Challenges to Sustainability of Livelihoods, Urban Identity, and Development in the Middle East and North Africa: A Panel in Honor of Michael E. Bonine (1942-2011)
Panel 107, 2012 Annual Meeting
On Monday, November 19 at 11:00 am
Panel Description
Michael E. Bonine, Executive Director of MESA from 1981-1989 and prominent geographer, studied urban structure and city-hinterland relations in Yazd, Iran; contours of urbanization in Morocco, Tunisia, Turkey and the UAE; and issues of sustainability in arid lands across the region. This panel honors Michael Bonine’s scholarly accomplishments and mentorship through interdisciplinary presentations by anthropologists and geographers who have built on his work to advance understanding of place, space, and environment in the Middle East and North Africa. Responding to the conference theme, papers based on fieldwork and archival research address challenges of living in sometimes inhospitable economic and political environments. Panel presentations address food sustainability in dense urban settings; ecological effects of global trade relationships; contested interpretations of place, identity, and representation; and the relationship of political culture and urban planning.
The first paper considers the interaction of space, place and time in urban Turkey through a study of food and livelihood security among Istanbul’s low-income residents. The second presentation extends the inquiry into the past, and investigates ways in which the European search for luxury goods adversely affected local livelihoods and in North and West Africa. The third paper explores the effects of nationalist discourse and recent government priorities on public history and traditional ecological adaptations in the Iranian city of Yazd. The final panelist takes study of urban livelihoods in a new direction to examine the place of sustainable development in urban planning in Doha, Qatar, and master planning’s relation to local politics. Together, the presentations paint a nuanced picture of challenges to sustainability in a variety of Middle Eastern and North African contexts.
Panel discussants will situate the presentations in relation to Michael E. Bonine’s work, and assess his contributions to Middle East studies.
Though critiques of conventional study abroad are not new, the growing emphasis on learning outcomes draw attention to what – and how – students learn from their international experiences. Assumed benefits are being confronted, and some are asking whether the investments are worth it. This places attention on how schools justify, organize, implement and assess study abroad programs. This paper examines the experiences of an unconventional, short-term learning abroad program to Istanbul/Turkey– characterized as a faculty-led, immersion program – in the summers of 2011, 2012 and the winter of 2013. Each trip requires a semester of preparation. The emphasis of the program is on experiencing and learning about daily life in Turkey, valuing non-U.S/non-European ways of doing things, on understanding and building relationships with place, and confronting such problematic things as stereotype, privilege, exceptionalism, and the consumption of culture. Applying the critical literature to the author’s observations leading the evolving program, the paper investigates the implications of “faculty-led” and “immersion,” highlights opportunities and potential benefits, and presents the difficulties and tensions of learning
Ostrich feathers and ostrich eggs have long been an important export from North Africa to different European markets. These large plumes and eggs were part of the valuable luxury trade crossing the Mediterranean for centuries. The source of ostrich feathers until the later nineteenth century was principally from ostriches that were hunted in the wild, coming mainly from North Africa and West Africa. The value of the ostrich plumes triggered a colonial French and British competition over this luxury commodity leading to colonial attempts to establish domesticated ostrich farms, principally by the French in North and West Africa (and the British in South Africa). This paper uses an economic historical frame to understand colonial French and British relations during the 19th century in Africa through ostrich feather trade. The paper examines the trade feather that developed particularly by the later nineteenth century, and focuses on the sources of feathers and local practices for hunting and raising ostriches. I argue that by looking at the need of ostrich plumes in European markets and the rise of consumption of fashion goods based on the ostrich plume, nineteenth century European capitalism destroyed not only the wild North African ostriches but also local North African livelihoods based on wild ostriches.
During the second half of the 20th century, a city once known for its wind towers, qanats, and adobe houses was modernized and grew more than 10 fold in population. This growth has been accompanied by an act of erasure that complicates the spatial narrative of Yazd and what it represents. Reflecting on the urban morphology of the city and the political dynamics that helped shape its spatial and social structure, I will attempt to reinterpret the urban landscape of Yazd. In reading the city from this particular vantage point, I hope to illustrate the degree to which local narratives, as well as its traditional ecological adaptive strategies, were affected by the nationalist discourse that defined who Yazdis were and what the city meant to the nation-building project. In this regard, I hope to show the degree to which local public history has been lost, and explore what the future may hold for Yazdi identity and its spatial representation.
This paper examines the rapid assimilation of sustainable development into the urban planning schemes of the petroleum-rich states of the Arabian peninsula. Based on a close analysis of Doha, Qatar, where extraordinary wealth translates into extraordinary possibilities, the paper explores three fundamental challenges to the deployment of a meaningful and substantial vision of sustainable development in Qatar and, by proxy, the other Gulf States. First, the paper contemplates the potential friction between sustainable development and political stability in the Gulf States through an analysis of the particular forms of rentier economies common in the region. Second, this paper examines the challenges posed by the praxis of sustainable development: how might the participatory and grassroots methodologies common to that paradigm fit with the kinds of political socialization particular to the Gulf States? Finally, the paper considers how master planning, as the primary framework for the deployment of sustainable development initiatives in the region, might continue to produce very unsustainable outcomes. Overall, this paper contends that challenges to sustainable development in Arabia pose a significant counterbalance to the possibilities rendered by the extraordinary wealth of the region.
