Arab Modernism(s): Cities, History, and Culture

Arab Modernism(s) is an exploration of how the Arab world encountered modernism – sometimes inadvertently, sometimes deliberately – and how those encounters continue to shape the built environment of its cities today. Adhering to his late father’s belief that ‘cities are nothing without people’, Yasser Elsheshtawy writes not just about the buildings, but the lives lived in and around them. His narrative weaves together personal anecdotes and works of fiction and film, thus providing a textured backdrop to his central theme: the evolution of modernism in Arab cities. Following the introduction, the next ten chapters each focuses  on a different city or town, moving from Hassan Fathy’s Gourna to Cairo, Algiers, Rabat and Casablanca, Amman, and Beirut and then to the Gulf cities of Riyadh, Kuwait, Doha, and Abu Dhabi and Dubai. The book closes with a Coda – a tribute to the author’s father, Hassan Elsheshtawy.

Yasser Elsheshtawy is Adjunct Professor of Architecture at Columbia University, New York and Non-Resident Fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute, Washington, DC. He is author or editor of five other books in the Routledge Planning, History and Environment series including Temporary Cities: Resisting Transience in Arabia and Riyadh: Transforming a Desert City.

For more about this book, see the authors three blogs ‘Why Arab Cities Matter’ at Blogged Environmment

Preface and Acknowledgements