Samer Bagaeen

Brand Dubai: The Instant City; or the Instantly Recognizable City

Abstract With ambitions to become a hub of global commerce, a top tourist destination and a shopping Mecca—a New York/Las Vegas/Miami rolled into one—Dubai has been spending billions of dollars to build an astonishing modern city nearly from scratch in a mere 15 years. To date some

Adapting the City

100 billion worth of real estate under construction or in the pipeline continues the boom. Combining the involvement of local businesses and innovative strategies of urban marketing with headline catching projects, Dubai has set out to transform its urban landscape, and its image. Ambitious mixed-use urban developments featuring luxury residences, hotels and office blocks, huge shopping malls and imaginative entertainment complexes are rapidly changing the face of Dubai emirate and are putting the Dubai property market on the world stage. The catalyst for much of this expansion, this paper argues, has been the emirates decision to allow non-nationals to purchase freehold property. The paper concludes by questioning the sustainability of this growth but does not attempt to offer any answers, given its rollercoaster nature.

Evaluating the Effects of Ownership and Use on the Condition of Property in the Old City of Jerusalem

The main objectives of this chapter are to develop a theoretical underpinning of and a methodology for urban intensification and regeneration that could help transform currently unsustainable urban areas into sustainable urban neighbourhoods and communities. The key task of the research is accordingly to find ways of translating sustainability into strategic concepts of urban restructuring and regeneration. It is argued that, once this key task has been achieved, the other tasks of dealing with urban growth as well as restructuring inner city and urban fringe areas would follow suit.

Political conflict, town planning and housing supply in Jerusalem

This paper looks at the changing nature of ownership patterns in the Old City of Jerusalem from a historical perspective, the role of rent control and leasing arrangements, and assesses their impact on the maintenance and condition of property in the Old City. It investigates the nature of the institution of Muslim religious trusts (the waqf) in order to build up a picture of its transformation into a manager of housing in the Old City since 1967 focusing on the relationship between the shift of ownership from the public waqf to the private family waqf and the effects of this on the condition of the built environment. Although recent trends in the Middle East and some Muslim countries indicate a clear decline in the status of the waqf as an institution, this paper shows how, in Jerusalem, and in the Old City in particular, it has been flourishing since 1967. The paper offers some insights into the impact of the identified historical and legal factors on the condition of buildings and, by examining statistical evidence, finds a clear correlation between the ownership and use of buildings and their physical condition.

Book review: Demystifying Doha: On Architecture and Urbanism in an Emerging City

In this detailed demographic analysis of the current ethnic composition of Jerusalem, Samer Bagaeen looks at the highly problematic role of urban planning in ethnically polarized cities. He argues that “city planning [in Jerusalem] has been turned into a tool of the [Israeli] government to be used to help prevent the expansion of the citys non‐Jewish population”. Palestinians have, as a result of national and municipal housing policies, been forced to live in cramped conditions, and according to the authors own surveys, overcrowding is now having a deteriorating effect on the physical fabric in the Palestinian quarters of the Old City. Jerusalem has been of ongoing concern for City and this paper is in some respects a continuation of Michael Safiers article on Jerusalem and cosmopolitan co‐existence in Vol. 5, No. 2, 2001.

Between a rock and hard place: House-building in Brighton and Hove

Demystifying Doha: On Architecture and Urbanism in an Emerging City focuses on building and development in the State of Qatar’s capital city, Doha, set within its broader context of Gulf and Middle Eastern urbanism.

Review of Demystefying Doha: On architecture and urbanism in an emerging city

In June 2013, Brighton and Hove City Council submitted Part One of their City Plan to the Secretary of State for independent examination. More than fifteen months on, elected councillors have not come to an agreement about the officers’ proposed modifications in response to the Inspector’s report and the council risks being forced to withdraw the plan. Suddenly, the city finds itself torn between the need to build new homes and the desire not to build them. How did it come to this?

Book review: Toward the Healthy City: People, Places, and the Politics of Urban Planning:

Demystifying Doha: On Architecture and Urbanism in an Emerging City focuses on building and development in the State of Qatar’s capital city, Doha, set within its broader context of Gulf and Middle Eastern urbanism.

Green Cities: Urban Growth and the Environment by M. E. Kahn

funded by local government and integrated into the wider metropolitan infrastructure system. The importance of representative organisations formed by the urban poor in informal settlements—in which women often have a central role—is clearly highlighted in the conclusion of the book. It will be very interesting to revisit the Karachi example after the 2010 flood. Overall, I found this edited volume to be a compelling read. Just why the needs of cities and their urban populations tend to reside on the margins of the climate change adaptation literature remains a mystery. As the book emphasises, most discussions in the adaptation literature do not focus on urban areas. What is needed is a clearer understanding of how to support action within urban centres that can address the broader developmental needs of low-income groups and make better use of local knowledge. The diverse detailed case studies included in the book bring to the fore the sheer complexity of this as a democratic city-based governance agenda. At times, whilst reading the development challenges for adapting cities to climate change, I felt the urge to (mis)quote the famous polemic offered by Wildavsky (1973): if climate change adaptation is everything, then maybe it’s nothing? The challenge posed by the authors in this book, however, is how to make the case (and space) for an emphasis on governance structures and the plight of the urban poor in a burgeoning climate change literature still largely dominated by a technology-driven, market-based approach to adaptation. One only needs to look at the current plight in Pakistan to see the very real and immediate urgency of this agenda.

Redeveloping former military sites: Competitiveness, urban sustainability and public participation

Does growth hurt or help the urban environment? Why do some cities suffer environmental degradation while others are able to preserve or even enhance their environmental quality? What is a green city? Will urban growth exacerbate the problem of climate change? Or can it help address this challenge? These are some of the questions that Mathew Kahn attempts to answer in this book. Green Cities draws on the literature of environmental economics in the quest to investigate the environmental consequences of urban growth in metropolitan areas in the United States. In fact, a great part of the book is dedicated to understanding the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC)—the hypothesis that there is an ‘inverted-U’ relationship between the various indicators of environmental degradation and levels of per capita income. These indicators, or factors, which can proceed to alter the shape of the EKC are also investigated in some detail in the various chapters. Chapter 2, for example, examines these indicators, or ‘yardsticks’ as Kahn calls them, and combines them to synthesize a construct for a ‘green city’ index. Arguably, the lack of a common measuring tool across the disciplines does not make this task easy. For example, Kahn highlights that distinct tools are in use by ecologists, public health experts and economists. The ecologists’ favourite tool, the ecological footprint, “ . . . provides an intuitive formula for converting day-to-day individual choices into an aggregate measure of demand for natural capital” (p. 9). On the other hand, public health approaches measure the costs (such as costs of drugs dispensed or lost days of work) of environmental problems such as air pollution. Kahn is careful to point out that because these approaches measure different aspects or urban environmental quality, “ . . . the conclusions they lead to can often diverge” (p. 26) making it more difficult to generalize about their impacts. In response, he proposes a more uniform ‘Green City Index’, but unfortunately admits that “ . . . the necessary data are lacking to construct it” (p. 27). Chapter 3 makes a first attempt at understanding the EKC before this subject is then taken up in more detail in Chapters 4 and 5. The EKC hypothesis posits, Kahn notes, “ . . . a non-monotonic relationship between development and environmental quality” (p. 30). What this means is that in a developing industrial economy, little weight is given to environmental concerns in society, raising environmental pollution by-products. It is only after a certain standard of living from the industrial production system has been attained, and when environmental pollution is at its greatest, the focus changes from self-interest to social interest. Kahn admits that the EKC is more an observed pattern rather than “a law of physics” (p. 37), yet he is content to use it as a tool to show how environmental quality evolves in a growing market economy. Journal of Urban Design, Vol. 14. No. 4, 565–575, November 2009