Rethinking cities in the Middle East:political economy, planning, and thelived space

Haim Yacobi, Relli Shechter Department of Politics and Government/

Department of Middle East Studies, Ben Gurion

University of the Negev, Beer Sheva 84105, Israel

Urbanisation is an economic, political, and socio-cultural complexity, and so is its interaction

with cityscapes. However, this truism rarely finds an expression in academic research. It is

obvious that economic transitions would determine the quality and volume of the built

environment. Municipal and state decision making further shape the nature of urban

spaces, and socio-cultural transformations influence perceived notions of the lived space

and, in turn, reshape the physical landscape itself. Nevertheless, research on cities in the

Middle East and elsewhere remains fairly limited in scope, with little cross-discipline ‘conver-

sation’ among scholars in different fields which attempts to account for such complexity.

This is all the more surprising as life in cities has become, over the past half century or so,

the most significant form of human collective dwelling; in the Middle East over half the

population currently lives in urban settings and the numbers are forecast to grow in the

future.1

This review article is the result of a dialogue between an architect and an economic histor-

ian in response to the foregoing. We have united in an attempt to offer a more integrative

approach to Middle East urbanism, accounting for the interactions of the political economy

of this region, planning, and the lived space. The key questions on which we focus are why

and how do state transformation and economic structural change impact upon urban space.

In seeking the answers we examine the long-term trajectory of cities as they went through

the first period of globalisation under imperial intervention and/or direct colonial rule;

gradually came under independent, inward-looking, national regimes; and presently experi-

ence the second wave of globalisation and the opening of local economies to international

markets. Such a narrative explores common themes in the historical trajectories of cities’

lives.

Our long-term, geographically extensive overview (Map 1) is bound to miss some

specific developments that have made a significant impact on the transformations of

cities in the region; our aim is not to totalise Middle East experiences and reduce a

variety of narratives to a simplistic linear model of change. Even more so, our study of

the Middle East is mostly focused on Egypt, the Asian Arab countries (the mashraq),

Israel/Palestine, and Turkey, the geographical unit which roughly corresponded with

the Ottoman Empire, the last state to control the Middle East before the age of nations.

We acknowledge that any bird’s eye view perspective is bound to do some injustice to

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# 2005 The Journal of Architecture 1360–2365 DOI: 10.1080/13602360500285500

historically specific contexts, and city transitions that occurred in such contexts. We would

welcome any future work that brings our suggestion here, namely to integrate political

economy with the study of urban development and city life, to bear on more specific

research on urbanism in the Middle East.

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Map 1. The Middle

East. (Design: Roni

Livnon.)

Middle Eastern cities during the first

phase of globalisation

Our overview starts with the Ottoman Empire, the

state that contained some of the oldest cities in

the world, and whose capital was in early modern

times one of the greatest in Europe (Stoianovich,

1994). During the first period of globalisation,

roughly from the mid-nineteenth century to the

First World War, urban planning development in

the Empire was largely prompted by the meshing

of European interference and local peripheralisation

with the world economy, led by Europe (on the latter

see Pamuk, 1987). State and private entrepreneurs

were influenced by these changes in the local politi-

cal economy, coupled with early Europe-based mod-

ernism; local cityscapes were planned with an eye to

processes of adoption, adaptation, or resistance to

models becoming ever more global.

For the Ottoman and Egyptian states (the latter,

while independent de facto, was still officially under

Ottoman rule), planned urbanisation was a venue

for modernising ‘from above’—the city with its new

architecture and novel forms of governance was to

discipline and educate the modern subject-turned-

citizen. Planning was implemented directly through

the construction of official buildings that catered for

an ever-growing state apparatus. But the state was

also active in creating a larger vision of the city

through a ‘state capitalism’ form of development,

by executing large infrastructure projects and finan-

cially facilitating property development activity in

the private sector. Private entrepreneurs, for their

part, gleefully seized such new opportunities for

enrichment. Concomitantly, the state became more

intrusive in regulating city life.

Urban development was most notable in cities

that were state capitals, such as Cairo and Istanbul.

In Cairo, state-led initiatives were intended to make

Egypt ‘a part of Europe’. Since the 1860s moderni-

sation and Westernisation under Khedive (Viceroy)

Ismail followed Haussmann’s model—new neigh-

bourhoods, public buildings, and public spaces

resembled the latest Parisian fashion (Fig. 1). The

vision of the renovated city manifested the expan-

sion of Europeanised perceptions of the way cities

should look and function into this newly built

environment (Mitchell, 1988). This, however, was

not a process typical of this region alone; many

world capitals, most notably in Latin America,

went for a similar process of Parisisation (Bauer,

2001). In Istanbul this process was at first more

motivated by foreign and local minorities, who

built a European-style neighbourhood (Pera)

outside the ‘old’ city, but the Sultan and state

elites followed suit (Celik, 1993). In the two capitals

tourism, for business and pleasure alike, impelled

these processes further; demand by tourists

enhanced the development of modern leisure

environments such as hotels, restaurants, coffee

houses, and shopping centres.

From the time of Ibrahim Pasha’s rule in Ottoman

Jerusalem,2 increased European dominance in the

city (and in the Empire’s affairs) was represented in

new buildings and compounds that housed

European consulates, hospitals, and missions.

Imported architecture reproduced still more national

(read European) ‘home styles’, thus expressing

European power in the built landscape of the city

(Fig. 2). Increased integration into the world

economy later meant the rise of port cities like

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Beirut, Alexandria, and Izmir, which became the

locus of import-export businesses in the new

economic relations with Europe. Such entrepots,

equipped with a newly built port and often con-

nected to the countryside by rail, gradually eclipsed

other commercial centres such as Aleppo, which had

dominated local and regional production and trade

earlier. Port cities not only became new business

hubs; wealth earned in international commerce

was also translated into new neighbourhoods for

the rich (Crinson, 1996). Residential buildings

inhabited by new local elites (often non-Muslim

minorities) and European businessmen were

inspired by European/colonial styles expressed,

for example, in the Constantinopolitan villa in

Beirut (Fig. 3).

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Figure 1. Cairo: ca.

1885, Shepheard’s

Hotel.

(Photographer:

Lekegian; courtesy of

the Middle East

Department, University

of Chicago Library.)

The newly emerging planned and modern/

Westernised urban environments seemingly created

a split city, where different urban spaces represented

binary oppositions—the ‘old city’ (in North Africa

known as the medina) stood for ‘tradition’ and

‘local’ life, while the new public buildings, commer-

cial centres, and residential neighbourhoods created

an urban iconography of imported ‘modernity’. In

reality cities were never totally segmented. City

inhabitants were stratified economically, and at

times lived and worked in partially segregated reli-

gious and ethnic environments. Still, housing,

work, and leisure spaces were not exclusive, and

separation between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ city

life never fully materialised. Nor did the ‘new’

replace the ‘old’, as visualised by local planners or

European visitors (eg, in contemporary travel

guides) and later historians. City dwellers crossed

such divides on a daily basis, engaging in business

or taking their leisure in various places in town.

The city geography became more integrated by

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Figure 2. Jerusalem:

the Italian Hospital,

1910–1917.

(Photographer: Haim

Yacobi.)

Figure 3. Beirut:

postcard of the

Europeanised cityscape.

(Courtesy of Nadim

Shehadi, Centre for

Lebanese Studies,

Oxford University.)

the development of transport and commerce too.

For these reasons we would argue that it is better

to read contemporary city spaces as a hybrid of

old and new and a melange of global and local

architectural tastes, rather than as an assortment

of segmented built and lived environments (see

Celik, 1997 for a similar argument regarding

Algiers).

The period after the First World War witnessed the

further European colonisation of some territories

formerly belonging to the Ottoman Empire, today’s

states of Iraq, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, and Syria,

in the form of British and French League of

Nations Mandates. This political transformation

exerted significant influence on the design of

cities, especially those that turned from provincial

to Mandatory, and later national, capitals. Manda-

tory Jerusalem well exemplified this trend; there

spatial and symbolic political intervention again

came about through planning. Under the adminis-

tration of Sir Ronald Storrs, the city’s first Mandatory

governor, significant legislation made the use of

Jerusalem stone obligatory in all construction, ensur-

ing the traditional mien of the Holy City even in new

construction. During the Mandate’s existence five

master plans were prepared, some by well-known

architects and planners such as Patrick Geddes

(1919), Lord Ashbee (1922), and Clifford Holliday

(1930), which significantly influenced the city’s

appearance. Such an impact was not unique to the

mandated territories; in Turkey a nationalist govern-

ment built a new capital (Ankara) with the assistance

of German and Austrian architects and planners.

National movements often conflated the emergence

of the nation with modernity, and symbolised such

reinvigoration by using architectural tropes taken

from a Western repertoire (see further below).

Post-colonialism, the rise of the

national state and planning

With gradual de-colonisation, especially after the

Second World War, urban planning entered a new

phase wherein the state became more active in

both the planning and the execution of city trans-

formations. Newly established Middle Eastern

regimes paid special attention to their capitals,

where they were keen on creating a novel national

iconography through the construction of public

monuments to legitimise the young state (Fig. 4).

The more autocratic regimes further engaged in a

leader worship cult in which posters, statues, and

daily public ceremonies reminded city dwellers of

their ‘good luck’ in living under such a luminary. In

Turkey, a country which experienced transitions in

its political economy and cities earlier, this happened

in the 1920s and 1930s after the establishment of

the Turkish Republic (Bozdogan, 2001; Bozdogan

and Kasaba, 1996).

The rise of the nation-state in the Middle East was

often associated with autocratic rule, inward-

looking economic development, and austerity

aimed at economic ‘catching-up’ and greater

equality as the region’s countries struggled to

reach international standards of socio-economic

development (Owen and Pamuk, 1999). Imposing

more egalitarian economic regimes, states further

strengthened the grassroots legitimacy of their

newly established ruling elites. Many countries

adopted ‘statist’ policies, whereby states promoted

over-expanding modernisation schemes in which

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Rethinking cities in the

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Haim Yacobi,

Relli Shechter

the public sector assumed a pivotal role. Clear

examples here are Nasser’s ‘Arab Socialism’ in

Egypt and the Shah’s ‘White Revolution’ in Iran

(significantly, the latter led to the downfall of the

Shah, who pushed for agile economic development

with little political development: see Abrahamian,

1982). Rapid processes of state building pushed,

in turn, for the enlargement of administration and

public services, which required expansion into the

urban landscape.

Cities, however, were not only the site of govern-

ment, and they grew rapidly as a result of the rural-

to-urban migration of citizens drawn by new job

opportunities and proximity to state services, and

significant demographic increase (see below).

Relying on popular support and fearing political

unrest, cities soon became the locus of human

development efforts by the state. In addition to

providing dwellings and services to a swelling

number of urbanites, city planning had to consider

the employment of a growing labour force.

Facing such weighty challenges and sustained by

modernist planning perceptions fashioned in the

Western world, local planners turned to a moder-

nistic type of urban planning and development.

This was a tangible illustration of the La Sarraz

Declaration formulated at the 1928 Congres

Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (for details

see Frampton, 1985, chapter 3) in attempting

to supply an increasing demand for housing.

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Figure 4. Cairo:

Government building

dominating Tahrir

square. (Photographer:

Relli Shechter.)

It chimed in with the political affiliation of many non-

aligned states of the period. Such modernism seem-

ingly ran counter to earlier planning and urban

design. Yet it was guided by the same principles

that informed the colonial and mandatory legacy

of city development; there was a close epistemologi-

cal link between ‘old’ and ‘new’ planning in the

paradigm that made its way into many a Middle

Eastern city plan in the 1950s and 1960s.

City planning in the region was largely taken as a

positivistic tool that modern societies use to organise

space, distribute resources, and balance different

interests for the benefit of a given society. This was

expressed in the notion of zoning and the creation

of open public spaces that resulted from universal

(and obviously Western) planning knowledge, itself

based on assumptions concerning the cultural use

of space (eg, housing typologies and open public

spaces), which were not always applicable to the

culturally different communities who lived in

Middle Eastern cities.

El-Rafey and Sutton (1993) give an example of the

gap between the modernist planners’ intentions and

the daily realities of many of the regions’ urban

dwellers. This ethnography highlights the spatial

problems confronting Egyptian women dwelling in

a domestic sphere of ‘boxy concrete structures’

(p. 522) in Madinet-Nasr (Egypt). It demonstrates

how this modernist design of housing mimicked

Western housing with little consideration of socio-

cultural specificity. Moreover, the modernist plan-

ning-paradigm in the Middle East (as elsewhere)

was conceived as the ‘heroic model’, based on

rationality, scientific method, and faith in a state-

directed future and in planners’ ability to know

what is the ‘public interest’ (Sandercock, 1998).

This view is now under significant criticism from

scholars who shed light on the ‘dark side of plan-

ning’. Such national schemes, they argue, operated

behind the mask of ‘scientific professionalism’ to

implement social, political, and spatial control, and

to achieve hegemonic interests (Yiftachel, 1994;

LeVine, 2004).

To the deficiencies in the modernist paradigm

guiding the planning and evolution of city space

we should add unsustainable investment in develop-

ment, where states overdid their vision of rapid

transformation of the country. The trappings of

state-driven growth emerged soon after it was

implemented, as many states rapidly over-extended

their commitments without showing complemen-

tary economic growth. From the late 1960s on,

the crisis became glaring, to the detriment of the

cities and their inhabitants. An economic opening

enhanced by the oil boom in the Middle East and

by global transitions in the world economy would

gradually bring about a re-alignment in state-

citizen economic relationships, and a new division

of labour in urban transitions induced by the govern-

ment and by the private sector.

The impact of the oil boom and economic

reforms on city life

During the oil boom, roughly from 1974 to 1984, oil

money in the form of direct transfers between

countries, international loans, and workers’

remittances temporarily alleviated local economic

conditions. Small oil exporters or states that did

not export oil (Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and

especially Yemen) sent millions of migrant workers

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to oil-exporting countries. Large sums in workers’

remittances were sent home and were often used

to purchase land and build private and commercial

venues. This has greatly influenced urban develop-

ment in cities and in the countryside through activi-

ties in the ‘hidden economy’. In Egypt, large-scale

construction in the countryside often meant the

suburbanisation of former rural settlements (Bach,

1998). Oil-exporting ‘allocation’ states (Luciani,

1990) implemented far-reaching development

schemes, through which small towns were turned

into large cities that attracted significant numbers

of newly middle-class citizens to city life. Kuwait

City is an example; the extensive construction

during the oil boom concentrated on high-rise build-

ings and towers as well as multi-lane motorways.

The end of the oil-boom in the early 1980s and

the sudden collapse of the former Eastern block in

the early 1990s reiterated the need for economic

reforms (Shafik, 1997). But such reforms were not

easy to implement and quite painful for many citi-

zens because they often involved cuts in public

services and official subsidies. Devaluation of wages

in the public sector, where many urbanites were

employed, further increased the economic plight

of city dwellers. Furthermore, unlike in some other

developing countries, the economic opening, globa-

lisation, and privatisation that such reforms entailed

have yet to show the expected improvement in the

material well being of the majority of local popu-

lations; contemporary conventional economic

wisdom (the Washington consensus) has had only

a partial positive impact on the region. Except for a

few global cities such as Istanbul, Tel-Aviv, and

Dubai, which have become international hubs of

manufacturing, commerce, and communication,

cities in the region have not profited significantly

from the global, free-market opportunities (Fig. 5).

Since the Second World War a ‘demographic

revolution’ in the Middle East has gradually eroded

urban standards of life. This explosive population

growth was initially considered a non-issue or even

an economic advantage for countries, especially

for oil-exporters (Gilbar, 1997; Richards and

Waterbury, 1998). In the aftermath of the oil

boom, however, its negative impact on contempor-

ary economic relief and future development

became fully exposed. The impact of a rapid demo-

graphic increase is most obvious in major cities

throughout the region, where a large proportion

of the local population (58.2%) currently lives

(Stewart, 2002). A copious country-to-town

migration has caused the proportion of population

and absolute numbers of city dwellers in the

region to increase even more rapidly than the

national totals (Bonine, 1997; El-Ghonemy, 1998;

Moghadam, 2000). Such expansion in the number

of city dwellers, especially in the mega-cities of the

region—Cairo, Istanbul, and Tehran—further inten-

sifies the pressures on available city and state

resources and adds to unemployment. It leads to

deterioration in the quality of life, a worsening of

local social strife, and an increase in state repression.

Urban informality ‘from above’

The next, ‘privatised’ stage in urban development in

the Middle East has resulted directly from the tran-

sitions in the political economy discussed above. It

has been propelled by the partial return of the

global, free market to inward-looking and relatively

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closed national economies. At the same time, the

state has retreated from planning and development.

This phase has brought about two processes: first,

private entrepreneurs, often with official support

or backed by cronyism, have gradually taken over

urban renewal (we call this process informality

‘from above’). Second, initiatives have sprung up

‘from below’ to fill the existing vacuum in supplying

housing demand (see next section).

Where the state retreated, private entrepreneurs

seized the opportunity and presently lead the

process. ‘Modern’ (colonial) and ‘traditional’ (Islamic)

styles, now considered part of local heritage, are

being renovated; the old city and the colonial centre

are undergoing gentrification, which often ejects

existing residents, replacing themwith themore afflu-

ent. Damascus and Jaffa are thus being ‘rediscovered’

by local, expatriate, and international investors and

non-governmental organisations (NGOs) dedicated

to the preservation of historic sites (Salamandra,

2004; LeVine, 2004). Still more, new tourist attrac-

tions and private dwellings are being constructed in

‘traditional’/vernacular styles, exemplified by Hasan

Fathi’s neo-Nubian style. In other cases the imagined

old inspires modern construction such as the new

library at Alexandria (Starr, 2005). Such renovations

and reshaping of city landscapes are often motivated

by newly evolved notions of local identity and nostal-

gia. They are at the core of contemporary public dis-

courses on past, present, and future national

agendas, and corollary debates on globalisation,

where discourses over authenticity, heritage, and

taste gradually formulate novel ‘glocal’ notions of

desirable living spaces.

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Rethinking cities in the

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Figure 5. Damascus:

the new and old city,

2005. (Photographer:

Goetz Nordbruch.)

Globalisation of cities throughout the region is

especially noticeable in cities’ business, leisure, and

commerce environments, often inspired by global,

high-modernist, or post-modernist visions. Such

structures often ignore the living tissue of their

surroundings in their physical appearance and in

catering to new, exclusive sections of the local

economy (Fig. 6).

High-rise buildings, located in the midst of less

affluent city spaces, well exemplify this new decon-

texualised urban reality. Similarly to global cities in

Europe and North America, such buildings serve as

secluded headquarters for local and international

businesses and NGOs. Large hotels provide an

environment removed from big city hassles, not

only for tourists but also for affluent urbanites; so

do private clubs and gyms that cater to the rich. A

significant number of the more prominent city

towers are dedicated to private luxury accom-

modation. Increasingly, however, those who can

afford it choose to leave the city, or at least to own

a second home elsewhere, and opt for gated

communities in the nearby countryside or on the

coast.

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Figure 6. Abu Dhabi:

the waterfront.

(Source:

www.uae.gov.ae)

A variety of shopping sites—supermarkets,

department stores, food and other chain stores,

and fashionable (design) boutiques—create new

exclusive spaces, further polarising the urban

environment and emphasising socio-economic

gaps. The commercialisation of city space is also

enhanced by advertising, which has become a

significant part of the urban visual experience.

Many of the less well-off, however, do participate

in leisure through consumption of such places via

window shopping (Abaza, 2001).

As in the first phase of globalisation, global patterns

of architectural design for housing, business, shop-

ping, and leisure usually start at the top and gradually

trickle down in a variety of ways to larger segments of

the population. However, they create many tensions

and much political unrest in the process. This unrest

once fed the national struggle against imperialism;

today it supports new forms of discontent vented by

Islamic movements in Arab countries.

Informality ‘from below’

Since the mid-1980s, and increasingly during the

1990s, state-city relationships significantly changed

in many countries, with the rewriting of the social

contract between regimes and their citizens.

Citizens were now expected to make do with

fewer government services and to depend more on

their own (limited) resources. Nevertheless, state

bureaucracies, and even more so municipal ones,

remained formally and informally involved in tran-

sitions in urban spaces as they refused to relinquish

political and economic gains stemming from partial

regulation of city life. Furthermore, states zigzagged

between co-optation of de facto existing urban

settlements, by providing them with necessary infra-

structure and services, and attempts to de-populate

the megalopolis as in the case of building desert-

cities in Egypt.

Now, in ‘mature’ building environments, overall

state and municipal planning is no longer

implemented or simply does not work; planning

has been reduced to ad hoc intervention in attempts

to manage crises, eg, construction of roads to relieve

chronic traffic congestion. Past legislation and regu-

lation of rent controls are also losing ground. Activity

in the ‘hidden’ urban economy, which might be as

large as the formal one, has partially relieved econ-

omic pressures (Roy, 1992). International and local

NGOs, especially Islamic ones, have also been

active in the more humble parts of the city, providing

large segments of city dwellers with some of the

benefits distributed by the state in the past (edu-

cation, health, welfare). The impact of insufficient

resources coupled with an increase in inequality in

the region has been especially strong as attempts

at economic reform have aggravated the already

severe problem of unemployment. With less or no

resources allocated to public building and mainten-

ance of urban dwellings, the already significant

problem of housing in cities has also become worse.

Between forty and seventy percent of inhabitants

of major cities in the developing world live in

‘illegal conditions’ (Fernandes and Varley, 1998).

This illegality is expressed in land invasion and con-

struction at such sites. These venues are a familiar

part of local hidden economies, inwhich city dwellers

make do with whatever available resources they can

lay hands on. Informal construction, however, is not

the experience of the urban poor alone. In Cairo and

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Rethinking cities in the

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Haim Yacobi,

Relli Shechter

Alexandria it is also a part of lower-middle and

middle class urban life (Soliman, 2004). The same is

true for Turkey, where according to Yonder (1998)

more than fifty percent of the populations of

Ankara, Istanbul, and Izmir live in informal settle-

ments (Fig. 7). Informality here only indicates the

building process, not the quality or type of building.

It further suggests howwidespread this living experi-

ence is in Middle Eastern cities.

Nor can informality be considered independently

from the formal economy and construction; in city

life the two are intimately interrelated. Although

contradicting the rationalist-modernist logic of

state urban planning, informality is a practical

solution, tacitly accepted by states in their attempt

to mitigate the current deterioration in services

provided to their citizens. Informality is also

imbued with older mechanisms of reciprocity,

where social solidarity based on family and ethnic

origins interlinks with formal citizen-state relations

(Bugra, 2003).

Denoeux in his comparative study (1993) of Egypt,

Iran and Lebanon delineated the conditions that

produced informal urban networks in the three

countries, transforming cities from being supportive

of the state into potentially politically challenging

entities. He emphasised the economic aspect, ie,

cost of living, which caused bread riots in cities,

especially the largest ones, in Algeria, Morocco,

Sudan, and Egypt (Denoeux, 1993). Local political

protest and violence have often found expression

in insurgent Islamic movements and Islamic terms;

militant Islamic activity, and harsh state reaction to

it, further reduces the quality of urban daily life.

Although little treated in this article, we acknowl-

edge Castells’s (1983) argument that the investi-

gation of city tensions should also cover other

considerations such as ethnicity, gender, and

national struggle. Such conditions have been

linked to urban poverty, violence, and immigration,

which were often spatially expressed in urban

enclaves, but less frequently represented in formal

city maps.

Discussion

With the exception of temporary relief in the form of

a rise in oil revenues, daily urban experience in

Middle Eastern cities is often characterised by

deterioration in living conditions, which is the result

of a reduction in state redistribution of resources,

still to be adequately compensated for by an increase

in private-sector activity. City-level involvement,

namely municipal rather than state action in urban

renovation, which marks a significant change in

Turkish city life, is still the exception rather than the

rule in the Middle East.

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Figure 7. Istanbul:

Sariyer informal district.

(Photographer: Bahar

Rumelili.)

The level of sustainability of the region’s econo-

mic growth is still under debate, but most scholars

share the rather pessimistic approach taken by

Bonine (1997). This holds that the economic

success of the Middle East should be defined (at

least in the short run) in terms of keeping up with

current growing demand for minimal government

services and maintaining (rather than improving)

the existing standards of living. Moreover, cities,

where poor and rich live in close proximity, and

where uneven income distribution is already

among the highest in the world, would inevitably

create strong notions of ‘relative deprivation’, thus

further exacerbating notions of social inequality

and economic injustice.

This rather gloomy conclusion, however, does not

mean that current conditions should be passively

accepted. Since transformations in the local and

global political economy largely influence the

development of cities and lived space, we need to

factor in such transitions in looking for new solutions

rather than uphold past, counter-productive

development schemes. Drakakis-Smith (1980) has

already argued that the Western way in which

development and planning were understood and

implemented in Middle Eastern cities was

inappropriate for providing housing to the urban

poor because it was too expensive. Modernisation

theory, which fed much of the conventional

wisdom on development in the form of technical

supply of housing and urban services, is no longer

credible. Instead, we would call for a wider under-

standing of the role of planning that both concep-

tually and practically links the spatial with the

economic, the political, and the social. We further

call for locally contextualised solutions to the

contemporary city crisis.

In current Middle Eastern settings, alternatives

should emerge in the form of empowering urban

disadvantaged communities (Burgess, 1991), which

have been negatively affected by globalisation,

privatisation, and the inexorable withdrawal of

the state. In the field of housing studies, this alterna-

tive model of intervention is identified as ‘non-

conventional housing policy’, namely the operation

of different forms of self-help housing approaches

(Ramirez et al., 1992). We go farther along these

lines, suggesting that future urban development

would do better to align formal and informal

construction through the free market, rather than

continuing to do so through depleting command

economies; the latter now mainly benefits local

elites through economic rents and cronyism. De

Soto’s (2000) recommendations to empower illegal

home-owners by legalising ownership is a positive

way to go; it would encourage more investment in

housing and allow the poor to put much ‘dead’

capital to work in the form of mortgages and

loans taken against such property and invested in

economic activity. In Turkey, where this has been

implemented since the 1990s, city life and environ-

mental matters have significantly improved, which

testifies to the potential success of such schemes.

We acknowledge that the hegemonic/authori-

tarian nature of states in the Middle East is not to

be dissolved soon. However, we suggest a gradual

extension of the notion of ‘non-conventional

housing policy’ into a more comprehensive vision

of ‘non-conventional planning policy’, in an

attempt to redefine the state’s responsibilities to its

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Haim Yacobi,

Relli Shechter

citizens in providing urban goods and services that

will enhance participation and empowerment of

urban communities. While states scale down their

commitments to city dwellers they should create

new mechanisms that facilitate the latter’s active

participation in planning and improving urban life.

Any interference with the city’s built environments

should go beyond simply considering material

conditions. It should incorporate cultural consider-

ations, because development inevitably means

transformations in local identity represented by the

emergence of new regimes of urban forms which

assign novel meaning(s) to the urban landscape.

Planning and architecture are not neutral; they

involve setting cultural as well as economic priorities,

and as such should be more open to public scrutiny

and participatory in nature. They should allow a

wider discourse on contemporary urban realities

stemming from internal and external (globalisation)

conditions, and raising serious questions about

local versus universal, authentic versus imported,

and new versus old. They should also be more

country-specific than in the broad analysis

suggested here, better to treat changing contexts

in finding local solutions to the problems.

Notes1. The authors thank Kerem Oktem and Kobi Peled for

their insightful comments on an earlier version of this

article.

2. Between 1831 and 1840 Egyptian troops led by

Ibrahim Pasha occupied Syria (Bilad al-Sham), including

Jerusalem. Ibrahim’s administration was centred in

Damascus, but strong local governors, whom he

promoted, represented it in Jerusalem.

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