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 a " Rabat, Amman, Beirut, Kuwait, Manama, Doha, Abu Dhabi and Riyadh a " provide a unique insight into todaya (TM)s Middle Eastern city.

Winner of The International Planning History Society (IPHS) Book Prize.

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.

- Fills a gap in the literature on Riyadh and Saudi Arabia - Includes high-quality illustrative materials - Written by an established scholar on the region's urban development with unique access to the city and its planners.

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.

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'.

"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, USA

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.

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.

In the last few years, the Persian Gulf city of Dubai has exploded from the Arabian sands onto the world stage. Oil wealth, land rent, and so-called informal economic practices have blanketed the urbanscape with enormous enclaved developments attracting a global elite, while the economy runs on a huge army of migrant workers from the labor-exporting countries of the Indian Ocean and Eurasian regions. The speed and aesthetic brashness with which the city has developed have left both scholarly and journalistic observers baffled and reaching for facile stereotypes with which to capture its city's identity and significance to the history of urban planning, architecture, social theory, and capitalism.

In "The Superlative City," contributors from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and colleagues from the United Arab Emirates, the United States, and Denmark offer the most serious analyses of the city to appear to date. Remarkable aspects of Dubai, such as the size and theming of real estate projects and the speed of urbanization, are situated in their local and global architectural, political, and economic contexts. Planning tactics and strategies are explained. The visually arresting aspects of architecture are critiqued but also placed within a holistic view of the city that takes in the less sensational elements, such as worker camps and informal urban spaces.