Writing in a 1951 communique back to his superior in New Delhi, Indian Vice-Consul Mohammad Yunus described a particularly tough task: dealing with the “innumerable pensioners” in the Shi’a pilgrimage cities waiting to die. They had traveled from India to Iraq in order to die in Karbala or Najaf, believing that the location of their death would mean assured salvation. These individuals, citizens of newly independent India, had little money and much medical need. Yet Yunus noted that there was little more than a shed at Basra for pilgrims alighting from their voyages, and the only boarding houses for pilgrims of any kind operated by Dawoodi Vohra charitable organizations. This paper examines economic development in the urban areas of the Karbala district during the late monarchical period (1945-1958), particularly the cities of Karbala and Najaf. Due to their role as centers of pilgrimage and scholarship in Shi’a Islam, these communities were spaces of ethnolinguistic diversity both in their resident and transient populations. Largely due to a renegotiation of its royalty agreement with the Iraq Petroleum Company, the Iraqi central government embarked on a new modernization plan that included public service buildings and infrastructure after 1951. While many efforts were situated in the capital, the program did not completely neglect provincial urban areas such as Mosul, Kut, or Basra. Despite having tangible needs, especially in regards to pilgrims and pensioners, the cities of Karbala district were largely an afterthought in these plans. Instead, foreign sources of income such as Shi’a charitable organizations or old bequests such as the Oudh loan often filled the development vacuum. I argue that this is part of a broader narrative situating the pilgrimage cities as spatially dissonant within the construction of the Iraqi nation. These areas, distinguished by their sacrality, pursued their own development utilizing the transnational rather than national. While the government at times would offer some assistance, these token shows of currying political favor never supplanted the tangible labors of Persian and Indian Shi’a both in and out of Iraq. Spatially, economic development in Iraq remained contradictory and contested, giving rise to a seminal yet flawed Iraqi nationalism. Reflecting the international efforts of economic development in Karbala and Najaf, this paper utilizes documents from a variety of national archives, including papers of the British Foreign Office, Indian Ministry of External Affairs, and the United States Department of State.

A discourse on the state of Egyptian architecture was never more present than between1939 and 1959 in the pages of the first Arabic language architectural journal Al-Emara, established by Egyptian modernist architect Sayed Karim. If the magazine was, as Karim described it, “the forum for the exchange of honest opinion and ideas,” then the newly formed independent states of the Arab world were the terrain in which these ideas were tested, circulated and shared. Fifty years after the launch of Al-Emara, in the 1989 preface to the book Twentieth Century Architecture in Egypt, Karim laments the loss of Egypt’s position at the center of architectural and urban development in the region. Reflecting on those fifty years however, one cannot deny the formative role Egypt played in developing the urban fabric of the cities of the Arab World. Urban history is often told through the lens of what remains of its built landscape, but the drawing board and the building sites were not the only spaces in which Egyptian architects effectively disseminated their ideas. Magazines, conferences, education and institution building were other avenues through which they etched their presence onto the built environment of the region. Taking Kuwait as a case in point, this article will shed a light on the often overlooked contribution of Egyptian architects in the city from the 1950s to the 1990s. This paper will link Egypt and Kuwait in the last fifty years of the 20th Century via two key Egyptian figures of modernist architecture and urbanism, Sayed Karim and Mahmoud Riad, and the more widely recognized Hassan Fathy, as well as lesser-known practitioners such as Said Abdel Moneim, credited with the design of public and private buildings in Kuwait. Post-Nasser and Sadat, and the decline of a Pan-Arab spirit in the region, Egypt’s political and cultural sphere of influence in the region gradually began to shrink. Meanwhile, the Gulf countries, including Kuwait, became richer, and started to spread their own investments and culture beyond their borders. Today, the Gulf is shaping Cairo via its economic influence, its developers and ideas of suburban modernity. Back in Cairo, the returnees from this period of exchange as well as workers with remittances brought new influences to the city. This paper will attempt to trace these shifts of exchange and influence through a reading of the built environment.

Social science literature on risk and disaster has acknowledged the socially constructed nature of disasters and their impacts; as probability of a disaster happening (risk) and disaster itself are not solely natural acts or acts of divine intervention, but rather disasters and responses to disasters are contingent upon socio-spatial processes and forms of (or lack of) political intervention (Beck, 1992, 2006). Therefore urban areas or buildings defined as “risky” and hence worthy of pre-emptive and reactive management, funding, and intervention involve power relations, both at in the phase of construction of the definition of risk and also generating solutions to it. This research builds on the body of literature that deals with spatial politics of risk-driven urban transformation (Gotham and Greenberg, 2014) and demonstrates that the likelihood of a disaster happening in Istanbul is used as a framework for urban transformation in the upper-middle income neighborhoods of Kadikoy district in Istanbul, a first-degree earthquake risk region. By rendering certain residential buildings “risky”, simultaneous demolition and reconstruction of buildings that are only few decades old are justified and supported by government subsidy for the private capital reinvestment in the built environment. This research, based on ethnographic fieldwork, studies historical and socio-spatial forces behind the earthquake risk-driven urban transformation in Istanbul that generates new investment opportunities through recycling risky buildings. Moreover, by focusing on class inequalities and their spatial manifestations in the city, this research examines the impacts of the transformation on the local community and what it reveals about class and employment relations in the urban setting.

My interest in Marrakesh began in 2004 when my spouse and I visited the city eager to immerse ourselves in the "tourist experience". During our stay, we had a first-hand encounter with money and power. I recall the Pizza Hut server who warned me, rather in solidarity, that the tourism police were rounding up faux-guides (unauthorized tour guides) because I was in the company of a white tourist. I also recall the five-star hotel guard who denied us entry on the pretext of our "improper" casual attire. It was during the same visit that I began to appreciate the subversive nature of Marrakeshi satire and the "tiny revolutions" -in the Orwellian sense- each Marrakeshi joke evokes. Marrakeshis console each other, in jest, that Marrakesh "will soon impose a travel visa on poor Moroccans" whenever confronted with class-mediated "Hogra" (contempt, oppression and injustice). This paper is a qualitative research project on the processes of urban restructuring operating in Marrakesh and their implications on the local population. It arranges in one analytic framework questions of (post)coloniality, ideology, heritage-commodification, subjectivity and counter-conduct in the shadow of global capitalism. I examine, on the one hand, the ways in which the political, economic and social shifts affect the power relations in the city and, on the other, the ways in which the city's residents interpret those shifts, receive/perceive the changes underway in their neighborhoods. I find that Marrakesh has become a "contested terrain" in which local residents attempt to modify or resist policies, discourses and practices favoring "attractiveness" over local priorities. The central state orchestrates the depopulation of the historic neighborhoods deemed essential for the city's branding; it then opens the field to the NGOs and the media to construct a marketable and consumable "patrimony," while private actors who invest in real estate and tourism benefit from favorable policies and sprawl into peripheral land. Against this backdrop, the forms of counter-conduct among Marrakeshis are far from being monolithic. Some civil society groups choose to internalize the modern governmental reason in their activism. Others adopt a language of empowerment very much in line with the market logic, while many simply appease the state to secure short-term benefits. As for those urban subjects who lack the capacity to assert their right to the city, they engage in various forms of collective, albeit fragmented, speech/action consisting of informality, rumor and humor as the preferred means of oppositional politics.

Research Abstract: The Geopolitics of Spatiality A Comparative Study of Urban Governance and Urban Segregation in Palestine;Ramallah as a Case Years before the Oslo Accords --that resulted in the founding of the Palestinian Authority (PA)-- places were not ranked in hierarchies conferring a particular status to their residents. However, the establishment of the PA--which embraced the neoliberal model under a complicated geopolitical situation that is characterized by the presence of Israeli settler colonialism--has been accompanied by major transformations in the local planning policy and has engendered new mechanisms and exclusive/inclusive patterns of socioeconomic hierarchies. The most notable features are uneven development, recent forms of spatial segregation and social fragmentation among the neighborhoods of Ramallah, the de facto seat of the PA. In its endeavor to contribute to the social theory for a better understanding of how neoliberal policy shapes the urban fabric, this empirical research rests on a solid argument that Ramallah--in the 21st century--has had its own version of the segregated city, where people have been spatially sorted by socioeconomic affiliation. Therefore; it deals with the geopolitics of spatiality and urban governance in Palestine and attempts to address how the post-Oslo planning policy and landscape transformations influenced the spatial socioeconomic morphology of Ramallah. The study employs an ethnographic approach and analyzes the local spatial ordinances in use, aerial photos and plans. It also examines the Israeli practices that hinder the Palestinian development and the expansion of Ramallah’s urban fabric. Moreover, this research suggests that neoliberalizing the urban space of Ramallah--whilst being colonized--should be studied within the general framework of capitalist colonialism and global political economy which the Oslo Accords--that have been marketed as an economic and political liberation project--are part of. Hence; it further compares the current course of local urban planning with that in French Colonial Africa--where unlike the British--the apparent discourse aimed at liberation from the aristocracy and supported the rights of the oppressed. It concludes that notwithstanding their liberal and tolerant discourses, both capitalist regimes-- neoliberal and colonial--ended up with a similar segregated city, where planning practices had biased segregationist nature and dictated in effect who and what will locate where, and legitimized socioeconomic hierarchies.