JADMAG Issue 6.3 "Cities"

Description  Edited by Mona Harb and Eric Verdeil Many non-scholarly and scholarly accounts on the societies, culture, and political economy of the Middle East post-“Arab Uprisings/Spring” still deal with cities and regions as mere repositories of social, cultural, political, and economic action—despite the spatial turn that has informed social sciences and humanities for more than three decades.

Indeed, they often overlook the shaping roles of the built and natural environments in the production of events unraveling in cities and regions of the Middle East. We thus need to understand cities and regions not only as backgrounds and contexts for processes and practices, but rather as environments that have determining impacts on these, and that human interactions also shape. Since its launch in September 2013, Jadaliyya’s Cities Page has been committed to producing such informed, empirical, and integrated knowledge, where the spatial engages and intersects with historical, political, economic, technological, legal, social, and cultural analysis. These are some of the questions we committed to address five years ago: How and why does urban space contribute to public action and social movements? What is the relationship between power, space, and resistance? How do different groups utilize space to mobilize and facilitate collective action? Which forces that shape space (physical and technological, as well as social, historical, political, and economic) are combined to guide this action? More broadly, how do specific historical, national policies, and global forces shape cities? How are different inequalities constituted by urban life and how do they reconstitute the city? How do the ordinary practitioners of the city negotiate, navigate, appropriate, resist, and transform urban forms? While many electronic outlets have been scratching the surface of such questions, focusing on formal aspects and general descriptions of urbanism, Jadaliyya Cities has been contributing to critical urban scholarship, and informing reflective practice and urban activism. See a peek here.   Table of Contents Introduction by Mona Harb and Eric Verdeil Articles “Cleaning out the Ghettos”: Urban Governance and the Remaking of Kurdistan by Nicholas Glastonbury and Defne Kadıoğlu Urban Conflicts and Multiple War Narratives: The Case of Aleppo by Giovanni Pagani Erbil: An Unfulfilled Dream of Urban Modernity by Thierry Boissière and Yoann Morvan Zaatari Refugee Camp: A Makeshift City by Kamel Doraï Camp Pause: Stories from Rashidieh Camp and the Sea by Dictaphone Group Mapping New Constructions in Beirut (2000–2013) by Hayat Gebara, Mona Khechen, and Bruno Marot Paradigms Lost in Morocco: How Urban Mega-Projects Should Disturb Our Understanding of Arab Politics by Koenraad Bogaert Imider vs. COP22: Understanding Climate Justice from Morocco’s Peripheries by Koenraad Bogaert An Emergent Political Icon on the Landscape of Istanbul: The Palace of (In)Justice by Ayşe Öncü A Spatial History of a Main Baghdadi Street by Yaseen Raad The Rise and Decline of a Heterotopic Space: Views from Midan al-Tahrir by Farha Ghannam A Lyrical Cruise in Tunis by Lana Salman What a Queer Urban Future Looks Like: Beirut by Maya Mikdashi The Geography of Public Lighting in Arab Cities by Eric Verdeil A Cautionary Note for Habitat III: Decentralization Can Lead to Centralization by Mona Harb