Yasser Elsheshtawy - Böcker

Riyadh has set its sights on becoming a world city befitting the twenty-first century. To that end it has embarked on a massive construction drive evidenced in the proliferation of proposals for high-end districts, giga-developments and elaborate infrastructures. An urban vision seemingly dedicated to attracting global capital. Yet such a narrative can be misleading. A ‘humanization programme’, initiated during the tenure of its former mayor Abdulaziz bin Ayyaf, has complemented the city’s rapid rise by providing spaces catering for the everyday needs of its inhabitants. Yasser Elsheshtawy, in this richly illustrated book, targets these people-centred settings. It is a compelling counter-narrative interweaving critical theoretical insights, personal observations, and serendipitous encounters. He deftly demonstrates how Riyadh thrives through the actions of its people. As the world moves towards an urban model that is resilient and humane, the humanizing efforts of an Arab city are worthy of our attention. Riyadh’s premise is perhaps best captured in the cover image depicting the desert riverbed of Wadi Sulai, filled with rainwater, making its way towards the Saudi capital. Along its banks there will be dedicated public pathways and urban parks. It is a vision of an urbanity where both the spectacular and the everyday coexist. A city that is not just dedicated to the few, but one that serves the many.

Middle Eastern cities cannot be lumped together as a single group. Rather they make up the urban kaleidoscope of the title, as the diversity of the six cities included here shows. They range from cities rich in tradition (Cairo, Tunis, and Baghdad), to neglected cities (Algiers and Sana'a), to newly emerging 'oil-rich' Gulf cities (Dubai). The authors are all young Arab scholars and architects local to the cities they describe, providing an authentic voice with an understanding no outsider could achieve. These contributors move away from an exclusively 'Islamic' reading of Arab cities - which they regard as outdated and counterproductive. Instead, they explore issues of identity and globalization in the context of the struggles and solutions offered by each city from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Their focus is on how the built environment has changed over time and under different influences.

Today cities of the Arab world are subject to many of the same problems as other world cities, yet too often they are ignored in studies of urbanisation. This collection reveals the contrasts and similarities between older, traditional Arab cities and the newer oil-stimulated cities of the Gulf in their search for development and a place in the world order. The eight cities which form the core of the book – Rabat, Amman, Beirut, Kuwait, Manama, Doha, Abu Dhabi and Riyadh – provide a unique insight into today’s Middle Eastern city.Winner of The International Planning History Society (IPHS) Book Prize.

Yasser Elsheshtawy explores Dubai’s history from its beginnings as a small fishing village to its place on the world stage today, using historical narratives, travel descriptions, novels and fictional accounts by local writers to bring colour to his history of the city’s urban development.With the help of case studies and surveys this book explores the economic and political forces driving Dubai’s urban growth, its changing urbanity and its place within the global city network. Uniquely, it looks beyond the glamour of Dubai’s mega-projects, and provides an in-depth exploration of a select set of spaces which reveal the city’s ‘inner life’.

Cairo, Baghdad, Algiers and Dubai cannot be easily lumped together as a single group. Cities in the Arab world are too diverse and hybrid, ranging from those rich in tradition, to 'forgotten’ cities, to newly emerging Gulf cities.The authors here, Arab scholars and architects local to the cities they describe, provide an authentic voice with an understanding no outsider could achieve. They explore issues of identity, hybridity, colonization and globalization in the context of the struggles and solutions offered by each city from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Their focus is on how the built environment has changed over time and under different influences.

"This outstanding collection, written by sophisticated and engaged Arab architects/urbanists, is a stunning sequel to Planning Middle Eastern Cities (2004) Like its predecessor, it does three things: effectively demolishes the monopoly ‘orientalists’ had over the topic; integrates grounded Arab scholarship with mainstream ‘western’ critical urban theory; and, by detailing the diverse ways Arab cities are responding to globalization, challenges oversimplified debates on ‘The Global City’. Studies of Arab/Islamic cities used to be the province of ‘outsiders’ who not only prematurely generalized to a genre, but encapsulated it in timelessness. In contrast, the case studies included in the earlier volume (Dubai, Sana’a, Baghdad, Algiers, Tunis, and Cairo), now supplemented in this volume by three older cities (Amman, Beirut, and Rabat) and five newer oil cities (Riyadh, Kuwait City, Manama, Doha and Abu-Dhabi), focus, often critically, on their rapid transformations. Each case study traces its colonial and post-colonial history, the evolution of its distinctive social and physical structures, and its intersection with the region and the world. It pays particular attention to, inter alia, the effects of recent wars, migration patterns, petroleum prices, noting the increased role of ‘rulers’ in city planning/real estate investment both within and between Arab countries. Each traces the increased interactions between multinational firms and local developers as they strategize and compete to elevate themselves to global city status. Neoliberalism and State-sponsored advanced capitalism are all implicated in the painful task of balancing identity and post-modernity.A must read!" - Janet Abu-Lughod, Professor Emerita, Northwestern University and The Graduate Faculty, New School for Social Research, USAWinner of The International Planning History Society (IPHS) Book Prize.

Yasser Elsheshtawy explores Dubai’s history from its beginnings as a small fishing village to its place on the world stage today, using historical narratives, travel descriptions, novels and fictional accounts by local writers to bring colour to his history of the city’s urban development.With the help of case studies and surveys this book explores the economic and political forces driving Dubai’s urban growth, its changing urbanity and its place within the global city network. Uniquely, it looks beyond the glamour of Dubai’s mega-projects, and provides an in-depth exploration of a select set of spaces which reveal the city’s ‘inner life’.

Riyadh has set its sights on becoming a world city befitting the twenty-first century. To that end it has embarked on a massive construction drive evidenced in the proliferation of proposals for high-end districts, giga-developments and elaborate infrastructures. An urban vision seemingly dedicated to attracting global capital. Yet such a narrative can be misleading. A ‘humanization programme’, initiated during the tenure of its former mayor Abdulaziz bin Ayyaf, has complemented the city’s rapid rise by providing spaces catering for the everyday needs of its inhabitants. Yasser Elsheshtawy, in this richly illustrated book, targets these people-centred settings. It is a compelling counter-narrative interweaving critical theoretical insights, personal observations, and serendipitous encounters. He deftly demonstrates how Riyadh thrives through the actions of its people. As the world moves towards an urban model that is resilient and humane, the humanizing efforts of an Arab city are worthy of our attention. Riyadh’s premise is perhaps best captured in the cover image depicting the desert riverbed of Wadi Sulai, filled with rainwater, making its way towards the Saudi capital. Along its banks there will be dedicated public pathways and urban parks. It is a vision of an urbanity where both the spectacular and the everyday coexist. A city that is not just dedicated to the few, but one that serves the many.

Are Arab Gulf cities, the likes of Dubai, Abu Dhabi or Doha, on their way to extinction? Is their fate obsolescence? Or, are they the model for our urban future? Can a city whose very existence is predicated on an imported labour force who build and operate these gleaming urban centres remain a viable urban entity? Could the transient nature of this urban model, its temporariness and precariousness, also be its doom? In this wide-ranging book Yasser Elsheshtawy takes on these tough, but necessary, questions aiming to examine the very nature of the Arab Gulf city and whether it can sustain its existence throughout the twenty-first century. Having lived in the region for more than two decades he researched its marginalized and forgotten urban settings, trying to understand how a temporary people can live in a place that inherently refuses to give them the possibility of becoming citizens. By being embedded in these spaces and reconciling their presence with his own personal encounters with transience, he discovered a resilience and defiance against the forces of the hegemonic city. Using subtle acts of resistance, these temporary inhabitants have found a way to sustain and create a home, to set down roots in the midst of a fast changing and transient urbanity. Their stories, recounted in this book through case studies and in-depth analysis, give hope to cities everywhere. Transience is not a fait accompli: rather the actions of citizens, residents and migrants – even in the highly restrictive spaces of the Gulf – show us that the future metropolis may very well not turn out to be a ‘utopia of the few and a dystopia of the many’. This could be an illusion, but it is a necessary illusion because the alternative is irrelevance.

Arab Modernism(s) is an exploration of how the Arab world encountered modernism – sometimes inadvertently, sometimes deliberately – and how those encounters continue to shape the built environment of its cities today. Adhering to his late father’s belief that ‘cities are nothing without people’, Yasser Elsheshtawy writes not just about the buildings, but the lives lived in and around them. His narrative weaves together personal anecdotes and works of fiction and film, thus providing a textured backdrop to his central theme: the evolution of modernism in Arab cities. Following the introduction, the next ten chapters each focuses on a different city or town, moving from Hassan Fathy’s Gourna to Cairo, Algiers, Rabat and Casablanca, Amman, and Beirut and then to the Gulf cities of Riyadh, Kuwait, Doha, and Abu Dhabi and Dubai. The book closes with a Coda – a tribute to the author’s father, Hassan Elsheshtawy.Visit the author’s dedicated Arab Modernism(s) website at: https://www.yasserelsheshtawy.com/arab-modernismsTo view blog posts by Yasser Elsheshtawy on Blogged Environment use the following web address: https://www.alexandrinepress.co.uk/blogged-environment