This Bibliography Brings Together A Rather Diffused Literature From Many Different Disciplines In Order To Provide A Research Tool For Scholars Interested In The Subject. The Area Covered Is Most Of The Islamic World, Although The Concentration Is On The Core Area Of The Middle East And North Africa. The Bibliography Focuses On Western Language Literature, Esp. English, German, French And To A Lesser Extent Spanish. Coverboard Slightly Wornout, Spine Has A Very Minor Tear, Text Absolutely Clean, Condition Good.

Although the city as a central entity did not simply disappear with the Fall of the Roman Empire, the development of urban space at least since the twelfth century played a major role in the history of medieval and early modern mentality within a social-economic and religious framework. Whereas some poets projected urban space as a new utopia, others simply reflected the new significance of the urban environment as a stage where their characters operate very successfully. As today, the premodern city was the locus where different social groups and classes got together, sometimes peacefully, sometimes in hostile terms. The historical development of the relationship between Christians and Jews, for instance, was deeply determined by the living conditions within a city. By the late Middle Ages, nobility and bourgeoisie began to intermingle within the urban space, which set the stage for dramatic and far-reaching changes in the social and economic make-up of society. Legal-historical aspects also find as much consideration as practical questions concerning water supply and sewer systems. Moreover, the early modern city within the Ottoman and Middle Eastern world likewise finds consideration. Finally, as some contributors observe, the urban space provided considerable opportunities for women to carve out a niche for themselves in economic terms.

Islamic cultures in the Middle East have inherited and developed a legacy of urbanism spanning millennia to the ancient civilizations of the region. In contrast to well-organized states like China in history, Muslim peoples formed loose states based on intricate social networks. As a consequence, most studies of urban history in the Middle East have focused their gaze exclusively on urban social organization, often neglecting the extension of political power to rural areas. Covering Morocco, Egypt, Syria, Iran and Brunei, this volume explores the relationship between political power and social networks in medieval and modern Middle Eastern history. The authors examine social, religious and administrative networks that governed rural and urban areas and led to state formation, providing a more inclusive view of the mechanisms of power and control in the Islamic world.

The contributors to this book examine the religious, social and administrative networks that governed both rural and urban areas in the North African and Middle Eastern parts of the world. This gives some idea of how power is allotted in the Islamic world.

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

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1969.

This book describes diverse urban planning projects in Turkey, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates (Dubai and Sharjah) Kuwait, Afghanistan, Albania, Syria and Yemen. One thing in common between these countries is that the author has personally worked on all of these projects, and thus the book is a partial professional autobiography. Each chapter tackles not only a different country but also a different aspect of urban planning and development, as follows: upgrading or improving recent illegal or informal slums, including detailed local planning and strategic planning; urban conservation of Al Muharraq, a historic Gulf city; traditional building construction as a reference point for modern design; urban design of new city centre areas in three prosperous Gulf cities – Kuwait, Dubai and Sharjah; the recreation – post-war – of an urban planning system in Kabul; a historical account of urban planning in the Zog-Mussolini period in Albania, which is contrasted with the currently collapsed system; an account of urban economic regeneration in Syria; and local planning aiming at economic revival in Aden. These essays articulate eight themes: tradition versus modernism; regionalism and identity; the property market in the urban economy; privacy, the family/tribe etc.; arts and crafts, industrialised construction; the impact of the motor car, and urban infrastructure; the courtyard house; and public administration, local politics and corruption. The book will be of interest to urban and regional planners, infrastructure engineers, urban economists, architects, urban managers and local government experts as well as those with an interest in the region itself. The book will be useful as an academic textbook in the region, because it presents a wide range of views of the topic, and a wide spread of countries and backgrounds.

Middle East and North Africa: Climate, Culture, and Conflicts – too hot to handle? The volume offers an account of ideas, historical case studies and current debates on climate change and its consequences from perspectives of eco-theology, archeology, history, geography, political science and technology.

A Companion to the History of the Middle East offers a fresh account of the multifaceted and multi-layered history of this region. A fresh account of the multifaceted and multi-layered history of the Middle East Comprises 26 newly-commissioned essays by leading international scholars Primarily focused on the modern and contemporary periods Covers religious, social, cultural, economic, political and military history Treats the region as four differentiated political units – Iran, Turkey, Israel and the Arab world Includes a section on current issues, such as oil, urban growth, the role of women, and democratic human rights