Janet L. Abu-Lughod

The Islamic city – Historic Myth, Islamic Essence, and Contemporary Relevance

At the present time of resurgence in Islamic beliefs, the question of the Islamic city has once again come to the fore. In many parts of the Arab world, and especially in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, urban planners with a new found respect for the great achievements of the past are searching for ways to reproduce in todays cities some of the patterns of city building that have been identified as Islamic. They have been influenced, whether wittingly or not, by a body of literature produced by western Orientalists purporting to describe the essence of the Islamic city. The purpose of this article is, in Part I, to examine and criticize some of the basic works in that tradition and then, after deconstructing the concept of the Islamic city, to build up, in Part II, a somewhat different, and hopefully more dynamic and analytic model. The article ends with a brief discussion of whether and in what ways it would be feasible or desirable to build contemporary cities on Islamic principles.

Theories of Development: Mode of Production or Dependency.

Introduction - Roanald H Chilcote Dependency or Mode of Production? Theoretical Issues PART ONE: CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES Imperialism and Progress - Aijaz Ahmad Ideologies in Theories of Imperialism and Dependency - Carlos Johnson PART TWO: CASE STUDIES IN DEPENDENCY AND MODES OF PRODUCTION ANALYSES Imperialism, Social Classes, and the State in Peru, 1890-1930 - Anibal Quijano Interpreting Social Change in Guatemala - Norma Stoltz Chinchilla Modernization, Dependency, and Articulation of Modes of Production PART THREE: WORLD-SYSTEM AND CLASS ANALYSES Crisis and Transformation of Dependency in the World-System - Andre Gunder Frank Surplus Labor and Class Formation on the Latin American Periphery - Henry Veltmeyer Class Analysis and Dependency - Dale L Johnson

The Legitimacy of Comparisons in Comparative Urban Studies A Theoretical Position and an Application to North African Cities

An old controversy, never resolved, lies at the root of present difficulties in the burgeoning field of comparative urban studies-a field marked by a great deal of motion but not too much progress, if by the latter term we mean coherent and systematic movement toward an agreed-upon goal. The controversy goes back at least to the nineteenth century and was generated by the tendency of early anthropologists to make elaborate files of &dquo;interesting&dquo; culture traits (gathered from as many points on the globe as explorers had written home about), and then to construct simplified theories concerning the evolution of given institutions over time by assiduously inserting selected bits of cultural evidence into the strata of their (assumed) evolution. Needless to say, evolutionary progress always conveniently culminated in the form that happened to be prevalent in Western Europe at this time (Nisbet, 1970). In statistics, this is known as converting cross-sectional data into a theoretical model of change, a perfectly legitimate operation so long as several rather critical caveats are strictly respected. First, the theoretical model of change must not then be treated as if it had been empirically derived over time. Second, the dating sequence must be established rather

Sociology for the twenty-first century : continuities and cutting edges

These essays probe issues of central importance to North American societies in the 21st century. The chapters in part one revise theory and methods to comprehend the economic and political institutions that increasingly dominate the lives of individuals and groups, arguing that these giants must be made more democratically accountable. Part two explores the social effects that growing globalization, transnationalization, and information technologies are having on politics, economics and the environment. The final chapters compare how new immigrants from increasingly diversified backgrounds are being absorbed in Canada and the United States, exploring the impact that immigrants are having on pre-existing ethnic minorities and on the dominant political culture. While it is an attempt to refocus the discipline of sociology, the books nontechnical style and its attention to issues of central concern to all citizens should make it also accessible to nonspecialists.

Re-presenting the City: Ethnicity, Capital and Culture in the 21st Century.

Representations of the city have typically focused on urban dichotomies such as renewal or decline, poverty or prosperity, and politics or culture. These simplistic portrayals leave many fundamental questions unanswered. What constitutes a city? What images and discourses are used to construct it? What makes city dwellers succeed or fail? Discussing recent visual, architectural and spatial transformations in New York and other major world cities in relation to the themes of ethnicity, capital, and culture, Re- Presenting the City moves between interpretative representations of the newly emerging metropolis and the theoretical and methodological questions raised by the task of representation itself. Contributors from an wide range of backgrounds--urban planning, philosophy, sociology, folklore studies, cultural studies and architecture--reflect on the construction of both the real and the unreal city, the images, metaphors and discourses through which the contemporary city is represented, and the texts which both mediate our experience of, as well as contribute to producing, the city of the future.

Readings in Urban Analysis: Perspectives on Urban Form and Structure.

This important work brings together a range of perspectives in contemporary urban analysis. The field of urban analysis is characterized by the multiplicity of approaches, philosophies, and methodologies employed in the examination of urban structure and urban problems. This fragmentation of perspectives is not simply a reflection of the multifaceted and complex nature of the city as subject matter. Nor is it a function of the variety of disciplines such as geography, planning, economics, history, and sociology. Cross-cutting all of these issues and allegiances has been the emergence in recent years of a debate on fundamental issues of philosophy, ideology, and basic assumptions underlying the analysis of urban form and structure. The notion of urban analysis Robert W. Lake discusses focuses on the spatial structure of the city, its causes, and its consequences. At issue is the city as a spatial fact: a built environment with explicit characteristics and spatial dimensions, a spatial distribution of population and land uses, a nexus of locational decisions, an interconnected system of locational advantages and disadvantages, amenities and dis-amenities. Beginning with landmark articles in neo-classical and ecological theory, the reader covers the latest departures and developments. Separate sections cover political approaches to locational conflict, institutional influences on urban form, and recent Marxist approaches to urban analysis. Among the topics included are community strategies in locational conflict, the political economy of place, the role of government and the courts, institutional influences in the housing market, and the relationship between urban form and capitalist development. This is a valuable introductory text for courses in urban planning, urban geography, and urban sociology.

Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350.

In this important study, Janet Abu-Lughod presents a groundbreaking reinterpretation of global economic evolution and provides a new paradigm for understanding the evolution of world systems by tracing the rise of a system that, at its peak in the opening decades of the fourteenth century, involved a vast region stretching between northwest Europe and China. Writing in a clear and lively style, Abu-Lughod explores the reasons for the eventual decay of this system and the rise of European hegemony. She concludes with a provocative analysis of our current world economy, suggesting that we may be moving towards a pluralistic world similar in important respects to that of the thirteenth century.

Rabat: Urban Apartheid in Morocco

A critique of an article by Joseph C. Miller concerning the mortality of slaves during the Atlantic crossing is presented. A reply by Miller is also included (pp. 331-6). (ANNOTATION)