Routledge Handbook on Middle East Cities

Haim Yacobi, Mansour Nasasra

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317231172
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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.

1
Introduction

Cities in the Middle East: beyond "Middle Easternism"

Haim Yacobi and Mansour Nasasra

What is the meaning of a collection of chapters for a book dealing with cities in the Middle East? We asked ourselves this question a few years ago, when we were invited to edit the Routledge Handbook for Cities in the Middle East. Can one characterise cities in the Middle East as a distinct urban category without falling into an essentialist trap? Is there any justification for generalising about the urban processes of various cities located in a region despite their diverse histories, politics, and cultures? And finally, what is our role as researchers in deconstructing the modern geopolitical and urban map of the Middle East that has resulted from the postwar European imperialism which actually created the concept? As already noted by Davison in his canonic article “Where Is the Middle East?”,

the fact remains that no one knows where the Middle East is, although many claim to know. Scholars and governments have produced reasoned definitions that are in hopeless disagreement. There is no accepted formula, and serious efforts to define the area vary by as much as three to four thousand miles east and west. There is not even an accepted core for the Middle East.

(1960: 665)

“Where is the Middle East?” is indeed a question that is echoed in the recent call by Jazeel (2016) for the return of researchers’ involvement in area studies, particularly in the Global South, and in the study of the circulation of knowledge production in the various disciplines. Tariq Jazeel argues not only that the circulation of knowledge production in the various disciplines is geographical but also that one should consider how knowledge production (and in our case knowledge of the urban) is transplanted into physical settings from where it rearticulates itself – a debate which is central to this collection.

Mainstream urban literature on the Middle East is dominated by an essentialist form of “orientalism” (Serageldin and El-Sadek, 1982), and with a few significant exceptions (Mitchell, 2002; Çelik, 1997; AlSayyad, 1996a), the cities of the region are usually considered as only marginally touched by globalisation and as passive objects of these trends (Stetter, 2012). Therefore, the lacuna that open up sets the main objective of this handbook – namely, to critically explore and conceptualise how, and in what kind of urban spaces, different cities around the Middle East are produced, planned, and experienced, not just as geopolitical sites but also as an epistemological source of knowledge.

Our objectives coincide with the growing critical literature on Middle East politics (Bayat, 2003; Sadiki, 2014; Gerges, 2015; Gelvin, 2017; Achcar, 2016) on the one hand and the growing centrality of the urban landscapes in the region on the other (e.g., see Shechter and Yacobi, 2005; Andraos and Akawi, 2016; Gharipour, 2016), all of which are aimed at de-essentialising knowledge production concerning the region. A telling illustration of this critique is manifested in the image on the cover of this book: an art project of Ashekman (http://ashekman.com), a Lebanese graffiti and hip-hop duo who have painted the word salam – “peace” in Arabic – across dozens of rooftops in the northern city of Tripoli, a project that is visible only from the sky. Interviewed by Alexandra Talty, the artists, Mohamed and Omar Kabbani, stated that the concept behind this project (named Operation Salam) was to show another side of the country beyond war and extremism:

In the media outlets talking about Lebanon, all you hear about is terrorism and extremism, all the negative aspects. . . . But there’s plenty of creativity, plenty of people trying to live their life . . . that’s why we used the word salam. I want to change people’s perception of us.

(Talty, 28 December 2017)

Operation Salam might sound like a naïve attempt to re-narrate urban life in the Middle East, yet we see it as a good demonstration of Maria Todorova’s seminal work, which significantly analysed how the Balkan region was politically constructed within Western culture. Todorova coined the term “Balkanism” (Todorova, 1997), which is also useful for framing in this book, in the way it references a narrow understanding of the region’s politics. According to our reading, some of the key contributions to the literature on the urban Middle East are rooted in a similar Middle Easternism approach, by tending to focus on cities in the region as a unique category that is the reversed image of “ordinary” Western cities.

This book joins this critical view by moving 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. In other words, we take the Middle Eastern city as a dynamic site of investigation; rather than a given neutral category, we approach cities as multidimensional sites; products of political processes, knowledge production, and exchange; local and global visions; and spatial artefacts. Importantly, our attempt is not 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, among other concerns.

We wish to frame the selected chapters in this book with the discussion advanced by Jennifer Robinson, who claims that viewing all cities as ordinary may gain substantial results, “with implications for the direction of urban policy and for our assessment of the potential futures of all sorts of different cities” (Robinson, 2006: 109). She attempts to develop a postcolonial urban theory that defines new ways of dealing with differences between cities, and her contribution to our discussion lies in her questioning given categorisations of cities (e.g., developed versus undeveloped; modern versus traditional; colonial versus postcolonial) and their assumed hierarchies within a global order (Robinson, 2006: 41). This book aims to advance a view of cities in the Middle East that goes beyond the current scope of contemporary research which is profoundly limited by certain long-standing assumptions embedded in urban theory – assumptions that propose the fundamental incommensurability of different kinds of cities (Robinson, 2011; Mcfarlane, 2010).

Throughout this book, urbanisation is seen as an economic, political, and sociocultural complexity, as is its interaction with urban landscapes, urban dwellers, global politics, and everyday life. Municipal and state decision-making further shape the nature of urban spaces, and sociocultural transformations influence perceived notions of the lived space and, in turn, reshape the physical landscape itself. The growth of urban scholarship over the past two decades accentuated the importance of also looking at the complexity of cities in the Global South, highlighting the necessity of questioning the liberal, often Western gaze over urban processes (Roy, 2006) and viewing urban planning from outside its origins in the global centres of power (Watson, 2009). While such a vein of thought is a source of inspiration when dealing with cities in Africa or Asia, research on cities in the Middle East remains fairly limited in scope, with little cross-disciplinary conversation among scholars in differing fields that attempts to account for such complexity.

As a whole, this book is an attempt to acknowledge a more complex notion of urbanity in the Middle East, and rather than highlight monolithic characteristics, trends, and transformations associated with cities in the region, we suggest diversified approaches that avoid the often theoretical and disciplinary reductionisms while dealing with cities in the Middle East. Accordingly, this book is multidisciplinary in its scope and guides the reader towards a comprehensive understanding of the main research strands in the field. The book aims to present a critical and theoretical understanding of urbanism in the region, highlighting the great relevance of Middle East cities to the growing field of urban studies and Middle East studies and politics.

The book focuses both on the symbolic and tangible construction of place in cities. Through presenting different case studies from the Middle East, we wish to open up an interdisciplinary debate that includes the fields of architecture, geography, history, planning, anthropology, sociology, political science, urban studies, and Middle East studies – all areas that are represented by the backgrounds of the scholars who have contributed to this volume. The richness of the case studies and the theoretical debates reveals various insights concerning historical and current urban conditions in the Middle East, and the selected chapters analyse and theoretically discuss different cases, including Sana’a, Beirut, Istanbul, Tehran, and Hebron, to mention but a few, in which cities are linked to global and local processes, how cities are planned and used, the effects that conflicts and violence have on cities, and the nature of the role of communities and their memory in shaping urban life in the Middle East today.

As the chapters reveal, an interdisciplinary engagement is greatly needed since, as AlSayyad (1996b) and Castells (1997) have suggested, neither body of knowledge is complete or credible without the other. To put it differently, no discussion of the emergence of an urban Middle East and the management of social relations in the political climate that the Middle East experiences nowadays can ignore the pivotal role of cities in both generating and challenging the national order, control, and resistance. Likewise, no serious historical account of urbanisation in the Middle East, or discussion of contemporary globalising cities, can overlook the central role of the Middle East in shaping “planetary urbanism” today.

As the influential work of Abu-Lughod (1980; 1984) suggests, the literature on the so-called Islamic city offers an unconcealed paradigm of how a general theory on the city in the Middle East has transformed and developed through the study of only a few cases, mainly in North Africa. This critic also reveals the uncritical orientalist assumption of the role of “Islam” as an explanatory factor for urban development and form. Indeed, researchers who focused on urban history in the Middle East highlighted the colonial gaze over local populations.

The present volume opens with an additional historical view that contextualises Middle East urbanism with the historical context of the region. Mohammad Sakhnini examines in his chapter “In the Eyes of Some Britons: Aleppo, A Cosmopolitan City” the travel accounts of some early British travellers who visited Aleppo during the eighteenth century. Sakhnini shows how the identities of these travellers were steeped in the world of others – in the entanglement with people from different cultures and religions – with no mention recorded in their diaries that Islam and Muslims were their enemies. Aleppo, the city at the heart of this chapter, was viewed by these Britons as a multicultural, multireligious city in which Europeans were men of riches and influence but also free to pursue their cultural and religious practices. Sakhnini emphasises that the cosmopolitan practices of the Enlightenment, such as tolerance and improvement, were pursued not only in grand European cities such as Paris, Edinburgh, and London but also in Aleppo.

Understanding urban planning in the Middle East as part of a wide and complex network of ideas and visions – a set of actions that is not binary – is discussed in the chapter by Reza M. Shirazi and Somaiyeh Falahat: “The Making of Tehran: The Incremental Encroachment of Modernity”. This chapter argues that Tehran’s development after being selected as the Persian capital in 1788 was, from the beginning, primarily and essentially a modern project that was intended to transform the city into a manifestation of a functioning utopia. Although influenced by different ideologies from Shiism, via nationalism, internationalism, and traditionalism, Tehran was developed and planned centred on principles and orthodoxies of modernity and modernism. Based on a critical reading of major “moments of urban modernity” from the first Naserid interventions to the Tehran-Karaj Urban Region Plan and the recent Master Plan for Tehran, Shirazi and Falahat show how, despite the strong presence of an anti-modern discourse at various points in time, more evidently in the post-Revolution period, modernist, technocratic, and technologised attitudes towards city-making remained dominant. Attempts to establish an anti-modern or critical trend in urban planning and architecture against the dominant modernisation project were marginalised, failed to consolidate into a competing discourse due to political changes and restructuring, or remained as an abortive rhetoric.

Cosmopolitan social encounters stand also in the core of André Levy’s contribution, “Dotting Urban Spaces: Jewish Survival Politics in Current Casablanca”. Levy argues that the study of spatial encounters between minority groups and the larger dominant societies frequently focuses on tensions between White veteran residents and new migrants, commonly treated as people of colour. In this chapter, he lingers with people of the minority group who, in the face of a massive migration of its members, stayed put. Therefore, the premise of the strangeness of the newcomer that often feeds suspicion, animosity, or fear is not present in those encounters. The minority and majority groups involved here, Moroccan Jews and Muslims, have a millennium of shared history. Levy argues that this historical given consolidates a unique dynamic between the groups and suggests specifically that as a demographically insignificant minority, Jews manage to establish cultural enclaves that enjoy surprising success. Although these cultural enclaves are aimed at coping with their inferiority, these enclaves allow them a sense of control over their encounters with Muslims. That control, within what they perceive as a menacing ecology, is attained by the basic logic underlying the cultural enclaves, which he terms “contraction”. This denotes two interconnected trends in Jewish life: a continuous demographic depletion and a tendency towards self-isolation and detachment from Muslim surroundings.

Along with other urban analysts, Castells (1983) engaged class analysis with wider aspects of power relations, including ethnicity, gender, location, and migration. This broader, integrative approach is also evident in Marion Young’s thesis: recent emancipatory social movements are mobilised around issues of collective identity rather than class or economic interests exclusively (Young, 1990). The extensive research that followed the Arab Spring (Allegra et al., 2013) has echoed this debate within the Middle East, and as already suggested, research on urban social movements in the Middle East is too often caught in surrendering to the exceptionalism of the region (Bayat, 2003). This has also been discussed in detail:

In recent decades, this tendency has mainly translated in MENA countries into an over- production about “civil society” and “Islamist movements” as the main protagonists of contentious politics. More recently, the copious production of conferences, special issues of journals and edited books that followed the inception of the Arab Spring generally confirms this tendency . . . even though these broad categories do not seem completely convincing for capturing the dynamic of dissent currently expressed in the region. As Bayat convincingly argues, the heuristic value of the prevailing social movement theory that draws on Western experience for accounting “the complexities of socio-religious movements” in contemporary Muslim societies should be questioned.

(Allegra et al., 2013: 6)

Since we felt that the discussion of urban social movements and the Arab Spring have been central to the literature during the past decade, we present in this book a different perspective, less discussed, on “Queer Urban Movements in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem: A Comparative Discussion”. This chapter by Chen Misgav and Gilly Hartal offers a critical discussion of how urban metropolitan centres are conceived by many as sites of sexual freedom and presence, cultivating LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) and queer movements and activism. Misgav and Hartal analyse the characteristics of LGBT and queer urban movements in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and argue that there is a difference between the two cities, grounded in the urban setting and in the particular cultural, discursive, and political portraits of each location as global or local. Such divergences, they argue, reveal not only the difference between the urban movements but also the distinct forms of spatial visibility, presence, and activity of the queer movements in urban space.

Discussion of urban encounters between individuals and communities is central to questions of memory, belonging, politics, and the built environment in general and in the Middle East in particular. In this context, Tovi Fenster’s chapter “The Home in the Middle Eastern City: A Contact Zone of Contradictory Memories and Belonging in Jaffa” discusses the meanings and perceptions of the home in the city of Jaffa/Yaffa as a contact zone of contradictory memories and belonging. Fenster focuses on historiographies of specific addresses of her grandparents’ home in Jaffa that had been a Palestinian home whose owners were dispossessed in 1948. Fenster analyses the perceptions of home, memory, and belonging from her mother and the Palestinian grandson of the original owners who happened to live across the road. This analysis emphasises the silence of the “winners” – her mother’s abstention from telling the story of the “Arab house”, conforming to the national politics of silencing – and the silence of the “losers” – the grandson’s reluctance to relate his feelings, insistently refusing to collaborate with “the enemies”.

Destruction, disposition, and the struggle over memory is indeed central to Middle East politics. In Yasmeen El Khoudary’s “Gaza’s Historical Cycles of Prosperity and Destruction: Is the Present an Aberration?”, she suggests that in recent years, Gaza has received substantial world attention and media coverage that has described it as “the biggest open-air prison in the world”, “the most densely populated spot on Earth”, “an unlivable place by 2020”, among other portrayals that foresee a doomed future for the Gaza Strip. In this chapter, El Khoudary sheds light on Gaza’s ancient cultural and archaeological heritage, which receives marginal attention in studies about the archaeology of Palestine, is distorted by Israeli colonial strategies in the fields of history and archaeology, and gets forgo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables and figures
• List of contributors
• 1 Introduction: cities in the Middle East: beyond "Middle Easternism"
• 2 In the eyes of some Britons: Aleppo, a cosmopolitan city
• 3 The making of Tehran: the incremental encroachment of modernity
• 4 Dotting urban spaces: Jewish survival politics in current Casablanca
• 5 Queer urban movements in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem: a comparative discussion
• 6 The home in the Middle Eastern city: a contact zone of contradictory memories and belonging in Jaffa
• 7 Gaza's historical cycles of prosperity and destruction: is the present an aberration?
• 8 Erasing memories of Palestine in settler-colonial urban space: the case of Haifa
• 9 Beersheba and the dynamics of a Palestinian city: Bedouin networks with Gaza, Jerusalem, and Istanbul
• 10 Understanding the materiality of suspicion: affective politics in MENA cities
• 11 Borders, boundaries, and frontiers: on Jerusalem's present geopolitics
• 12 "A Demarcation in the Hearts": everyday urban frontiers in Beirut
• 13 Tourism and urbanism in Iran: top-down and ad hoc developments in the Caspian region
• 14 The politics of building in post-Revolution Tehran
• 15 Revisiting Sana'a's urban planning and development challenges
• 16 Marrakesh: a fresh perspective — moving from form-based planning to a value-based approach
• 17 Securitisation of urban electricity supply: a political ecology perspective on the cases of Jordan and Lebanon
• 18 The rise of a Saharan city: urban development, tribal settlement, and political unrest in Laâyoune
• 19 Rethinking "building resilience": conflict and the Middle East city
• 20 Erasing palimpsest city: boom, bust, and urbicide in Turkey
• 21 Hebron: challenging the urbicide
• 22 The impact of internal displacement in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq: internally displaced people, interethnic relations, and social cohesion in Duhok
• 23 Can integration offer Iraqi refugees in Damascus a durable solution?
• 24 Growth, aspiration, and consolidation in Ramallah
• 25 Political economy of tourism development in the Gulf: the cases of Muscat and Doha
• Index