Land and its physical attributes have been central to discourse on architecture and urbanism. Grounded constructs used to explain urban form are consequently used to generate urban design. Though there is vast literature on the centrality of an oceanic perspective to our understanding of cultures, it remains abstract and related to the idea of the ocean. My paper compares the historic urban development of three port settlements in the Gulf (Al Khalij): Sharjah and Ras al Khaima on the eastern edge of Arabia and Bander Lingeh in Iran. While these Khaliji ports benefitted from the lucrative Indian Ocean trade, they facilitated exchange of material, human and capital flows. The Persian component and the Arab component coexisted, though not without conflicts. Merchants, lenders, divers, and labour force from all across the region inhabited and participated in the making of these settlements. My paper reveals Khaliji urbanism as a unique typology based on secure tenure over the connecting ocean, linking diverse people with landscape and seascape ecologies. I will conclude with introducing “seascape” urbanism as a visual complement to the existing domains of “port” and “coastal” urbanism. Through the three case cities, I argue that consideration of “identity” in Gulf cities necessitates the revival of centrality of the ocean as a unifying geographic entity. The maritime orientation of my paper transcends the contemporary discourse on Khaliji identity from its present insularity. Future considerations of “identity” in Al Khaliji will thus necessitate the revival of centrality of the ocean as a unifying geographic entity.

Over the past five years, the urban landscape of many Jordanian cities has changed dramatically. With the influx of billions of dollars in direct foreign investments coming from oil-rich Arab Gulf states, several Jordanian cities have gone from quiet, conservative towns to booming metropolises replete with high rise towers, mega development projects, and ambitious urban developments. Adopting an interdisciplinary, and multi-layered methodology, this research project takes place at three levels: the macro, meso and micro levels. At the macro-level, the proposed research project analyzes official narratives and public perceptions of these mega-projects. Interviews with over 20 policy and planning officials, this paper measures their level of engagement with public groups and local citizens. Moreover, through content-analysis of local media and archived web postings, we determined the degree of transparency involved in the public consultation process. At the meso-level, local perception of inclusiveness in mega real estate development was investigated using on-line surveys where over 2000 respondents voiced their opinions and perceptions of Amman’s urban development. This also presents a new means of integrating public opinion data on national governance in Middle East urban studies. Finally, at the micro-level, over 15 local focus groups were conducted to shed light on perceptions of how these mega real estate developments intersect with local housing, economic and social needs. We find significant resistance to mega development projects at the public and official level and yet structural pressure by global agents and the political elite to continue urban real estate development in the name of ‘modernization’. Methodologically, this project is unique in its application of political science methods of research to a topic usually housed within the urban planning discipline. The use of multi-level nested design permits a novel approach that enables simultaneous investigation and comparison of official, public and local perceptions of democratic urban planning processes. Similarly, this research project provides, for the first time, an opportunity to test, assess and enhance the use of online survey questionnaires to gauge public opinion about inclusive urban planning. Finally, empirically, this project offers an original in-depth comparative analysis of three Jordanian urban development sites where massive Gulf investments are very rapidly reshaping the urban landscape throughout the Middle East.

The paper essentially seeks to query in what way contemporary grand urban projects in urban centers of the Arab world fit into political interests of globalizing monarchies. It focuses on a detailed case study of the Bouregreg Project in Rabat-Salé, Morocco which is the monarchial state’s attempt to make a world-class “modern but historical” capital befitting the Islamic Kingdom. By viewing the Bouregreg Project as an urban enterprise of the powerful monarchial state designed to increase political authority in the urban domain, the paper aims to offer perspectives on the intersection of monarchical power and neoliberal capitalism that is asserted to be playing out in Rabat-Sale over the course of the Bouregreg project. For this purpose, this paper specifically focuses on the royal-endorsed agenda of “agglomeration” of Rabat-Salé which the Bouregreg project stands for. Given the intertwined histories of the two cities in the last century, which begot the current circumstances of serious political, economic and social discrepancies between Rabat and Salé, this paper critically examines the top-down urban agenda of agglomeration from the perspective of mobilization of Salé. Drawing from documental research and interviews with municipal-level central authorities and governing urban bodies in Rabat and Salé, the purpose of this paper is two fold: first, to demonstrate how the hegemonic agenda of agglomeration is legitimized via political discourse as well as institutional apparatus, and second to illustrate how this agenda is historically and politically linked to the authority of the Moroccan monarchy, walking a tightrope between modernity and tradition in the 21st century. While much scholarship in the burgeoning literature on the urban boom in the Middle East takes a macro-level perspective of neoliberal urbanism, this paper aims to use the detailed case study of neoliberal urban renewal in the Bouregreg project as a wider investigation of the political ramifications of the so-called Arab mega-projects for authoritarian regimes in the region.

With several other political shifts resulted from the collapse of Ottoman Empire, the construction of Ankara as the new capital of the Turkish Republic brought dramatic changes. Since its conquest, Istanbul had been strongly identified with the Ottoman Empire; hence, the founders of the newly formed state saw establishing Ankara as the capital as a necessary break from the 450 years of the past. I claim that organization of the city and the symbolic buildings in the city was determined according to a colonial logic which aimed to classify, organize, regulate and order the subjects of the land. Rather than simply signifying a break from the former Empire, it constituted the transformation of an old rural city into a capital of the “modern” Republic. I argue that the theory of “enframing” elaborated by Timothy Mitchell is applicable to the Ankara context. I use a three-layered approach, focusing first on the mausoleum of Ataturk second on the presidential residence in Cankaya, and third, on the city of Ankara, situated in the center of Turkey, Cankaya which is at the center of Ankara, and at the heart of Cankaya, Anitkabir?the mausoleum of the founder of the state. Their positioning represent the method of ruling that is employed by the colonial forces in the colonized states, even though Turkey has never been officially colonized. This article examines the implementation of disciplinary power by using the visual techniques of calculation, division and order during the early era of the Turkish Republic in its capital. The building of new structures was not only intended to cut the historical continuity between the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic, but was also intended to create a lieux de memoire to replace people’s memories with an artificial history.

Violence in Baghdad and Iraq’s other cities can be spatially described in several ways. Newspapers usually report acts of violence as occurring in a particular neighborhood or along a named street. The U.S. military and Iraqi security forces analyze acts of violence in particular units’ areas of responsibility. Militias and insurgent groups might divide the city into zones. Elected Iraqi authorities probably think about violence in a particular electoral district, municipal council area, or in ethnic enclaves. In this paper, I assess the extent to which violence is better described through religious geography. I argue that Friday mosque sermons disseminate common knowledge within a geographically-bounded space, allowing individuals to know what others know in that mosque’s catchment area. This common knowledge helps neighbors coordinate and provide local social orders. Distinct social orders should emerge around mosques. From this, I hypothesize that murders and other violent crimes should be more common in areas far from mosques or in overlapping catchment areas than in areas wholly within a single mosque’s catchment area. The frequency of insurgent-based violence, however, should vary by the type of mosque. To tests these and other related conjectures, I constructed a geographic information system (GIS) that includes data on over 400 mosques in Baghdad, over 391,000 violent events (e.g. murders, assassinations, kidnappings, insurgent attacks, and counterinsurgent operations) that occurred in Iraq from January 2004 to December 2009, and geographic and demographic data on Baghdad. I use GIS techniques to analyze spatial relationships between frequency and type of attacks and mosques’ location and preachers’ political affiliation. I also use temporal data and case studies of mosques to assess the impact of Sunni Arab and Sadrist participation in the political process on insurgent violence. In particular, I try to assess how violence in Baghdad changed in the geographic catchment area of mosques associated with the Association of Muslim Scholars, Adnan al-Dulaimi’s Awqaf clerical network, and Moqtada al-Sadr’s movement as each group engages the formal political process at various times.