Ananya Roy

Nezar AlSayyad

The turn of the century has been a moment of rapid urbanization. Much of this urban growth is taking place in the cities of the developing world and much of it in informal settlements. This book presents cutting-edge research from various world regions to demonstrate these trends. The contributions reveal that informal housing is no longer the domain of the urban poor; rather it is a significant zone of transactions for the middle-class and even transnational elites. Indeed, the book presents a rich view of "urban informality" as a system of regulations and norms that governs the use of space and makes possible new forms of social and political power. The book is organized as a "transnational" endeavor. It brings together three regional domains of research-the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia-that are rarely in conversation with one another. It also unsettles the hierarchy of development and underdevelopment by looking at some First World processes of informality through a Third World research lens.

Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia

Urban Informality

This book deals with the aesthetic potentials of sustainable architecture and its practice. In contrast to the mechanistic model, the book attempts to open a new area of scholarship and debate on sustainability in the design and production of architecture. It traces and underscores how the consideration of environment and sustainability is directly connected to aesthetic propositions in architecture.

Aesthetics of Sustainable Architecture

On the Architecture and Urbanism of the Colonial Enterprise

Forms of Dominance

Irene A. Bierman

Nasser Rabbat

During the nineteenth century, Cairo witnessed once of its most dramatic periods of transformation. Well on its way to becoming a modern and cosmopolitan city, by the end of the century, a 'medieval' Cairo had somehow come into being. While many Europeans in the nineteenth century viewed Cairo as a fundamentally dual city—physically and psychically split between East/West and modern/medieval—the contributors to the provocative collection demonstrate that, in fact, this process of inscription was the result of restoration practices, museology, and tourism initiated by colonial occupiers. The first edited volume to address nineteenth-century Cairo both in terms of its history and the perception of its achievements, this book will be an essential text for courses in architectural and art history dealing with the Islamic world.

Making Cairo Medieval

This Handbook simultaneously provides a single text that narrates the Cairo of yesterday and of today, and gives the reader a major reference to the best of Cairo scholarship. Divided into three parts covering Histories, Representations and Discourses of Cairo, the chapters provide comprehensive coverage of Cairo from both a disciplinary and an interdisciplinary point of view, with scholars from a great range of disciplines. Part One contains chapters on the history of specific parts of the city to provide both a concise picture of Cairo and an appreciation for the diversity of its constituent parts and periods. Part Two of the book deals with the various forms of representations of the city, from high-end literature to popular songs, and from photographs to films. Finally, Part Three covers current discourses about the city, comprising historical reflections on the city from the present, surveys of its current condition, analysis of it serious urban problems and visions for its future. The Routledge Handbook on Cairo provides a unique and innovative look at the ever-evolving state of Cairo. It will be a vital reference source for scholars and students of Middle Eastern Studies, Middle East History, Cultural Studies, Urban Studies, Architecture and Politics.

Histories, Representations and Discourses

Routledge Handbook on Cairo

The city and the cinema have become inextricably intertwined over the last century, with the identities of places becoming bound up in their cinematic portrayals. We have seen the landmarks of New York, London and Tokyo turn into iconic symbols of wealth, power, status, style and culture, and for the majority of people the images and sounds of movies form the only experience they will ever have of distant cities. Cinematic Urbanism presents an urban history of modernity and postmodernity through the lens of cinema. AlSayyad traces the dissolution of the boundary between real and reel through time and space via a series of films that represent different modernities. They include: Cinema Paradiso It's a Wonderful Life Metropolis Brazil Blade Runner Annie Hall Taxi Driver Do the Right Thing My Beautiful Laundrette The Truman Show. Alsayyad argues that our understanding of the city cannot be viewed independently of cinematic experience. Films do not only capture the depiction of a society; they influence the way we construct images of the world and, as a result, how we operate within it. We are beginning to blur the distinction between what is real in the everyday, and how we imagine the everyday. Cinematic Urbanism explores this dynamic, bringing together insights from urban and film studies to illuminate current architectural debate. .

A History of the Modern from Reel to Real

Cinematic Urbanism

From its earliest days as a royal settlement fronting the pyramids of Giza to its current manifestation as the largest metropolis in Africa, Cairo has forever captured the urban pulse of the Middle East. In Cairo: Histories of a City, Nezar AlSayyad narrates the many Cairos that have existed throughout time, offering a panoramic view of the city’s history unmatched in temporal and geographic scope, through an in-depth examination of its architecture and urban form. In twelve vignettes, accompanied by drawings, photographs, and maps, AlSayyad details the shifts in Cairo’s built environment through stories of important figures who marked the cityscape with their personal ambitions and their political ideologies. The city is visually reconstructed and brought to life not only as a physical fabric but also as a social and political order—a city built within, upon, and over, resulting in a present-day richly layered urban environment. Each chapter attempts to capture a defining moment in the life trajectory of a city loved for all of its evocations and contradictions. Throughout, AlSayyad illuminates not only the spaces that make up Cairo but also the figures that shaped them, including its chroniclers, from Herodotus to Mahfouz, who recorded the deeds of great and ordinary Cairenes alike. He pays particular attention to how the imperatives of Egypt's various rulers and regimes—from the pharaohs to Sadat and beyond—have inscribed themselves in the city that residents navigate today.

Histories of a City

Cairo

Nezar al-Sayyad

Challenges the assumption that hybrid peoples create hybrid places and hybrid places house hybrid people and suggests that hybrid environments do not always accommodate pluralistic tendencies or multicultural practices.

On the Identity Discourse and the Built Environment

Hybrid Urbanism

David Moffat

Mark Gillem

In seeking to answer the question Whose Tradition? this book pursues four themes: Place: Whose Nation, Whose City?; People: Whose Indigeneity?; Colonialism: Whose Architecture?; and Time: Whose Identity? Following Nezar AlSayyad’s Prologue, contributors addressing the first theme take examples from Indonesia, Myanmar and Brazil to explore how traditions rooted in a particular place can be claimed by various groups whose purposes may be at odds with one another. With examples from Hong Kong, a Santal village in eastern India and the city of Kuala Lumpur, contributors investigate the concept of indigeneity, the second theme, and its changing meaning in an increasingly globalized milieu from colonial to post-colonial times. Contributors to the third theme examine the lingering effects of colonial rule in altering present-day narratives of architectural identity, taking examples from Guam, Brazil, and Portugal and its former colony, Mozambique. Addressing the final theme, contributors take examples from Africa and the United States to demonstrate how traditions construct identities, and in turn how identities inform the interpretation and manipulation of tradition within contexts of socio-cultural transformation in which such identities are in flux and even threatened. The book ends with two reflective pieces: the first drawing a comparison between a sense of ‘home’ and a sense of tradition; the second emphasizing how the very concept of a tradition is an attempt to pin down something that is inherently in flux.

Discourses on the Built Environment

Whose Tradition?

Rooted in real-world observations, this book questions the concept of tradition. In his introduction, Nezar AlSayyad discusses the meanings of the word 'tradition' and the current debates about the 'end of tradition'. Thereafter the book is divided into three parts.

The End of Tradition?

Manuel Castells

Professor and Chair Center for Middle Eastern Studies Nezar Alsayyad

Five centuries after the expulsion of Muslims and Jews from Spain, Europe is once again becoming a land of Islam. At the beginning of a new millennium, and in an era marked as one of globalization, Europe continues to wrestle with the issue of national identity, especially in the context of its Muslim citizens. Muslim Europe or Euro-Islam brings together distinguished scholars from Europe, the United States, and the Middle East in a dynamic discussion about the Muslim populations living in Europe and about Europe's role in framing Islam today. Working at the knotty intersection of cultural identity, the politics of nations and nationalisms, and religious persuasions, this is an invaluable anthology of scholarship that reveals the multifaceted natures of both Europe and Islam.

Nezar AlSayyad

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