Using case studies in Libya, Egypt, Turkey and Iran this panel examines the socio-cultural histories of the built environments and their contemporary/future place in the urban. The scholars here treat the physical environment, built form, infrastructure technology, and design of the city as archival materials to be “read against the grain” to extract narratives of social/cultural histories of place. Some of the questions we hope to answer follow. How do the spaces, physical plan, layout and organization create these cultural narratives? How do policy makers or local governments impose the use of urban spaces for certain social groups and/or functions? How do the social actors, the people, contribute to the use of the space and remodel/manipulate the built environment to their needs? Finally, the perception has been of a hegemony from above upon the towns and their urban form, yet in all four studies the evolution of these places has been uneven and driven by local actors and circumstances. Thus, we interrogate the part played by states, institutions, corporations, and municipalities in the development of these cities.
The investigation of subject matters under the umbrella of urban history has expanded from examining the architectural and other physical features of the cities to studying social, economic, political, and cultural aspects to understand the built form. Recent scholarship by urban/architectural historians like Dell Upton and Melanie Kiechle in the US, Hanan Hammad in Mahalla, and Arbella Bet-Shilmon in Kirkuk have demonstrated the growing interest in studying the built environment, especially as it is related to the socio/cultural histories of their inhabitants. Hence, our panel will examine the built environment at a multi-scalar level, by attempting to understand what were the higher objectives of the governments, designers and planners, but then the peoples’ own use of the space over time and across the region from North Africa to Turkey and Iran.. Overall, the proposed panel intends to investigate the multi-dimensional nature of the built environment by focusing on the bigger scale interventions and their local interpretations.
The panel's unique intervention is to question the larger linkages between the different built environments of each case study. Thus, we can start comparing and analyzing the similarities and differences between each intervention as it relates to policing, hygiene, sanitation, infrastructure (both on the scale of the city and the domestic space), technology, public space, and design of the urban form.
Architecture & Urban Planning
History
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Through plans, correspondences, and photography my paper aims to extract social and cultural histories of the populations who lived in the Suez Canal cities of Port Said, Ismailia and Suez. As such, the built environment and infrastructural projects that were built from the ground up in the cities, are an archival source for understanding how Europeans and Egyptians lived, moved and enjoyed the urban, specifically in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The built environment and its design led to certain everyday mundane interactions that became part of the cultural fabric of the Suez Canal cities. For example, the development of public space brought different nationalities into action with one another, which at times brought residents in front of the British consular court or police. Additionally, the Suez Canal Company (SCC) and the Egyptian government (both prior to and after British colonial rule) attempted to police and discipline the urban space towards the goal to make it appealing, hygienic, and sanitary. Yet, as elsewhere, theory was not a straightforward path towards, practice and implementation. Studying the development of water, sewage and indoor plumbing infrastructure demonstrates the complicated and uneven expansion of these utilities to the different areas of the cities. Differentiation in bathroom equipment and design, and access to water and sewerage infrastructure, in essence, created a two-tiered hierarchy, which linked to an individual's position, within the SCC and ethnic identity. As such, what we can begin to piece together from the fragments of the archives is a unique social history of the cities and their residents. This methodology allows the historian to retrace the lines of narratives that at times appear faint.
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Mrs. Fathia Elmenghawi
Martyrs’ Square in downtown Tripoli, Libya has undergone dramatic transformations during the colonial and post-colonial periods. The square was originally created by the Italians, who named it Piazza Castello after the historic castle. In the colonial period it was mainly used for political and military celebrations, this function continued into the post-colonial period. Under Gaddafi’s regime, and for political purposes, the square was tripled in size and renamed The Green Square. During the Italian colonial period and the two decades after independence in 1951, Libyans women used this square no more than as a passageway to the commercial area in the old city. They crossed it, wearing their farashiyas – a Libyan women traditional garment that covers the whole body except for one eye. During the Gaddafi era, women, whose way of dressing started to be modified – they began to appear in public with only a headscarf or in some instances without any head cover, continued using the square as a passageway. However, in political and military ceremonies, a few women did attend the parades or observe them. After the fall of Gaddafi’s regime, women gathered in large numbers in the square to celebrate the new revolution. Some of them even performed the Eid prayers, for the first time, with men in the square. Women occupied specific zones with invisible borders separating them from men. Based on archival research and secondary sources, the paper traces the change in Martyrs’ square design and changes of women’s presence and their diverse uses of the square.
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Mr. Reza Mortaheb
Abadan was the most prominent of all the oil company towns that the British Petroleum Company built in Southwest Iran. Located at the border of Iran and present-day Iraq, by the mid twentieth century Abadan not only accommodated the world’s largest refinery, it had also become Iran’s most populous industrial city. This paper focuses on the design of healthcare facilities and the Company’s public health policies in different stages of Abadan’s urban development between 1908 and 1933. Drawing on primary archival documents and secondary sources, the paper discusses how notions of sanitation and hygiene played a pivotal role in the organization of space in Abadan. This was manifested in provision of urban infrastructure— such as water supplies, sewage, and drainage systems— land acquisition policies, and housing, as well as in healthcare design and town planning practices. From the outset, prevailing sanitary principles of the time coupled with colonial conventions helped determine the placement and organization of residential spaces for different classes of the workforce and also informed the design of Company-sponsored healthcare system, which was comprised of dispensaries, hospitals, quarantine facilities and isolation camps. Medical services were also used as a tool to increase the Company’s control over the workforce, to forge the desired social order, to recreate the unequal power structure similar to colonial models, and, last but not least, to avoid labor militancy. In the 1920s, in the light of Iran’s new political environment, labor unrests, and frequent epidemics, the Company implemented reforms to boost industrial efficiency and productivity by increasing its control over space and populations, while also addressing pressing urban issues. This included a revision of public health policies and reorganization of healing spaces.
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Zehra Betul Atasoy
The developing Republic’s program of raising healthy future generations was promoted as part of its pronatalist agenda when the Ministry of Health and Social Assistance was established in 1920 after the Parliament of Turkey was founded. The ministry initiated an agenda for public health projects including the institutionalization of medical services throughout the country, creating a state-trained medical staff, and carrying on campaigns against epidemic diseases such as malaria, syphilis, and trachoma.
Treating and preventing syphilis became one of the priorities of the Turkish government because it was not just a threat to the nation’s mothers but also to unborn citizens as the disease was associated with birth defects and stillbirths. As a result, prostitution was identified as a public health risk and the state instituted a regulatory regime to determine appropriate sexual practices and places as well as mandating the medical examination of sex workers.
The centralization of the control of prostitution and syphilis epidemic was introduced with the Public Health Law in 1930 and the Regulation for the Struggle against Prostitution and Venereal Diseases Spread by Prostitution in 1933. This led to spatial concentration and surveillance of prostitution in the urban environment within the context of fighting against syphilis.
Even though prostitution took place in different neighborhoods in Istanbul (also in various forms such as street prostitution) Beyo?lu and Galata districts were the focuses of discussion for decades as the centers of the entertainment industry. This paper examines zoning practices both in the places of treatment (hospitals and doctors’ offices) and prostitution, and their spatial implications in daily life particularly in Abanoz, Ziba (Beyog?lu), and Zu?rafa streets (Galata) through the centralization of the regulation of sex trade and control of syphilis under the early Republican regime.
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Dr. Heidi Walcher
This paper traces the debate about prostitution and sexual diseases in late 19th century Iran.
The debate at the time hinged on a critical article published by Jakob Eduard Polak (1818-1891 Austrian physician at the Dar al-Fonun since 1851, personal physician of Nasir al-Din Shah (1855-1860) ), entitled “Prostitution in Persia,” (published in the Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrift, in 1861). This article is the starting point of this paper's discussion.
The first part will debate the content, purpose and wider, complex Perso-Austrian context of this article, arguing it can only be understood on the background of the Austrian establishment and its concerns with issues of prostitution, sexually transmitted diseases, prohibition, mobility, and the administration of hygiene and public morality. The paper will explore to what extent these considerations and principles were transposed or filtered into the Iranian context.
The second part, connecting to questions about Polak's article and its contextualization in Austrian medical circles and Iran, will pose questions about this particular article's specific context, underlying ideas and ramifications for categories like prostitution, sexual practices, gender and sex in Iran. The discussion also addresses historiographical and archival issues as well as Polak's direct personal and indirect legacy in Iranian history.
In medical and ethnological circles Polak has been known through his reports in the Viennese medical and ethnographical journals (not only but chiefly about his work and experiences in Iran) and among historians and anthropologists he has been well known through his ethnographic account on Iran (Persien, das Land und Seine Bewohner, translated into by K. Jah?nd?r?.in 1982), with a lasting positive reputation, freed of charges of “Orientalism” and hailed as a paragon in the “transfer of knowledge.” His work in and on Iran influenced Iranian medical students till the 1960s, which is why his ideas on 'prostitution' posed in this article, was relevant for the concept and connotation of the term and practice in late Qajar Iran.
This paper will be based on published Persian texts, but chiefly draws on unpublished archival as well as published European sources.
