When in 1967 Constantinos A. Doxiadis, a Greek urban planner and architect, was called by the Riyadh municipality to plan the Saudi capital, the best of his career was largely behind him. The discipline of Ekistics (or “the science of human settlements”) he had created had proved a useful tool to advertise his talent in cities across four continents, from Athens to Islamabad to Accra and to Philadelphia. Inspired by the modernist principles expressed in the 1933 Charte d’Athènes, Doxiadis became after WWII, accordingly, one of the first global urban planners. In full possession of his art, he started working on the transformation of Riyadh from a snug city radiating around an old core to what the Saudi elites envisioned as a “modern” capital. They expected the master plan to solve pressing traffic and housing issues and to put Riyadh on the global map as a model of “city of the future” for other Arab and Islamic cities. King Faisal, Prince Salman, and the mayor of Riyadh were confident in the ability of the Saudi state and the urban planners to shape national and transnational political and religious identities. But things didn’t quite go as planned, and Doxiadis’s collaborators were soon entangled in local networks of power and knowledge that rendered their task more difficult than they first thought. Their vision of the city was blurred and partial; their action was hampered; their attention was diverted toward unexpected commissions. By following the meandering story of Doxiadis’s men and women in Saudi Arabia, this paper examines the problematic emergence of global urban planning and the role of spatial politics in the shaping of political identities.

While many accounts of late colonialism view development as a way to perpetuate a neo-colonial relationship between metropole and colony, the Algerian case remains ambiguous. The creation of the European Common Market in 1957 applied to Algeria as well as the hexagon, signaling the need for a regional logic of development that sought to economically integrate Algeria into a European economic space. Consequently, this paper examines the relationship between colonial development and European Integration by looking at the impact of Europe’s Common Agricultural Policy (1957) on Algerian agriculture. Specifically, it focuses on the ways in which the standardization of olive oil and wine reflected the changing environmental, racial, and economic logics of late colonial rule, which were later fundamental for the nationalist discourses of France and Algeria after 1962. Olive oil and wine, which had historically been associated with the Mediterranean region, came to be viewed as natural facts that symbolized the geographical unit known as EurAfrica in the 1950s. This period witnessed the application of international accords that fixed the rules of production for these two products and presented a number of technical and political challenges. In standardizing wine, economic logic was often trumped by the political desires of the colon, who benefited from state protection and maintained that wine was the key to social harmony and French cultural presence. In the case of olive oil, which was a traditionally indigenous crop, the process of standardization erased the geographical origin of a product whose distinctively bitter taste had formerly been a mark of the Algerian soil. While accounts of colonial agriculture have generally focused on the ways in which the consumption of colonial products in the metropole helped to domesticate colonialism by fostering a “colonial culture,” these works overlook the ways in which technical and economic processes enabled these dietary habits and were central to creating real and imagined spaces. Based on extensive research carried out in both France and Algeria, this paper follows the political and scientific debates regarding the standardization of wine and oil on both sides of the Mediterranean. It shows how the production of agriculture was a key site for creating colonial (and later national) ways of thinking about space and political identities.

In the post-9/11 era, the US officials posited an “Arc of Instability” sweeping across the Persian Gulf and providing a pithy justification for military intervention and escalation. Placed in historical light, this depiction of the Gulf and adjacent territories as volatile and a threat is not as innovative as the discussion of a New Middle East or the post-9/11 world suggests. In earlier decades the Gulf was the central node in the so-called “Arc of Crisis” and was often described as being “unstable” and “insecure” due to “pirates” and tribal conflicts. Prior to the rise of U.S. hegemony, moreover, the Persian Gulf was under the tutelage of British imperial officers, who identified the waterway and its littorals with the larger “Persian Problem” and Britain’s imperial rivalries and interests at the turn of the twentieth century. Across the twentieth century, this discourse legitimated both the British and the US to engage in imperial interventions, muscular foreign policy, massive military outlays, and alliances with foreign regimes. These understandings of the region have also been opportunities and constraints for local actors, from rulers to citizens, in their engagements with foreign powers and each other. Through a close examination of a number of key texts stretching from the last decade in the nineteenth century to first decade of the current century, I will examine how policymakers and academics have conceptualized and represented the Persian Gulf and how these geopolitical imaginaries utilize piracy, sectarianism, terrorism, and rogue states to fashion tropes of insecurity, instability, and anarchy. By analyzing the assumptions undergirding these geopolitical imaginaries, I will trace the extent to which there have been continuities and discontinuities across the long-twentieth century in how the Gulf has been positioned in geopolitics and how politics in the region have been interpolated into global hegemonic orders.

In 1921, the British mandatory government in Palestine granted an exclusive, countrywide concession to electrify Palestine. The concessionaire, a Zionist engineer by the name of Pinhas Rutenberg, soon set to work realizing his grand scheme: a hydro-electrical power station at the confluence of the Jordan and Yarmuk rivers. The goal of this paper is to explore the building of Palestine’s first and only hydro-electrical power plant, and the critical role it played in creating a national electric grid in mandatory Palestine. Naharayim, as the plant was called, was a hydro-electrical machine made up of organic and inorganic elements. Envisioning and building it involved a calculus of environmental, technological, economic, and political variables. And it relied on various and seemingly incongruous forms of expertise. At every step of the process, Rutenberg’s undertaking had to contend with competing claims, emanating from the Yishuv, the Palestinian Arab community, and the non-human environment. Drawing on records from the Palestine Government, Jewish and Arab press and political organizations, and the archives of the Israel Electric Corp., the paper looks at a key instance of negotiating nature, technology, and people. By generating electricity and distributing it over an imagined Jewish national space, the imaginary acquired a material dimension. Thus emerged a national space capable of hosting a number of national objects, such as an economy, industry, agriculture, politics, and culture. The paper will show how the character of those national objects was shaped in critical ways by the negotiations involved in producing them, while also influencing Arab-Jewish relations in ways that reverberates through to the present.