Middle East Urban Studies Highlights of 2020
Editorial Team
Arab Urbanism editors, Nadi Abusaada, Noura Wahby, Deen Sharp, Anne Bouhali and Dena Qaddumi pick their Middle East Urban Studies highlights for 2020 that proved to be another bumper year:
Egypt’s Housing Crisis: The Shaping of Urban Space, American University in Cairo Press, Yahia Shawkat, Hardback, $49.95, 312pp, https://aucpress.com/product/egypts-housing-crisis/
Yahia Shawkat’s new book Egypt’s Housing Crisis is without doubt my Middle East Urban Studies highlight of 2020. No one knows more about the ins and outs of Egypt’s built environment than Shawkat and the depth and breadth of his knowledge is on full display in this volume. Shawkat produces a sweeping historical survey, from the early 1900s to the present day, of Egypt’s never ending housing crisis. The archival research that Shawkat has undertaken for this book is awe inspiring. Housing has always been at the center of Egyptian social life and now it finally has a book that meets its match.
Deen Sharp
A Roundtable on Engineers, Technopolitics, and the Environment. By : Danya Al-Saleh and Mohammed Rafi Arefin on Jadaliyya https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/41992
This collection of essays discusses the role of engineering in the repurposing of the environment, technology and politics. It is a great space to reflect on how many scholars working on infrastructure find themselves (myself included) faced with the rigidity of engineering knowledge. The roundtable put together by Al-Saleh and Arefin brought together essays from scholars across the region to reevaluate how engineers work, travel and conceptualise everyday problems and work to solve them. Looking at practicies by Egyptian, Turkish, Palestinian and Iranian engineers, we see the internal workings of an elite group, but also the dismantling of their hegemony when faced with grounded resistance. It was a relief to read that the regional ‘mohandes’ does not always reign supreme.
Noura Wahby
Atlas de l’Egypte contemporaine, Hala Bayoumi and Karine Bennafla (ed.), 2020, Paris, CNRS Editions. Online: https://books.openedition.org/editionscnrs/37347?lang=fr ISBN : 9782271131843. DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/books.editionscnrs.37347
After an Atlas of Jordan in 2013, an Atlas of Lebanon in 2016, the year 2020 saw the publication of an Atlas of Contemporary Egypt under the direction of geomatician Hala Bayoumi and geographer Karine Bennafla. This Atlas of Contemporary Egypt is all the more important as it fills an editorial void.
The atlas, which is pleasant to read and easy to handle, has been able to combine a rich iconography with accurate cartography. This multidisciplinary work brings together the contributions of geographers, sociologists, historians, anthropologists, politicians and economists. It gathers the works of numerous French, European and Egyptian researchers, and shows the dynamism of social science research in and about Egypt. It also testifies both to the renewal of this research, due to the participation in this project of many doctoral students and young researchers, and to the diversity of the themes addressed today.
The Atlas of Contemporary Egypt is a successful work, pleasant to read and very rich. Readers will have at hand a beautiful synthesis of the major issues that drive the Egyptian society and territories. The atlas thus offers a very up-to-date perspective on Egypt today that will be useful to researchers and students as well as to the general public, thanks to its ease of reading. A translation of the book is also planned in English and Arabic in order to make this work accessible to the Egyptian and international public, which may also contribute to the dissemination of French-language research to a more willingly English-speaking audience.
Anne Bouhali
Abécédaire de la ville au Maghreb et au Moyen-Orient, Bénédicte Florin, Anna Madoeuf, Olivier Sanmartin, Roman Stadnicki and Florence Troin (ed.), Presses Universitaires François-Rabelais, Tours, 2020, 438p, 39€. ISBN: 978-2-86906-750-9 https://pufr-editions.fr/produit/abecedaire-de-la-ville/
Written under the direction of part of the EMAM (“Equipe Monde arabe et Méditerranée” - “Arab world and Mediterranean area”) research team at the University of Tours, France, this book brings together forty years of urban research in French in North Africa and the Middle East. The book brings together the contributions of about a hundred social science researchers. It provides an overview of French research in the region and shows its renewal. Gathering short texts, accompanied by maps and photographs taken in the field, it shows all the political and social issues of the region. Several transversal reading axes are proposed: city life, the city making process, and the political and social dimensions of development and urban planning. This book thus constitutes a state of the art on the research and issues surrounding the city in North Africa and the Middle East and may be of interest to students, journalists and the general public.
Anne Bouhali
Stanek, Łukasz. Architecture in global socialism: Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold war. Princeton University Press, 2020. https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691168708/architecture-in-global-socialism.
Łuckasz Stanek’s Architecture in Global Socialism is a must read for architects, urbanists and researchers interested in the history of architecture, modernisation and development in the twentieth century. Defying standard Western-centric or regionalist approaches to these processes, Stanek offers a global perspective on the transnational exchange of ideas, works and imaginaries of architects, planners and other urban professionals in the Cold War era. The Cold War era, in Stanek’s book appears not only as a period of capitalist expansion but also as a period of ‘socialist worldmaking’ entangling Eastern Europe, the Middle East and West Africa. This global perspective is of utmost significance for those of us working on the history and present of architecture and cities in the Middle East and opens new terrains for investigating those cities’ position and their trajectories within the broader global history of the twentieth century. It also paves novel possibilities for new methodological approaches to the study of Middle Eastern architectural and urban history not merely as the culmination of blueprints, buildings and projects but also as the outcome of the material webs of actors, interests, and exchange networks that made them possible.
Nadi Abusaada
Abaza, Mona. Cairo Collages: Everyday life practices after the event. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020. https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526145116/
Abaza collages vignettes from the everyday life of the author’s apartment building with the momentous political changes happening in Cairo and Egypt since 2011. The book explores a wide range of themes and urban practices from the militarization of cities, to the aesthetics of commuting, and the process of repairing the apartment’s elevator. The juxtaposition of regular urban practices with broader urban development trajectories illustrates the interconnectedness of life in Cairo.
Dena Qaddumi
Fahmy, Ziad. Street Sounds: Listening to Everyday Life in Modern Egypt. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020. https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=29380
This book significantly contributes to urban studies by demonstrating the role of sound as a distinctive element of modernization. Fahmy shows how urban development in 20th century Egypt presented a new sensorial mode of class distinction, one that merged the silencing of urban space with the exclusion of the urban poor, even if when traditional practices and their sounds were represented with nostalgia.
A discussion with Fahmy on the book was published with the New Books Network. Listen here: https://newbooksnetwork.com/ziad-fahmy-street-sounds-listening-to-everyday-life-in-modern-egypt-stanford-up-2020.
Dena Qaddumi
Reisz, Todd. Showpiece City: How Architecture Made Dubai. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020 https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=29960
Narrating the early postcolonial period of Dubai, Reisz’s book captures the transition of the city through its significant architecture and political relationships that made it possible. These include the development of a masterplan, state hospitals, the national bank, and the Dubai World Trade Centre. The focus on this period is a significant contribution for understanding urban development in today’s Dubai without resorting to Orientalist and particularist readings.
An interview with Todd Reisz can be found here: https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/42076/Todd-Reisz,-Showpiece-City-How-Architecture-Made-Dubai-New-Texts-Out-Now.
Dena Qaddumi
