in the course of unregulated negotiation between rational and phenomenological interpretations.

In these first studies space was largely conceptualised through constant references to the pattern of the street network and the private sphere’s character of introversion, keeping in mind regularity as the criterion of an ideal city. It was believed that Islamic cities comprised a series of inconsistently juxtaposed cells, welded to each other by narrow, irregular streets, a combination which was regarded as the negation of urban order. Buildings, in this composition, were thought not to be integrated into a preconceived pattern but, rather, as individually defining the course taken by the roads and passages, resulting in a large number of cul-de-sacs and pathways. It was also presumed that there were hardly any open spaces or squares to relieve the narrowness of the streets and byways of the cities, while houses were oriented away from the street.⁴ The resulting space was largely perceived as tortuous, labyrinthine and complicated, with manifold secret nooks and shadowy recesses. De Planhol writes, for instance: ‘the people conceal their private life’ behind the ‘forbidding walls’ of their houses in ‘the maze of alleys and back streets.’⁵ Similarly, Brunschvig states that a Muslim city has tortuous, complicated and sometimes labyrinth-like paths lined with closed houses; the city favours culs-de-sac, shadowy folds and secret corners.⁶

In the second half of the twentieth century an important transformation took place in studies of Islamic cities in which their social and anthropological aspects were highlighted. Since then much more diverse readings and perspectives have appeared, based on which Islamic cities been explored by scholars from different disciplines whose range of points of view reveals similarly different aspects.⁷ In the decades since then, urban space has mainly been understood within a series of structural-functional relationships which scholars have observed in the cities’ structures and systems. Investigations have focused on the social, economic or administrational-political structures of the city during the course of which diverse reasons were presented to justify early twentieth century understandings. Reviewing the texts shows that the most common statements with regards the characteristics of space accorded Islamic cities usually contain elements of an interpretation that can be summarised as follows: the cities may look formless but they have quite definite and logically patterned organisations. That is, the syndrome of twisting lanes does not imply disorganisation, as there is a definite urban organisation in that there is a clear skeleton for the city with the bazaar as the main artery and other routes branching off it. The main urban functions are lined along the main arteries. The residential districts fill the rest of the city and they have their own urban utilities such as neighbour-hood mosques, markets and baths. The introversion (courtyard typology) of houses and the encroachments of buildings onto public thoroughfares, the twisting narrow streets and numerous blind alleys, culs-de-sac and blank walls were understood as connoting withdrawal from public life.⁸

In other similar statements diverse arguments have been put forth to demonstrate the regularity of the pattern of spatial organisation in the city. For example, the street network is described as consisting of a number of principal commercial roads with a network of regular and relatively wide roads connected via other streets to the outskirts of the town. Raymond argues this pattern invokes a relative regularity which ‘contradicts the stereotype of an anarchic “Islamic” street-plan.’ He continues by noting that it is in the residential districts that we enter the ‘famous network of irregular streets and alleys without exits which some scholars have seen as a specificity of the whole city… such impasses made up no more than forty to fifty per cent of the total street network, concentrated in the residential zone.’⁹ So the argument goes that as the irregularity of the streets is not a general characteristic of the whole city, the city cannot, therefore, be characterised as labyrinthine or irregular. Other statements by Raymond following a similar reasoning assert that the irregularity of the streets and the abundance of blind alleys were a particular local phenomenon and answered to the needs of people who inhabited the residential neighbourhoods, such as their need for privacy.¹⁰ This set of theoretical conceptions can be scrutinised in seven major approaches:

• (a) Schematic conceptions: Schematic representations of the Islamic city spatialise it based on three fragmented points of focus as key underlying forces shaping the city: its functional pattern, the network of passage and urban administrational-legal systems. The way that the city is seen in this understanding, derived from the related texts, can be summarised as follows: the city is an agglomeration of a number of urban functions such as mosque and suq, and a number of residential quarters. Due to their importance in a Muslim’s life, the mosque and suq created a functional centrality in the city. The principal government building, namely, the palace of the ruler, is located near the central mosque. The suqs follow a particular functional-spatial hierarchy according to which the less clean and silent jobs are positioned at the furthest distance from the mosque, while the cleanest and most intellectual are more closely positioned. The central mosque as the spiritual, political and religious centre is placed on the main thoroughfare (function and geometry). In the city the residential and commercial districts are spatially and physically separated, comprising the two main typologies of the urban fabric. The residential area is divided into a number of neighbourhoods settled by distinctive groups of people who have built separate communities based on their ethnic, tribal or profession-related commonalities. The morphology of the neighbourhoods is a distinctive characteristic of the city. It has a network of tortuous passages with a large number of blind alleys, which is created due to the lack of a determining (i.e. top-down) administrational system in the city. By orienting houses away from the public thoroughfares, this form has encouraged the enormous moral distance betwe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note from the author
• List of illustrations
• Introduction: diversifying global urban vocabulary
• 1 The idea of the ‘Islamic city’
• 2 City as labyrinth
• 3 Hezar-tu as an urban concept
• 4 City as Hezar-tu: Fez, Isfahan and Tunis
• Epilogue
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index