Al-Ahram Weekly | Culture Page | Urban entanglements

The politics of urbanisation has experienced a momentous change of direction over the past decade. While in the developed world the sprawl of informal quarters is more or less regulated, and thus contained, developing countries have not as yet come up with a blue-print that would allow cities to grow and accommodate the influx of rural migration and the natural increase in population with any semblance of order. This book addresses the problem through an examination of a number of large cities in the Middle East, offering a summary of the latest research in the field and, more importantly, a number of case studies aimed at inspiring the various authorities concerned in their efforts to improve the changing urban fabric.

Extremely well informed, but targeting the expert rather than the lay reader, this work of scholarship comprises an edited collection of the papers discussed at a symposium on the Politics, Instruments and Actors in the Planning and Administration of the Urban Space, held in Tours (France) in the Autumn of 1996, together with several new articles written specially for the book. The symposium was organised by URBAMA (Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches sur l'Urbanisation du Monde arabe), CHEAM (Centre des Hautes Etudes sur l'Afrique et l'Asie moderne) and CERAM (Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches en Aménagement, Université Hassan II-Ain Chok, Casablanca), with the assistance of the CNRS (Centre National de Recherche Scientifique) and the University of Tours.

It was during the early 1980s, and particularly during the second half of that decade, that the concept of city planning began to evolve, write Signoles, el-Kadi and Boumedine in their introduction. However developments were not at first clearly discernable, and nor did they follow an entirely logical course. They differed from country to country, and from city to city across the Arab world, and various extraneous and complex factors intervened. For these reasons, researchers were at first puzzled by the new tendency to abandon national, traditionally centralised city planning policies and to adopt less rigid systems that offered more independence to local government and institutions. The context in which the state steadily relinquished its responsibilities, they eventually concluded, was created by a new climate, where the roles played by globalisation, structural adjustment of the economy, international financial organisations and the promotion of neo-liberal tendencies, together with the rising importance of NGOs in the field (especially as providers of funds), combined to weaken the state and to favour the dominance of non-governmental local and international organisations.

The renovation of th Cairo aqueduct and its enirons

Case studies here include the creation of informal quarters, the rehabilitation and development of discrete areas in Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and Egypt, a discussion of the role of the state, of local government institutions and grassroots organisations, as well as that of local and international NGOs. Many of the papers are accompanied by maps, diagrams and tables that will no doubt interest social scientists, but are of limited interest to the general reader.

Far less specialised, and therefore less arduous to read, is the chapter entitled Point de Vue (Point of View), a first-person account by Jean-Louis Pages of the circumstances surrounding the renovation of the aqueduct area of the el-Sayeda Zeinab district in Cairo. Although the project has been in the making for over 10 years, and few concrete results have been achieved to date, Pages has been pleased by the progress the project has made, which outlines the shape of things to come. Here too traditional, authoritarian planning was replaced by grassroots participation and the establishment of meaningful dialogue between all the parties concerned (both governmental and non-governmental).

Packed with up-to-date information, and providing a complete overview of new trends in city planning in the Arab world, this book is highly to be recommended to specialists in the field. Those hoping for a more accessible discussion of urban problems, on the other hand, would be well advised to look elsewhere.

		Al-Ahram Weekly 9 - 15 September 1999 Issue No. 446
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875