This paper will explore the effect of local agency on the development of Amman. Individual Arab actions, far more than British direction or edict, altered the growth and shape of the new capital’s infrastructure. This paper will demonstrate how local actors succeeded in the electrification of Amman where numerous foreign efforts had failed. Amman’s history during the British Mandate is the story of conflicting imperial, regional, and local interests. This success demonstrates how local agency trumped both western and regional attempts to constrain the development of Amman. The history of the Transjordan Mandate has generally been presented as a story of survival. Historians have largely chosen one or two of the following themes - whether it be Abdullah’s strength, British infrastructure, tribal incorporation, or land settlement - to explain how Transjordan eventually became the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. In general historians have ignored the importance of locality and urban development for the growth of the state when analyzing the Mandate Period. In particular, these studies ignore the development of the new capital of Amman. During the British Mandate Amman became the economic, cultural, and administrative center of Transjordan. Despite its diminutive size (4000 in 1921, 46,000 in 1946), the city of Amman housed all of the integral components of a successful state by the end of the Mandate in 1946. The electrification of Amman was a long and complicated affair. The Amman Electric Company, which eventually became the Jordan Electric Company, began the electrification of Amman in 1938 without any foreign capital or involvement. To do so, it had to overcome the limitations and restrictions of the Rutenberg Concession. The Rutenberg Concession hamstrung electrification efforts for over a decade which had first begun in earnest in 1927. Unlike surrounding countries, the electrification of Amman was an entirely domestic affair. It was local actors, not imperial or domestic urban planners, who shaped the development of Amman. These changes demonstrate the large impact locals had on the both the history of Amman and Transjordan.

Damascus has long occupied a privileged place in the mythology of Arab nationalism. Whilst the political history of the city has been well-rehearsed, there remain significant gaps in our understanding of the urban and social history of Damascus. This paper examines the development of Damascus during the interwar years, between the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the independence of Syria. In the context of French imperial rule, the city was reinvented as the capital of an externally-imposed nation-state and underwent a series of profound social and physical transformations. A central plank of France’s imperial project in Damascus was the establishment of a regime of urbanisme, intended to supervise and direct the physical development of the city. Urban planning was a critical field in which the mandate authority represented itself as a force of modernisation and through which it pursued such diverse objectives as sanitation, security and conservation. This paper interrogates the priorities of the mandatory urban planning regime, as revealed through such key documents as the 1936 Master Plan for Damascus. It examines the vision for the city that was promulgated by the French mandatory authorities, asking a series of questions: How did French authorities conceptualise the urban population? What sorts of spatial divisions and communal identities did they emphasise? In what terms did the mandatory authorities understand the needs of locals? Is there any evidence of consultation with community leaders having taken place in the preparation of the 1936 plan? Which sectional interests were most served by the planning regime, and to what ends?

One of the major projects to change the face of late Ottoman Damascus, was the construction of a net of three tramway tracks. Based on hitherto neglected newspaper reports from six Damascene and Beiruti newspapers, the history of the tramway project between 1885 and 1914 provides a view into the changing notions and contested meanings of public places, public spaces, and the public sphere during the final decades of Ottoman rule in Bilād al-Shām. The project commenced in 1885 with a local initiative to catapult Damascus into the modern age of electric power, mass transportation, and city-wide illumination. When from 1905 onwards tracks were finally laid and electric street lighting was distributed throughout the city, it was a foreign company that appropriated some of the town's most important roads for generating private benefits. The municipality and the townspeople subsidised the endeavour through providing the streets the tracks were laid on, many of which had only recently been paved by the baladiyya, through the payment of fares, and through the payment of taxes that financed substantial parts of the construction and operating costs. This appropriation of newly established public places for the sole profit of a private and foreign company – profits, which exceeded the municipal budget – proved highly contentious during the years following the project's inauguration in 1907. Elites contested the idea of paying fares; the municipality argued over the payment of excessive fees for the street lamps and over the repaving of streets; the company blackmailed the municipality through repeated power cuts; and popular protest targeted the municipality and to a larger extent the company for extracting taxes and the payment of fares despite the hitherto modern streets having been turned into muddy swamps during winter or dusty plains in summertime, with large chunks of iron driving at high speeds and killing people not quick enough to leave the street, while public morals were violated by men and women sharing the tightly cramped compartments. This situation resulted in numerous violent assaults on the tramway cars, the exclusion of the populace from inauguration ceremonies, and finally a prolonged black out of street lights and popular tramway boycott in 1913.