Urban Design in the Arab World: Reconceptualizing Boundaries

Front Cover
Dr Robert Saliba
Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., Jul 28, 2015 - Political Science - 282 pages
Providing a critical overview of the state of contemporary urban design in the Arab World, this book conceptualizes the field under four major perspectives: urban design as discourse, as discipline, as research, and as practice. It poses the questions: how can such a diversity of practice be positioned with regard to current international trends in urban design? And what constitutes the specificity of the Middle Eastern experience in light of the regional political and cultural settings? This book is also about urban designers ‘on the margins’: how they narrate their cities, how they engage with their discipline, and how they negotiate their distance from, and with respect to global disciplinary trends.
 

Contents

Global Paradigms and Regional Implications
1
Tables
5
Reflections on an Urban Concept
17
reconcePtualIzIng BounDarIes Between
27
Community Activism in PostWar Reconstruction
39
Learning from Beiruts Central Area Renewal
51
Ecological Landscape Design and City Regions in the Mashreq
65
barely perceptible
69
New Cities Reflecting on the Dialectics between
167
From Makkah to Karbala Reconciling Pilgrimage
177
Baghdads Suspended Modernities versus a Fragmented Reality
199
Tahrir Square From Appropriation to Design
213
5
232
Future Directions for Urban Design
243
Expanses of roads and parking in Istanbul Dubai Aleppo and Beirut
246
Boxes
255

A Machinic Approach to Nahr Beirut
85
Proposals for the Arab World
97
A Critical Reflection
115
From Obsolete Infrastructure to Infrastructural Landscape
147

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About the author (2015)

Robert Saliba is a Professor at the Department of Architecture and Design, the American University of Beirut, and served as the coordinator of the graduate program in Urban Planning and Policy and Urban Design between 2008 and 2011. He has conducted extensive research on Beirut's historic formation and postwar reconstruction, and published three reference monographs: Beyrouth Architectures: Aux Sources de la Modernité (Parenthèses 2009), Beirut City Center Recovery: the Foch-Allenby and Etoile Conservation Area (Steidl 2004), and Beirut 1920-1940: Domestic Architecture between Tradition and Modernity (The Order of Engineers and Architects 1998). He has served as a land use consultant with the World Bank and UN-Habitat on the state of the environment in Lebanon and worked as an urban design consultant and a city planning associate at the Community Redevelopment Agency in Los Angeles, California.

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