GOOD ARAB BAD CITY | Ali Karimi |Thesis

Dedicated to the palm trees that have no choice but to live where they are planted.

GOOD ARAB BAD CITY

Ali Karimi Advised by Christopher M. Lee

Ali Karimi

Acknowledgements Thank you to Nawal Abdulkarim, Ismail Karimi, Mariam Karimi, Dr.Suhail Al Masri, Ahmed Bucheery, Ahmed Fairooz, Ara Simonion, David Smith, Gareth Doherty,

Hamed Bukhamseen, Yousef Awaad, Rawan Al Saffar,

Justin Kollar, Carles Muro, Leire Asensio, Jennifer Bonner, David Smith, Christian Lavista, Sami Buhazzaa, Dr.Khalid

Abdulla, Wen Wen, Judy Park and everyone who has been involved in the making of this book.

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Contents

1- Introduction

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2- The Virtuous Arab, the Virtuous City

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4- Islands, Courtyards, and Speculative Capital 5- Kuwait’s Utopia

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3- From Oil Town to Oil State 15 31

6- Housing as National

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7- A Thousand Units for Muharraq

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7- Conclusion

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8- Bibliography

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1- Introduction

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Along the western coast of the Persian Gulf are a collection of city-states known best for their relatively high standards of living, their oil-rich native populations, and their meteoric rise from small fishing and pearling towns to world cities over the course of half a century. Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and the Emirates (most notably Dubai and Abu Dhabi) have become emblematic of a particular brand of small scale nation building centered around rapid urbanism, foreign labor, and a comfortable native population [Fig 1, Fig 10]. The 20th century that has brought these cities to the global financial, strategic and architectural forefront has seen attempts to define the social contracts and relationships which have produced the unique urbanism of these countries. Afterall - if a city is a country, then the question of urbanism is not only one of efficiency, or comparative advantage but in fact is the very identity of a nation. At the same time, the scale of these cities relative to their wealth means that exercise of making a nation becomes a contained and manageable one. Theories like the rentier state theory by Hazem Beblawi and responses to it not only explain the political climate of these countries, but also through the relationship of state, oil rent, and citizen and non-citizensexplaining the urbanism of difference which produces the national suburb, the Indian/foreign laborer mid rise, and the expat highrise urbanisms. More than simply a matter of financial redistribution however, the creation of the Gulf city, and the Gulf citizen are not happenstance or coincidence, but we can understand them as projects which over the course of the 20th century developed to produce the urban fabric and society we see today.

As the Gulf countries reach the event horizon of previous national and modern visions there is a century of city-building to reflect on where the composition, and demographics would change drastically over time [Fig 4-9]. As these nations compete with each other to attract investment, global capital and foreign labor the conception of city and the creation of the citizen become tantamount to the continued existence of these countries. In the the climate of these countries postArab Spring and as oil prices drop belong the numbers needed for these expensive welfare states to avoid defeceits [Fig 2-3] the fear of instability has begun a new 1

Capital

Large City

Basrah

Kuwait City

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Dammam Manama

Doha

Dubai

Abu Dhabi

Riyadh

Figure 1 - Map of the Persian Gulf

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wave of construction. So it is despite the low cost of oil that a large part of the resolution of instability comes in the form of building and a second wind of urbanization - particularly in the form of housing cities. Resolving the housing crisis reflects a continued step in a rentier social contract but also a go-to strategy at the heart of the urban dynamics of these countries. Housing is the means to secure stability, citizen loyalty, and further develop these cities. So whether it is as a precaution against assimilation into the neighboring countries (Iraq, Saudi, Iran), or a matter of national or tribal pride - the project of a national and civic identity is at the heart of the urban reality of the Gulf city-states.

USA - $11,000*

Saudi Arabia - $16,400

Oman - $18,300

Bahrain - $29,000

Kuwait - $73,000

UAE - $131,500

Qatar $428,000

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Fig 2 - Oil prices in relation to Government Deficit

Fig 3 - Dollars per citizen if oil revenues are split amongst population

*US value calculated as total government revenue divided by population number Gengler, J. (2015). Group conflict and political mobilization in Bahrain and the Arab Gulf : Rethinking the rentier state - https://www.whitehouse.gov/ sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2015/assets/hist.pdf

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The question of the Good Arab and the Bad City is a parable of sorts, it reflects upon Al-Farabi’s Virtuous City and asks what are the virtues of a city and their relationship to the citizen. For Al-Farabi a city can be virtuous or misguided - and this is a product of a particular social contract - the relationship of citizen to rule to city. In reiterating the questions of Al-Farabi this book presents a series of case studies, some historical progressions, some isolated architectural moments; but ultimately asking what are the qualities a city aspires to and what social contract has produced the contemporary Gulf city. The text will look at the development of the Gulf city - as an idea, and as an apparatus for creating the Gulf citizen. But also as a holistic ecological vision from which an urban entity, and is architectural typologies were envisioned. Beginning with the history of the conceived Islamic and Arabic city regionally, we can understand the idea of a social contract and the city as the fulfilment of that ideal as a local driver for urbanism and the idea of the city. Moving into the early 20th century, we see the role of oil as the means for introducing a new project of the city, and typologies which mark the transition from city/tribal state to nation. This is further elaborated in the case of Dubai where can also see the idea of the city in a case where it is not top-down, and how the typology of the courtyard house becomes the repository for ideas of the city and the relationships of individuals to each other.

Following the pre-oil and islamic cities the book delves into the modernization and birth of the welfare state in the Gulf and the role the oil town plays in becoming role model for the social contract in a post-tribal society. The conflation of the single-family villa introduced in the oil-

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Fig. 4 - Rental to Income Ratio

Fig. 5- Population of Gulf Countries (National and Non-nationals)

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Fig. 6 - Population of Nationals

Fig. 7 - Population of Non-nationals

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Fig. 8 - Fertility Rates over time

Fig. 9 - Household Size

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Figure 10 - Nationals to Non-nationals

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town context with citizens right’s as we look to the failure of the high density housing solution in Kuwait. The second half of the book looks at Bahrain as case study, in the transition from tribal state, to protectorate, to welfare-rentier state and proposes an alternative to the current mode by which the crisis of urbanism, housing and citizen is resolved. Government built housing became a national policy in the late 50’s as a way of creating modern citizens and modern cities.

Governments initiated housing projects to build a modern country (and to move from tribe to citizen). This is true for other countries in the Gulf but also typical of the welfare states in europe and the US. Nation-building was a world-wide phenomenon at that point in time. The modalities, unit types, and urbanization came largely from British consultants, and the models first tested and built in the oil-company towns of the region.

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Modernization as a nation-building project not only tasked itself with the construction of housing, but instilling the government with a sense of purpose and legitimacy. So aroze the modernizing welfare state.The government built housing model would over time mark the transition from welfare state to rentier state, as the project of modernization would hit an impasse. Housing in its form becomes increasingly unsustainable over time, but the political path dependency prevents alternate modes and types. Not to mention that cities got more complicated, populations grew, and demographics change and so what began as a housing project for a nation became increasingly overtime a costly venture serving a small portion of the country (Roughly 10-15% of the country’s population, and 20-30% of its nationals).

What was once a nation-building tool, and a welfare policy which developed in part from tribal concession system soon became a political device to buy contentment and turned these countries into full rentier states trading housing for democracy. Whereas Western nations moved towards neoliberal models of planning and housing provision (so moving towards policy and market provision of housing), Middle-Eastern countries continued to construct or trickle-down rent towards citizens for housing. This book looks at these case studies and asks how through housing the modern state was envisioned, implemented and has reached an impasse. Past this impasse requires a new vision for the Gulf city.

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Chapter 2 - The Virtuous Arab, the Virtuous City

Ali Karimi

As governments and the real-estate industry in the Gulf recover from the hangover of the Arab Spring, a new era of city-building has begun in the region. Whether these are cities built for tourism, industry, education, or housing, there is a clear policy of city making at a national level in all the Gulf countries. The trend of city building and increased urbanization as a phenomenon is not limited to the Gulf either but can be seen as a national policy in China, and several African countries.

In the case of the Gulf, this global phenomenon is one that had begun in the early twentieth century as part of the modernization processes of increasingly oil rich city-states. Today this trend continues as part of an effort to diversify, expand, or further develop the countries. In the case of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Kuwait, who now have a city-building history of over forty years, this new era of city-making coincides with the event horizon of prior nationalist and modernist utopias which drove the conception of previous city models. In light of the global recession and the fact that cities in the region compete with each other to attract tourists, investment, and business; cities are now more than ever fully designable entities, and more importantly, ones that need to be designed well. So how should they be designed? This new era also coincides with the intellectual impasse of 21st century planning, being that modernism is too authored and the neo-liberal model not authored enough. Given the difficulty of moving forward without an idea of a context on which to build, it is useful then to reflect on the history of citymaking for ideas on how cities were viewed as a political project in the region. This chapter will examine three key moments in the history of the Gulf and Islamic city from which we can understand city-making not as a new phenomenon but one that lies at the very heart of urban and social life in the region.

City-making is integral to the Islamic faith. Cities constitute a vital part of the social cosmology, they are places of pilgrimage and communion, but also they are the domain in which Islam as a religion of codified social and religious interactions takes place. The first and most important example of this is the establishment of Medina by the Prophet Mohammed. Medina, called Yathrib prior to the Prophet’s arrival, was renamed upon the arrival of the prophet. The choice of 9

Fig 1 - The Plan of Kufah, 638 AD AlSayyad, Nezar, Cities and Caliphs on the Genesis of Arab Muslim Urbanism, Westport: Greenwood Press, 1991.

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Medina as a name was fitting, as the etymology of the word comes from the Aramaic word ‘Din’ which means to submit to authority; making madina the domain of submission. The prophet prohibited the use of the name Yathrib and the city would then be known as Medina or Al Medina al Munarawa – the Radiant City. The choice of name identifies Medina as the space of Islamic law and submission to its codes. The Prophet’s arrival in Medina was also marked by the preparation of a constitution which secured the rights of Muslims and non-Muslims in Medina. Medina as an idea represents a crucial moment in which Islam has to codify a set of social rules and make them physical through the instantiation of Medina as the physical space of the Islamic community. That being said, the constitution also means that although Medina is ruled by Islamic law, it still integrates and protects those of the Jewish and Christian faiths. The prophet Mohammed then as a deliverer of a message of law uses Medina as a model for a society ruled by the Islamic political-religious complex, a merger of state and religion (it is no coincidence that the mosque is also the ruler’s home) for a pluralistic society – a stark contrast to the tribal communities of Arabia at the time. Mohammed’s first architectural acts in the city are the establishment of the first mosque in Medina and his home. The consecration of the mosque-home as initial action heralds the transition of Yathrib to a new Islamic City with the establishment of the essential parts of the Islamic city.

In the creation of Medina as the capital of the nascent Islamic state, the creation of a constitution, the union of mosque and ruler’s palace and the identification of city as a space of submission to law become the constituent parts of Islamic civic thought. City-making in this case marks the foundation of the Islamic capital, the creation of an Islamic society, and begins a new era of the Islamic political-religious project as a state making exercise.

After the death of the Prophet Mohammed, the Caliphates would continue the expansion of the state territories, and the caliphate would become an empire.

Building off Roman and Persian tradition, the expansion occurred through the creation of garrison towns like Kufa which would later become the capital of the empire during the rule of Ali ibn Abi Talib (who moved the capital from Medina to Kufa). Other garrison towns include Basra and Misr (misr would become Egypt’s

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Figure 2- Baghdad, City of Al-Mansur

Galantay Ervin Y. (1979). New Towns: Antiquity to the Present

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Arabic name). City-making becomes an exercise in projecting the Islamic state, similar to the strategies Romans employed for conquering and controlling new territories. City-making was a way of consolidating rule and of spreading Islam.

One notable example was the planned city of Baghdad, conceived by Al-Mansur as the capital of the Abbasid empire. Following the tradition of new capitals in the Islamic Empire (Medina, Kufa, Damascus), Al-Mansur’s decision to found a new capital initially called the City of Peace allowed for the closer interweaving of Persian and Arab politics and establishing his rule in the region. The plan for Baghdad was a round walled city and at its center would be the mosque and the palace of Al-Mansur. The choice of the round plan in contrast to the Roman, Greek, and Islamic garrison town model connects Baghdad to a lineage of Persian city planning with avenues,temples and government building radiating outwards from the center. In creating the round city of Baghdad we see the development of city planning as a utopian exercise by not only incorporating the initial elements of the Islamic city, or developing it to a scale appropriate to an empire, but also the idea of a city informed by relationships to alternative pasts and different cultures to appropriate. Baghdad would grow and flourish, becoming the cultural and intellectual heart of the Islamic world for centuries until it was sacked by the Mongols.

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It is no coincidence then that the city of Baghdad would also become home to one of the most important Islamic scholars of all time: Al-Farabi. Al-Farabi although born in Afghanistan or Kazakhastan he would spend most of his life in Baghdad, the city in which he would write his seminal work: ‘The Virtuous City’. ‘The Virtuous City’ is a philosophical text which bridges between Greek and Islamic philosophy, constructing a Neo-Platonic treatise of how society works and the role of the city as the key to the aspirations of human society. The first half of the book deals with the heavenly bodies, the human body and its organs, logic and order. The second half then shifts from metaphysics and biology to contextualizing the former in the relationships between man and society. Al-Farabi uses the relationship between the organs to the functional man as analogues of the relationship between men to each other. Villages, towns and families are incomplete without a relationship which makes them subservient to the city. The city in Al-Farabi’s thought is the scale at which society can strive to completion, because it is at that scale that men can cooperate with each other to achieve perfection. The first half of the book is not a separate treatise on biology or metaphysics, but an effort on AlFarabi’s part to establish an order and nature of things which can be applied to man and the city. The virtuous city resembles the perfect body, where all the limbs cooperate with the mind to achieve health and perfection. Al-Farabi goes on to say that cities are the domain in which man can achieve happiness, and it takes the cooperation of the ruler and population to achieve this. Al-Farabi draws on the etymology of the world ‘Medina’ to further confirm that cities are necessary as the spaces of law for the ordering of human relationships and that city-making is a natural and essential function inherent to all men. To further articulate the virtuous city he lists examples of non-virtuous cities, cities which are immoral, 12

Fig 3 - Drawings of Mecca and Medina

purely mercantile, unjust and so on. Al-Farabi’s work represents the crystallization of the Islamic civic project as not only a political or religious configuration of space but an intellectual one: a discourse unto its own about which treatises can be written. For Al-Farabi civic life and society can be negotiated through city-making with specific aims and ideals. Building off the practice of citymaking from Medina to Baghdad, Al-Farabi brings the Islamic project full circle by tying the conception of the city into the Greek philosophical project and Platonic thought on the republic. Islamic city-making is brought into a global lineage of city-making exercises and the global debate on how cities should be considered and envisioned. The Islamic city ceases to be a unique entity but part of a larger discourse on how we understand leadership and the apparatuses of power and social empowerment.

Ali Karimi

As we move from the Radiant City (Medina) to the City of Peace (Baghdad) and then to the Virtuous City we can see clearly the development of the Islamic City as a utopian exercise in bringing law, coherence and identity to a region. It begins first with the Prophet’s codification of the faith in Medina, creating a space ruled and measured

by Islamic ontological thought. Then that model is spread out and tested through the deployment of garrison towns and capitals to consolidate rule and build communities to rule the vast territories of the empire. By the time we reach Al-Farabi we see city-making as a legible intellectual exercise which can be studied and debated but also one which extends beyond the Islamic world into the world-wide discourse of city-making. Over the course of a three hundred year period from Mohammed to AlFarabi we see the rapid spread of Islam bringing with it a new form of urbanization and city-making in the Middle East. This phenomenon is natural given the emphasis on civic life and the importance Islam plays as a vehicle for law and social ordering. The city itself is an apparatus of the faith and a vehicle towards Islam’s self-actualization.

In the context of our contemporary era of civic expansion, it is important to place the current exercise of city-making within a history of regional city-making.

This understanding of history is not just an abstract contextual exercise but provides a wide array of formal and ideological precedents that make the city imaginable, 13

designable, and part of the realm of public discourse. The purpose of this chapter is not to attempt to provide a detailed lineage or survey of Islamic city making, nor to even fully define the Islamic City and its constituent parts. Rather this chapter argues that the idea of cities as designable entities is at the communal thought and political life in the Gulf region. Not only was there an idea of an ideal city, but also clear ideas of what a city should be and ideological framework by which to produce and critique these cities. Moving forward the project should not be to imagine what an Islamic city could be today, but to ask more abstractly what are the lessons learned from the goals of the Islamic project. To re-imagine the role of the citizen, the possibilities for equality between different ethnicities, and to reinvigorate the project of an ideal city which creates a distinct culture and legacy.

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Chapter 3 - From Oil Town to Oil State With Frederick Kim

1. DeNovo, John A. American Interests and Policies in the Middle East, 1900-1939. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

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1963.

Efforts to characterize the context of the construction boom in the Persian Gulf often fall flat, resorting to the tired catch-alls of ‘oil cities’, ‘skyscrapers in the desert’, or ‘pop-up cities without an identity’. However these are the same catchalls that have been used for over fifty years and continue well into the twenty first century. What then has produced this condition of constant placelessness in which over half a century of architects have come, gone and yet ephemerality continues to be the status quo? This essay examines the origins of architectural practice in the Gulf region as a phenomenon born at the end of the colonial era and flourishing post-independence. By comparing key projects from the 1950’s to 1970’s in Bahrain, Kuwait, UAE and Qatar we can see the forces that have launched Gulf architectural practice on its current trajectory. These projects would establish the mode through which architectural practice would continue to occur for the remainder of the 20th century and reveal the fundamental cultural, institutional and professional legacies of the British presence in the region. More importantly we contend that there is a context to the seemingly amorphous architectural landscape of the Gulf, a context born in the critical period between protectorate and consultant-led city-state.

The British role in the Persian Gulf began primarily as a commercial endeavor and a matter of securing trade to India and the rest of the empire. While British presence in the Gulf existed in the 18th and 19th centuries, the colonial project was absent in the Gulf and far less involved than in India. Over time this role in the Gulf would develop into a strategic and diplomatic one particularly after the discovery of oil. The political residencies were tasked with securing British interest through regulating the states’ international affairs (i.e. insuring the autonomy of the Gulf states), and acting in the interest of British business. In practical terms this was done through political agents and British advisors to the rulers. Far more than just playing an advisory role however, the British exerted enough pressure to deny the Ottomans control of the Gulf in 1913, and implemented the treaties which insured that any exploitation of oil was mediated “only [by] people appointed by the British government”1. With regards to architecture, the legacy of British

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Figure 1 - Ahmadi Oil Town Digital Collections - Maps Great Britain. War Office.

Kuwait town plans [cartographic material] : Ahmadi.

1958. MAP G7604.A3 1958.

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Fig 2. Houses in Ahmadi - Kuwait

Fig 3. Houses in Ahmadi - Kuwait 2. Garratt, John. “Middle East Success Needs Homework.” Building 224 (1977): 42.

3. Belgrave, Charles Dalrymple. Personal Column. London: Hutchinson, 1960.

colonial rule was two-fold: first was establishing a legal and professional framework for business to be conducted; and second was imparting the ideological framework which fueled modernization efforts in the Gulf and would contribute to the influx of British professionals into the region. As opposed to being one which was interested in the cultivation of an architectural project, the colonial administration was a vehicle which allowed for the capitalization on oil wealth by the British consultancies.

This was clear to the architectural profession in England at the time, as an article in Building magazine states: “the British have more chance than anyone else in the Middle East because of the language, the system of law and the tradition of British involvement“2. The role the British played allowed for the formation of an international market while skirting the sedimentation of architectural language, educational institutions, or maintaining a pace of development that would allow for local practices to form naturally. The case studies presented will cover Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE - ordered chronologically by the date in which oil exports began.

These dates allows us to simultaneously track the influx of capital, foreign architects and population growth as well creating a timeline of British involvement over time. The similarities between the Gulf states allow for a reading of British policy as cities transition from impoverished pearling towns to urban centers for the consumption of consultant services. The countries also share similar urban conditions, history, language, and forces (influx of immigrants, discovery of oil, small population) which as the case studies will show contributed to the entire region entering the international market within a couple of years from each other. The similarities shared by these countries not only allow us to draw a timeline for the region’s development, but also highlight the nature of the consumption-driven approach as a means of establishing a country’s ‘brand’ within the international scene later in the 20th century.

Modernization occurred first in Bahrain, in which the architectural landscape was controlled by the state and the British implemented a development program. Bahrain’s development would become a precedent for the rest of the countries in the Gulf, not only as an urban phenomenon but also as a testing ground for various regional policies.

In contrast to the other GCC states (Gulf Cooperation

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Figure 4 - Awali Oil Town

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Fig 5- Mohammed Makiya Design - houses in Awali

Fig 6- Mohammed Makiya Design - Government Worker Housing

Fig 7- Mohammed Makiya Design - Government Worker Housing 4.Allday, Louis. “Asian and African Studies Blog.” The British

Library. February 28, 2014. Accessed November 21, 2014. http://

britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/asian-and-african/2014/02/the-adviser-charles-belgrave-and-modern-bahrain.html.

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Council), modernization occurred prior to the discovery of oil, giving the state time to organize without the pressures of rapid growth and sudden wealth3. The trajectory of modernization as a phenomenon separate from oil is a critical one, which when combined with the Bahraini colonial context reveals a narrative in which development can be read as a nuanced and contextual effort - rather than one hijacked by the speed of the postoil boom. Whereas Dubai and Qatar began to develop largely in the 50’s and 60s through business with British consultancies, Bahrain’s colonial rule began earlier and a good deal of the administrative buildings were commissioned and built by the administrators themselves (as opposed to consultants). While we can see both the rhetoric of modernization and the use of architecture to represent progress similar to the other states, the centralization of the project allowed the process to occur less as transactions of purchasing architectural commodities and more as an exercise in state-building from within the state itself. The longevity of the colonial rule meant that much of what would become architectural practice in the other states after independence was in Bahrain an administrative endeavor rather than a paid service. In this case the role of the architect as private consultant was integrated into state apparatus, and played by administrators who were supplemented by contractors and engineers. The primary example of this in Bahrain was Sir Charles Belgrave, the financial advisor to the ruler of Bahrain and arguably the man who ran Bahrain from 1926 to 1957. Over the course of his thirty year tenure in Bahrain Belgrave would gradually transition from being advisor to becoming the main court judge, police chief, planner, architect, and jack-of-all-trades for the country.

Belgrave had been an administrative officer in Egypt before being hired by the ruler of Bahrain (through British recommendation) to act as his financial advisor.

The British policy was not to run the state but to regulate through advisory roles, so while Belgrave was brought in as a separate ‘consultant’ “his position was closely tied to the colonial aims of the British in the region”4. Charles Belgrave’s contribution to the architectural landscape was as a non-architect who developed an architectural agenda for the country. His arrival began the importation of architectural types that he associated with governance, civilization, and also civic obligation towards the Bahraini

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Figure 8 - Georges Candilis Plan for Kuwaiti Housing

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Figure 9 - Georges Candilis Housing in Umsaeed, Qatar

Figure 10 - Georges Candilis Housing in Umsaeed, Qatar

5. Fuccaro, Nelida. Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf : Manama since 1800. Cambridge Middle East Studies ; 30. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

6. Noor Al-Nabi, Mohammad. 2012. The History of Land use and Development in Bahrain. Information Affairs Authority, Directorate of Government Printing Press. Kingdom of Bahrain.

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people. His insistence on the development of parks, public spaces, and making official the unofficial landscape of Bahrain heralded the transition from informal spaces and laws into formalized spaces and codes. In Belgrave we also see an individual simultaneously playing the role of a consultant and a colonial administrator. Although not an architect himself, Belgrave took it upon himself to oversee the construction of several buildings (schools, hospitals, a prison, as well as oil pipeline, the airport and roads), and in the case of his most notable project Bab el Bahrain was also the designer of the building. Belgrave saw his role as one of responsibility towards the Bahrainis and developing the country in the Bahrainis’ best interest (at times despite protestations). A large part of the civilizing project also mandated the importation of colonial subjects from India and Pakistan to fill roles that Bahrainis could not - a solution which would be implemented in Qatar, UAE, and Kuwait as well. This began with the police force who were retired Punjabis but soon extended to engineers and laborers and professionals to staff the building. Belgrave’s foremost urban contribution was the Manama waterfront, which was completed through a combination of land reclamations and expansions of the northern end of Manama. The advisor’s goal was to create a modern harbor for the capital city and the centerpiece of the waterfront was Bab Al Bahrain (similar to the Gateway to India) which acted as the main entry to the market. Belgrave designed the building in 1945 as both a governmental complex and symbolic entryway, the Bab was a combination of modernist and vernacular architecture heralding the next stage of urban life in Bahrain. Its design spoke of a continuity of cosmopolitan life into the oil era as opposed to being seen as a colonial artifact or foreign insertion5. Belgrave’s flexibility and his role as a jack-of-all-trades allowed him to pursue development on several fronts, developing parks and civic spaces as easily as reforming land regulations or organizing dinners for foreign dignitaries. However it was this very same flexibility that, as the country rapidly grew towards the end of his time, would not only infuriate the population but in many ways hamper the development of governmental agencies tasked with planning and development. Despite Belgrave’s work, there were no town planners in Bahrain nor governmental agencies charged with planning until 1968. At which time the Bahraini government requested a town planner from the

British Ministry of Overseas Development, and A.M. Munro was hired to setup the Physical Planning Unit under the Ministry of Municipality and Agriculture in Bahrain. Bahrain’s first master plan would be completed by 1968, “before this master plan proposal there was no clear picture how the town should expand, [or] where the main roads should be built”6.

Figure 11 - Georges Candilis British Petroleum Housing in Ahmedabad

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Kuwait’s oil exports began in 1945, over ten years after Bahrain, but gained its independence in 1961, ten years before Bahrain and the rest of the GCC. In contrast to the development of Bahrain’s early years, which was undertaken by an administrator concerned with modernization, Kuwait’s development sprung from the presence of the oil-town of Ahmadi and progress that occurred by osmosis. The town of Ahmadi was developed by the Kuwaiti Oil Company (KOC) between 1946-1956 as a colonial company town. Four things turned the town colonial island within Kuwait: the importation of British employees, Indian laborers, workers, the planning done

by Wilson Mason and Partners, and the planning policies which guaranteed a western lifestyle for the employees.

Wilson Mason & Partners completed their plan in 1947, in collaboration with KOC Building and Engineering representatives in London and Kuwait, in a plan which also included hospitals, cinemas, churches, and other amenities. The garden-city aspect of the design turned the city into an oasis in the desert, and would become the model for solutions to the rest of the Kuwaiti landscape.

Far more than just an urban precedent however, the town of Ahmadi would also impart a legacy of clear racial/ colonial hierarchies that the city enforced. For example, in the hospitals of Ahmadi Indian doctors would treat Indian patients, British doctors would treat British patients, and the segregated nature of the town would in many ways find itself instilled in both the urban fabric and the mentality of Kuwaitis as a result. Four years after the master plan of Ahmadi, the Kuwaiti master plan was completed by Minoprio, Spencely and MacFarlane. The objectives of the MSP master plan of Kuwait were both infrastructural, and civic, the role of plantings and beautification a part of the legacy of the Ahmadi development. The lion’s share of the work in Kuwait was done by the five main British contractors known as the ‘Big Five’ who were “British at the instruction of the political agency there”7. Delays to the planning process however meant that for much of the

Figure 12 - Georges Candilis British Petroleum Housing in Ahmedabad 7. Alissa, Reem IR. “Building for Oil: Corporate Colonialism, Nationalism and Urban Modernity in Ahmadi, 1946-1992.” 2012, 16 8. Ibid, 107 9. Mitchell, Christopher. “Development in the Middle East: The Practice of Architecture.” British Society for Middle Eastern Studies. Bulletin 3, no. 2 (1976): 89-91.

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10. Morris, A. E. J., and Harris, John R. John R. Harris Architects.

Westerham, Kent: Hurtwood, 1984. 6 11. Ibid 12. Ibid 13. Squire, Raglan. “Architecture in the Middle East.” Architectural Design, March 1957, 72-106.

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14. Wiedmann, Florian, Salama, Ashraf M., and Thierstein, Alain.

“Urban Evolution of the City of Doha: An Investigation into the Impact of Economic Transformations on Urban Structures/ Doha’nin Kentsel Evrimi: Ekonomik Donusumun Kentsel Yapilar Uzerindeki Etkisine Bir Ornek.

(Company Overview)(Report).”

METU Journal of the Faculty of Architecture 29, no. 2 (2012): 35.

1950’s Kuwaitis living in the poor infrastructure of the old city would look to Ahmadi’s planned town with envy as a colonial enclave with better governance and higher standards of living. The modernization of Kuwait was underscored by the notion that modern architecture was a key component of the country’s development. The British advocated Modernism as a way for Kuwait “to [assert] itself as a newly independent modern nation through the benevolent investment of its oil wealth into its architectural development in the name of progress”8. The case of Kuwait presents a development in the GCC relationship between the British and the locals. As opposed to modernization being an imposed process, it is through the autonomy of the oil company (as a semi-public entity) that notions of modernization are diffused into the Kuwait milieu. Modernization instantiates itself less as a pure governmental exercise as in the case of Bahrain, but rather as a public/private venture which can be imported, tested and then implemented.

Kuwait’s contribution to the development of the architectural landscape was the beginning of the move from British led administration to local governance and foreign consultants. In Kuwait we see the privatization of the colonial relationship of practice and modernization. As one practicing architect would note on the shifting nature of practice in the region: “a few years ago an architect’s clients were in effect British advisers or British engineers. Today a client is much more likely to be the Ruler himself, or a minister, or a committee of local people.”9 In Kuwait a government’s role as providing autonomy to the oil industry and the autonomy of its own planning processes but paying for and channeled by the private models of Ahmadi or the practices of consulting groups.

After development had begun in Bahrain and Kuwait, Qatar would initiate her own projects in the aftermath of oil exportation in 1949. By the 1950’s the transition had been made from British administrators dictating the model of growth as in Bahrain, to semi-public entities in Kuwait, to the era of private consultancy beginning in Qatar and the UAE. The beginning of this era is highlighted by one of the earliest and most critical projects in Qatar at the time: the Doha State Hospital. The design for the 100-bed hospital was decided by an open RIBA competition. The Qatari government chose to hold a competition as the result of an agreement between Hugh Hale the State Engineer to the Government of Qatar and Bill Spragg the secretary of RIBA10. Of the seventy-six entries John Harris, a young architect and graduate from the Architectural Association in the UK, was named the winner. The competition win allowed the unknown John Harris “to become established on the international scene at a time when comparable opportunities for other British practices to work overseas were few”11.

In the context of a recession in Britain for an architect of John Harris’s experience to win such a large project and then establish his practice is a fantastic success story even by current standards. The win not only cemented his place in Qatar, but also allowed Harris to become a key player in the Gulf throughout the 50’s-70’s as on a scale comparable to the starchitects of today. Harris credits his success to the ability to adapt to the context of the rapid development of the Gulf and its impatient clients. His primary innovation in Qatar came in the form of developing a contract for separate foundations, which allowed construction to begin far earlier than in

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i9 March 1957 issue of Architectural Design magazine devoted to the Middle East.

Figure 10 - March 1957 Issue of Architectural Design Magazine devoted to the Middle East

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Ali Karimi

Aerial view of Manama from the port in the early 1950s showing the “old” and the “new” buildings near Bab alBahrain in early 1950s (Fuccaro, 194)

Figure 11 - Aerial View of Manama from the port in the early 1950’s showing the “old” and “new” buildings near Bab al Bahrain (Fuccaro 194)

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Master plan of Kuwait by Minoprio, Spencely and Macfarlane from 1951 showing road system as a major planning tool for the old Kuwait City (Alissa, 26)

Aerial of Ahmadi showing the development of the oil town in 1956, (Alissa, 99)

Fig 12. Aerial of Ahmedi showing development of the oil town in 1956 (Alisa 99) 15. Squire, Raglan. “Architecture in the Middle East.” Architectural Design, March 1957, 72-106.

16. Bambling, Michele. “Lest We Forget: Structures of Memory in the UAE” -- UAE’s Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2014. Global Data Point, 2014, Global Data Point, June 16, 2014.

17. Ramos, Stephen. “The Blueprint: A History of Dubai’s Spatial Development Through Oil Discovery.” Working Paper, Dubai Initiative, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School, November 2009.

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a typical project; the contract “subsequently [became] a characteristic of major project construction in the Middle East, where speed is often a prime factor“12. It was the link between British officials in the Qatari government, and British academia/practice that allowed John Harris to come into the commission, but similar opportunities were increasingly available in the region. The sudden emergence of opportunities in the Gulf attracted many young British architects from schools or war services in an overcrowded domestic market to make their names in the Gulf. In 1957 Architectural Design magazine ran a Middle Eastern issue in which several projects from the region were showcased while claiming there was a lack of technical experts in the region and plenty of opportunities for inexperienced professionals to cut their teeth. Building magazine cited the “free-spending” and “vast amounts of oil money” as reasons to seek work in the Gulf. There was no shortage of debate on the ethics of practicing in the Middle East, and the primary question that practitioners had to face was establishing a context in which they could work. In an article on the Middle East Architectural Design magazine stated it was critical that “serious architects seek to develop a regional style” in an effort to contextualize their work and that architects had to “prepare [their] own brief ” to work in the region13. John Harris’s practice became part of the professional context in Qatar, laying the foundations for waves of consultants, international architects, and projects in the years to come. The rapid population growth and changing urban life in the years to come prompted Qatar’s first master plan by British firm Llewelyn-Davies in 1972.

The belated nature of master planning in the Gulf is in part the product of the rapid growth of the post oil-boom, but also the administrative restructuring that occurred after the independence from Britain. While public administration existed in Qatar by the 50’s, independence allowed for extensive administrative restructuring in creation of new ministries related to urbanization and infrastructural development. “The centralization of governance enabled petrodollars to be efficiently invested in the urbanization process”14 and the rapid growth continued through the 70’s and 80’s during which many westerners continued to be involved in Doha’s planning.

The race to convert oil wealth to progress and modernity became over time a race to convert oil wealth into international capital. The narrative of modernization,

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18. Bambling, Michele. “Lest We Forget: Structures of Memory in the UAE” -- UAE’s Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2014. Global Data Point, 2014, Global Data Point, June 16, 2014.

Ali Karimi

19. Bell, James. “He Said ‘Forward!’ to the Backward.” LIFE, November 17, 1952, 170-72.

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which had initially been, formed as a way of justifying reforms laws, and practices that would allow the British to do business in the Gulf transformed by the latter half of the 20th century into a capitalist complex centered around consumption.

By the time Dubai and Qatar initiated their own developments they had the experiences of Kuwait and Bahrain to draw upon, as well as a more developed pool of regional professionals to choose from. As important as the professional landscape was the idea of competition between the states “as each state [was] trying to get the advantage of the other”15. The flocking of consultants to these oil cities as well as architects, engineers and laborers began to shape a cycle in which cities ceased to be entities suited for a particular population and became highway signs that aimed at attracting speculators and global capital. In today’s world no city better exemplifies this phenomenon better than Dubai. Through the developments of the early 20th century we can see in the Gulf states the transition from top-down modernization in Bahrain to the beginnings of Dubai in which modernization transforms into an agent for speculative capital. Dubai from the late 1940’s had numerous contracts with exclusively British firms to develop projects. Projects like Al-Maktoum hospital and the British Bank of the Middle East, as well as the business-friendly nature of the Al-Maktoum family motivated the British political agent to move from Sharjah to Dubai in 1953.

Sheikh Rashid Al-Maktoum’s ambitions to turn Dubai into a business-hub for the region prompted a series of large-scale projects, one of which was a master-plan for the fledgling city - designed by John Harris. After his hospital win in Qatar, the invitation to prepare the master plan was the result of a meeting between John Harris and Sheikh Rashid orchestrated by the British Political Agent Sir Donald Hawley at a summer cocktail party in London in 195916. Harris’s master plan for Dubai was done in the early 1960s, coinciding with Sheikh Rashid’s other developmental projects. The projects done largely under British supervision and with cheap labor from India and Pakistan included the dredging of the Dubai creek (by British firm Halcrow and Partners and funded by a loan from Kuwait), as well as electrification of the city. Harris’s plans also coincided with the new land laws in Dubai which were adapted from the Sudanese land laws; “another example, though in a different sector, of consulting expertise contracted through regional networks based on British spheres of influence (the Sudan was also a part of the British Raj at this time)”17. At the time Harris’s masterplan was lauded for its flexibility and sensitivity in continuing the road patterns of old Dubai while also accommodating plots that could be used for development and encouraging investment. There was also criticism that in the hurry to produce the master plan Harris simply “drew the new city on top of the old one drawn from aerial photographs”18. In any case the plan would prove short lived as Dubai’s population quickly outgrew it and Harris would prepare a new master plan in 1971. Several more master plans would then be done after Harris’s each failing to account for the rapid growth of the city. Arguably the greater success for Harris in Dubai was designing her first iconic skyscraper. In the 1970’s Harris would also receive the commission for Dubai’s International Trade Center. The fifty-story building would be Dubai’s first iconic skyscraper and the tallest structure in the UAE for over twenty years. The DITC was opened in 1979 with the Queen of England in

audience. This unveiling in combination with the opening of the Jebel Ali freetrade port the same year heralded Dubai’s arrival on the international scene. In its arrival on the international scene, Dubai also signaled the full instantiation of the current era of architectural development that centered around modernization as the ability to attract investment, business, and clientele from around the world.

Whereas thirty years prior the concern was the provision of water, electricity and healthcare, the preoccupation became a question of how to purchase an identity and create a brand for the city that would make it known throughout the world. This is not to be understood as a breaking away from the trajectory of modernization, but in fact its apotheosis. Once the basic provisions of ‘civilization’ had been fulfilled, the project of modernization turned into one of capitalist consumption driven by the pace that had been set years prior, but also one of self-reflection and the need to prove to the world that the developing countries had modernized. This need in the case of Dubai came from the competitive nature of the Gulf city-states, but more so out of a context in the United Arab Emirates where there was the competition with the other emirates for ascendency. It becomes clear from the case of Dubai that the contemporary state of modernization is one born of the need to cement its autonomy, ascendancy and confirm its ‘hard-purchased’ modernity. In response the architectural landscape has become one of rapid projects and a built environment of quick iconic transactions.

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The context of the Gulf today can be understood as two overlapping projects: the project of modernization and the project of practice. The project of modernization was one of importing laws, iconography and development as driven by the notion of progress. The project of practice as we understand it in an urban and architectural sense is the transition from state architect in administrative role to state-advisors selecting architects to state-funded consultants as separate entities.

Modernization was the impetus behind the transformation, and was an imparted legacy of British rule and its momentum sustained by British presence as a pressure applying force in the domestic market. Over the course of the twentieth century, modernization passed through different stages and developed its own character as it leaped from the various countries until it became the capitalist project it is today.

From its beginnings as White Man’s burden in Belgrave saying “‘Forward!’ to the Backward”19 the act of modernization was heavily linked to state-building and the importation of architectural types while still being integrated in a milieu as a result of the trajectory of pre-oil development. While there was no architectural practice as such in early 20th century Bahrain, the rooted nature of Belgrave’s role allowed for the steady influx of technicians, the development in part of an architectural language native to the country, and during his time a steady transformation of Bahrain. Belgrave came in as a consultant, but acted in the capacity of a ruler due to his integration into the Bahraini government. His goal was modernization and his methodology infrastructural, architectural and urban. In Kuwait it occurred through integration by a ‘grass is greener’ mentality, where Kuwait allowed for the autonomy of the oil town of Ahmadi, which over time became a role model for Kuwait City. Ahmadi’s innovations would be imported locally into Kuwait City.

In Qatar and Dubai modernization would become capitalism as it shed its colonial 28

John Harris Dubai Masterplan showing the combination of old and new development, 1960, Dubai. (Bambling, 108)

Dubai’s Development plan by John Harris in 1971, showing advancement from his initial plan. (Morris, 110)

Ali Karimi

Figure 13 - Dubai’s Development Plan by John Harris, 1971, showing advancement from his initial plan (Morris, 110)

associations and became absorbed locally as consumption driven project to which the state of practice owes its existence today. Throughout this process we see identity grow increasingly to be the primary question for both locals and for foreigners. Particularly in the cases where there were no urban precedents nor developments of any similar scale the speed of growth for the sake of ‘catching up’ resulted in an environment where architects had to generate their own context. The nature of consultant work, rapid and as mercenary as it was resulted in either no project or a sense of responding to bare minimum conditions. It is precisely this inability to tap into any sense of project or context while also under the pressure to produce quickly to make up for lost time, which has caused the lack of rootedness in the Gulf. Ephemerality is born out of a pattern of consumption of services, as a process engendered by the British influence. This was also further exasperated by rapid growth that prevented the implementation of meaningful planning. The inability to implement plans fully was in part a consequence of the inability to organize administrations to prepare for growth in a pre-independence context.

It must be said that the aim here is not to demonize the British for securing their interest or for creating a cult of progress. Nor is the goal to place blame on rulers or decision makers who acted in the context of their time or whose decisions seem shortsighted in retrospect. The goal is to outline the context that has produced this shapelessness and to classify it as a force produced by lopsided and ultimately misinformed markets with plenty of purchasing power to be exploited. Establishing this context as a critical exercise serves to ground work in the region and help steer practice in a new direction. It must be also stressed that placelessness is not only a foreign narrative for the Gulf, but one the locals have applied to themselves as well. This is in large part a product of the unwillingness on the part of the country’s residents to claim ownership of the realities that seem un-authored by them. The current era of consultanates (the era of big government, big capital and consultancies) can only be reimagined by the establishment of a position on context.

Context here means understanding that that there is no lapse in national memory nor an ahistorical reading of the 20th century as haphazard gold rush. The professional landscape of the time had its foundations formed as a

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product of the British administrative efforts laying the groundwork for business - be it oil, architects, or contractors. The landscape is also indebted to the notions of development, modernization, and the notion of progress as a commodity. The architectural landscape can find its origins in Bahrain as a state concoction, in Kuwait as public-private process of osmosis, or in Qatar and Dubai as purchasing progress from foreign parties. It is clear that the current architectural landscape of the Gulf countries is not one that emerged suddenly out of the desert but rather one that had been gestating in the sand dunes for well over a century.

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Chapter 4 - Islands, Courtyards, and Speculative Capital Using Typology to Validate Dubai

Ali Karimi

The retelling of Dubai’s history typically centers around the pre-modern and current periods as contiguous (but not continuous) eras which have fomented the contemporary city. This narrative, however, provides little in the way of productive architectural and urban mechanisms which can structure and orient the growth of the city. More importantly, it does not answer the essential dilemma that Dubai faces, which is how we can discuss the idea of a city and the development of that idea over time as a productive critical exercise. This essay argues that through the lens of the dominant type in pre-modern Dubai we can understand Dubai’s current state as not only being historically sound but also urbanistically and typologically valid. By analyzing the dominant type of the courtyard first as a repository of communal and civic functions, then as a shaper of urban fabric, we understand it as the primary producer of the idea of the city in the Persian Gulf. When applying this understanding of the type to the case of Dubai we can see the transition from tribal agglomeration to capitalist city as logical developments of type rather than separate projects from discontinuous eras. Furthermore within this framework the introduction of world markets and speculative capital can be seen as a continuation of the logic of the city rather than as a sudden departure from Dubai’s early history.

The paradigm of the dominant type restarts the discussion on history and the city by seeking out the spatial and typological solutions to tackling the discontinuities in the idea of the city. The goal of this paradigm is to provide the theoretical backdrop and impetus for re-imagining the city as an active national project.

The courtyard type and its various instantiations can be seen in many forms across all cultures. What distinguishes the type in the Middle East from its cousins elsewhere is the nature of the courtyard as communal space, the social covenants that insure its autonomy and privacy, and the relationship of the tribal unit to the heuristic planning devices that structure the city. The archetypal courtyard which embodies these notions in the Islamic context is the Prophet Mohammed’s house/mosque built in the city of Medina. The importance of this precedent and the choice of the courtyard type as the architectural form is not coincidental.

The establishment of the city of Medina would be one of the first major actions 31

Fig 1. Prophet Mohammad’s House/Mosque KAC Creswell Early Muslim Architecture, (New York: Hacker Art Books, 1979) 1. Hamed Khosravi, Medina in City as Project (http://thecityasaproject.org/2012/06/medina/ June 4, 2012)

2. Ibid

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of state building and community development in Islam.

Medina, whose name itself distinguishes it from the other Arabic words for town, etymologically meant ‘space of sovereignty’ [1]. The construction of Islam’s first mosque began soon after the Prophet’s arrival in the town. The building highlights two fundamental characteristics: the first is of the internal space as a bounded communal space, and the second is of the courtyard type as a domain of community within the city. The use of the courtyard type allowed for the demarcation of the populace of Medina, and was the first spatial instantiation of that populace as part of a larger Islamic umma or community of the faithful. In developing the architectural means to denote the community we see that fundamental to the sovereignty of the Islamic state was the establishment of its basic unit: the courtyard type. The Prophet’s house/ mosque initially had been no more than a boundary wall and a partially roofed courtyard but was set primarily as an “inhabitable place to exclusively mark the core political body of an Islamic state... and community of faithful, set in a territorial dimension” [2]. The building would lose the form of the square as it expanded, adapting to the constraints of the site and context, but the platonic form was not as important as the retention of the bounded space.

The courtyard house/mosque was almost diagrammatic in nature, its function was the architectural formalization of the need to instantiate and codify community. Scaling up, if the exercise of creating the first mosque was a template for the community then the exercise of establishing Medina was the template for the city. Medina was an exercise in the codification of an urban dimension for the faith, and outlining the spatial devices and enclosing strategies that signify political entities. The idea of the city was as an urban construct composed of courtyard types, and the idea of the faith was as the demarcated community, the unity of the faithful. When proliferated across Medina, we see that the dominant type’s success lies in its pliability, housing communities or families; in the case of the Prophet’s mosque/house, both. The mosque acts as the space for the community, and the house is the domain of the family, the fundamental unit of a community. The distinction between courtyards for community purposes or residential is unimportant, as both occupy the basic unit of sovereign space of the faithful.

Fig 2. Enlarged Mosque of Mohammad in Medina Jean Sauvaget, La mosquée omeyyade de Médine (Paris: Vanoest, 1947)

The importance of the precedent here is neither to ground 32

3. Janet L. Abu-Lughod, The Islamic City--Historic Myth, Islamic Essence, and Contemporary Relevance. International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 19, No. 2 (May, 1987), p. 169

the importance of the courtyard as a religious space, nor to establish a theological canon as a top-down driver of the logic of cities in the region. The aim is to look at the courtyard type at its most abstract, in which it is no more than a wall which bounds a family or community. The importance of the courtyard space in formalizing the public on a local scale means that a city’s success is in its ability to allow for the uninhibited accumulation of civic or residential islands which in themselves instantiate the collective. It then becomes understandable why despite the initial similarity of the courtyard types and the organic urban fabric in European cities there is an absence of open collective spaces like the plaza in the Middle Eastern urban fabric. Collective space is diffuse across the city in the courtyard type, and integrated into the larger but still bounded spaces of mosques, garden compounds, and institutional complexes (not to mention houses). As a diagram the city can be understood as an agglomeration of bounded communities – a city of walls. Using the Prophet’s house as archetype and as a diagram, we can understand the courtyard house as the formal instantiation of the communal, and as the container of an understanding of the civic realm within the city.

Ali Karimi

At the scale of the city the courtyard type’s autonomy becomes the driver of urban form through the heuristics of its construction and expansion. Although there were no building codes as such, the built environment was codified through urf, known practices and social covenants, as well as the laws of Islamic jurisprudence.

The fundamental aspect of these laws is the prevention of harm to the neighbor which was formalized (to give a few examples) through the regulation of entryway locations, the use of winding paths to allow privacy, and the regulation of building heights to prevent views into others’ homes. The expansion of the home itself and the aggregational logic of courtyard houses with the goal of privacy and gender-conscious urban design resulted in organic growth patterns and dendritic streets. The cultural significance of privacy “left to the residential areas a large measure of autonomy, since many of the public functionaries operated largely in the commercial sections of the city”; further contributing to the development of unregulated urban fabric [3]. The intent of course is not to belabor the reasons behind the urban form of the city, but to establish the autonomy of these parcels, the lack of a driving planning structure for the design of the city, and the role of local decision-making as a shaper of urban form. The diffusion of the civic realm meant that the courtyard type was largely the dominant type because it could instantiate the necessary functions of a city. The driving needs of the city – communal, spiritual, social – could all be housed within the realm of the courtyard type. This also meant that the dominant type was free to exercise its autonomy to a greater degree and unencumbered so long as it did not impede on another’s freedom. Thus there was no need to develop a typological or formal solution for open spaces as the need for them could be addressed through the manipulation of the existing dominant type on the level of scale, organization, or subdivision. The autonomy of the community and private space is what configured the city, and the courtyard type becomes the smaller scale embodiment of that idea of the city.

Compared to China for example, where the courtyard type is equally dominant, the relationship of the courtyard house to the larger idea of the city is completely 33

different. The type is just as prolific and varied by scale and program, but in the context of Beijing the courtyard type is a part of a series of nested relationships that range from Imperial City to the Hutong, to the Siheyuan and finally to the individual rooms. In the Chinese context the courtyard’s relationship to the city is in the formalization of political hierarchies and subdivisions germane to the Chinese political and social milieu. These relationships did not exist in the Middle Eastern city and the urban fabric was driven by the growth of the autonomous unit in the city within the social checks of urf, privacy, etc.

The relationship of the courtyard to the larger city is not one of nested relationships but of bounded communities accomodated within the fabric of the city .

Fig 3. “18th-century Ottoman manuscript showing simplified typological representation of the city of Medina” Stefano Bianca, Urban Form in the Arab World Past and Present, (Thames & Hudson 2000)

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Having understood the courtyard as the smallest unit which represents the idea of the city, and its role in driving the form of the city; the case of Dubai presents itself as the means through which we can connect the operative logic of type to the processes of modernization. Towards the end of the 19th century Dubai was undergoing the transformation from sleepy fishing village into bustling port and merchant town. The courtyard type as Dubai had known it was primarily found in the form of barasti – palm frond huts. The transformation of Dubai at the time was in part due to the influx of merchants from Bander Lengeh at the invitation of Sheikh Rashid bin Maktoum, Dubai’s leader at the time. These merchants were lured to Dubai with promises of land, trade and business incentives. In return the immigrants brought with them wealth and architectural knowledge from Southern Iran which began the transformation of the thatched courtyard huts into coral-stone courtyard houses. For some families, these two would be interchangeable, the barasti would be used as a summer home, and the coral-stone house would be the winter home. Although radically different tectonically, the transition from barasti into coral-stone house was made possible through the retention of the same organizational and spatial logic as well as the same relationship to the urban fabric. As one replaced the other over time the buildings’ relationships to the street and the relationship of their internal spaces to each other remained the same. The influx of Iranians from Bandar Lengeh also established locally that the courtyard type was resilient enough to host different nationalities and ethnicities within the same urban fabric.

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4. Jim Krane City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism (Macmillan, Sep 15, 2009)

Ali Karimi

Fig 4. Barasti and Coral-stone houses in mid-20th century Dubai

Fig 5. Sheikh Mahtoum Hospital (center) built in 1952 Graeme Wilson, Father of Dubai : Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al-Maktoum (Media Prima 1999)

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This would hold true for the British political agency, and for other Western buildings as they would be introduced to the developing city. Until the 1960s, the evolution of the courtyard type in Dubai continued as it integrated of new functions and spaces, modern amenities, and the features of International Modernism as designed by the British.

The discovery and subsequent exportation of oil would prompt a sudden and drastic increase in population, quadrupling within five years of the start of exportation in 1969 and doubling every ten years after. Soon the character of the city would also change rapidly, as the dominant type transformed from courtyards and winding streets to multiple story apartment buildings in a city designed for motor-vehicles. Implementation of new building codes was also a significant factor, as it enforced minimum setbacks which made the courtyard model untenable spatially. The courtyard type continued to exist in architectural terms but only in the occasional villa, compound or institutional building. It is at this point in time that traditional histories of the contemporary period would begin; spinning a narrative of highways, ports, and free trade zones. The contemporary condition of the city is of developer-managed tracks of land for the creation of icons like Dubai World and the Palm Island. Often the narrative would end on a note bemoaning the discontinuity of tradition in the current era and the lack of identity as a consequence of the modernization process. An alternative narrative however would be to choose to understand the current context of Dubai as a product of the deep structure of type, and its role in the formation of pre-modern Dubai.

As established earlier, the power of the courtyard type was largely in its ability to frame the idea of the city and the urban fabric responded accordingly. The courtyard type was the vehicle for creating a city which was agile - mercantile and heterogeneous - while also integrating the civic and communal functions of a city at a local level. The proliferation of the courtyard type created a city that was an agglomeration of autonomous islands which housed their respective localized communities. If we understand these as being the primary relationships (the civic, urban, and political building blocks) then the idea of the city and its fundamental role as a space that

That then is the caveat: that the continuity of the relationship of individual domain to city comes at a loss of all the life that had initially allowed the courtyard type to function. The hands-off nature of the Islamic city and the sparseness of imposed civic or public function was a product of those functions being addressed on a local scale.

The embedded green spaces, communal program, and diffusion of civic life throughout the fabric were all lost in the scaling up of the autonomous relationship. The result is the creation of a condition in which the trajectory and importance of autonomy can be maintained and market forces can act upon the city in complete freedom but with no ‘city’ existing as such. The archetypal courtyard was the boundary which contained community, and the city was the agglomeration of communities (or tribes/sects). The contemporary city is the legally enclosed island of capitalist development, bereft of a larger design that enforces civic

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enables this autonomy becomes the driving idea behind the development of Dubai. In this light we see that while the form and scale of the courtyard is lost, the urban logic and idea behind what a city should offer is retained.

Where once there had been autonomous tribal islands and courtyard communities joined by the connective tissue of dendritic streets; now there are the speculative islands of capitalist autonomy bounded by highways and the sinews of motor transport. The city had been a space of agonistic pluralism which functioned by its privileging of privacy and its commitment to the idea of community as it inhabits architectural space. These notions when taken into a capitalist framework are well suited for the purposes of the free market and quickly jettison the civic baggage which the city and type previously had to provide. Given the large expatriate population it makes even more sense that the notion of the civic space is never entirely a topdown planned exercise in Dubai, as the notion of citizen is equally vague and non-inclusive. Civic space is seen then as an infrastructural problem, providing the amenities to pursue freedom and development with greater degrees of autonomy. As such the example of Dubai is in itself an archetypal condition: a model in which the logic of the courtyard house can develop rapidly into the development plot of a large scale city while maintaining the same autonomy and role in shaping the form of the city and its fabric. The idea of the city is retained, but not the dominant type which allowed that idea to function in the first place.

Fig 6. a) Abstracted courtyard type b) Contemporary villa type - dictated by contemporary master plans and building codes Kevin Mitchell, Learning from Traces of Past Living : Courtyard Housing as Precedent and Project, Published in ‘The Courtyard House from Cultural Reference to Universal Relevance’ (Ashgate - England 2009)

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Fig 7. Dubai in 2014 - a city of icons and islands

life (such as in the West) or the internal logic of the type which allows for the city to be know-able as a political realm (as in the Islamic city). Though the communal spaces of the Islamic city were privately owned spaces or enclosed spaces (rather than open spaces such as plazas) the scale of a mosque garden or courtyard were such that they allowed for the containment and inclusion their constituent community. So even though there may be the provision of privately owned public space in developments in Dubai, such as a beach as part of a development, these do not aspire to a legibility on a civic scale nor collective scale that was diffuse in the Islamic city. The current state of Dubai is evacuated islands – autonomous but bereft of all but market logic. Where as the city in the Islamic case was understandable through its growth and integration of its formalized communities, the contemporary city is only understandable as the infrastructral armature that allows business to take place.

Ali Karimi

Having made clear the relationship between the deep structure of the dominant type in conveying an understanding of the city and its role in the figuration of the developmental city we have to answer two questions : why Dubai and why type ? The usefulness of Dubai as a case study is obvious enough - the speed, scale and intensity of its urbanization is unequaled currently in the Persian Gulf. It provides a model which can be emulated (by neighboring cities) and an abstract clarity as a result of the combined logic of private autonomy and free market speculation. In Dubai one can find the development of the idea of a city as it changes rapidly over a short period of time; but none of the typical barriers to growth in the form of local opposition, infrastructural challenges, contested public/private realms, or lack of funding.

The city provides a intense model through which we can understand the evolution of type, the proliferation of the dominant type, and the relationship to the urbanization process in a developmental city. Ultimately Dubai provides both a warning and explanation for the trajectory of modernization in the Gulf. Before the model of Dubai is implemented elsewhere there must be an understanding of the drivers behind that idea of the city and how to propose alternate models. It is true that the development of Dubai and its current state can also be read through several other theoretical frameworks,

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each of which explain the city’s trajectory through alternate lenses. What makes type the operative framework is that it allows us to understand the development of an idea of the city in relation to a single unit, and the figuration of the city as consquence of the political and social relationships embedded within that unit. We see in the lineage of the courtyard type the continuation of the same civic and urban logic from pre-modern to contemporary Dubai. The flexibility of the type, and its embedded liberties allowed it to accommodate capitalism and the continued drive for free market autonomy without any civic or political inhibitions. The traditional barriers that would exist in other contexts born of a urban populace were absent in a context in which barriers for communities exist within the type itself. All barriers to development were internalized within the bounding wall and self-regulating at a scale smaller than that of the city. Type as an operative framework allows us to look at Dubai and pose two solutions: the first is to reconstruct the notion of the civic and introduce public space top-down across the city. This is essentially the importation of new urban models to rectify the current state of Dubai. The alternative is to begin the process of reinterpreting the type, and going beyond its role as a shaper of urban boundaries towards using it as a means of designing and envisioning new and appropriate communal spaces for Dubai.

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Using the courtyard type and tracing its development in Dubai allows us to understand the flexibility of the individual unit of type, its instantiation of the idea of the community and its power in generating a city driven by those ideas.

The case of Dubai also allows us to see market forces outstrip the safety measures that insure the continued legibility of a city via its dominant type. Perceiving the development of Dubai through the framework of type allows us to understand the embedded urban, social, and political logic in architecture which explain a city’s growth. Type provides an explanation of how a city can become so commercially palatable while also empty of all overriding civic, spatial, or communal desires.

While other explanations that are economic, political, or anthropological are equally valid, using type allows us to contextualize Dubai’s growth and her trajectory rather than see the city as a context-less aberration. Validating Dubai as a entity born of a deep architectural and urban logic allows us to re-explore the fundamental idea of the city. The end goal of this validation is not to justify the current state of Dubai, but to introduce new possibilities of what the city can and should be.

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Chapter 5 - Kuwait’s Utopia

1. Housing crisis continues – Plans in place for 5 major projects http://news.kuwaittimes.net/housing-crisis-continues-plans-place-5major-projects/ 2. Ibid

Ali Karimi

3.Asseel Al-Ragam (2013) The Destruction of Modernist Heritage: The Myth of Al-Sawaber, Journal of Architectural Education, 67:2, 243-252, pg244 4.Ibid

The history of government-built housing in the Gulf is similar across most of the GCC states. Beginning with welfare programs in the 1950’s and 60’s which settled people into detached single family villas, the trend continues to this day at increasing cost and difficulty for regional governments. In the UAE, Saudi, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait the past half century has seen the continued decentralization, suburbanmodel housing, and the expansion of infrastructure in service of the public and private sectors of housing. Alternatives to this mode have presented themselves over time, but remained solely for non-nationals in those countries, with nationals preferring the single-family villa. The case for a higher density housing is most emblematic in Kuwait, where the failure of density as alternative still occurred despite more ideal conditions than elsewhere in the region. After all, the failure occurred in a context where some of the world’s best architects were proposing higher density solutions for the country. Yet, despite these conditions the trajectory of government built housing did not change. Half a century later, Kuwait has a backlog of over 100,000 applications to its public authority for housing1. The process of resolving the current housing crisis will occur through the same model of suburban single family villas and the government has made plans to build new cities outside Kuwait city with hundreds of thousands of residences in the works2.

This essay will examine the reasons behind the prevalence of the current suburban model of government built housing, explicating the failure of higher density housing as an alternative, and why thirty years later it may be the solution to the current housing crisis.

Government-built housing became state policy in Kuwait as part of the nationbuilding agenda of the Kuwaiti ruling family. The emir Sheikh Abdulla Al Salem Al Sabah implemented a series of reforms, welfare policies, and a program of construction as part of the effort to assert Kuwait’s modernity and nationhood3.

In an effort to modernize the country’s housing stock, two policies were enacted to usher in the welfare state in Kuwait. The first was the Land Acquisition Policy, which provided Kuwaiti males with housing in the form of pre-built

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Fig 1. Al Sawaber Government Housing in Kuwait

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Figure 2 - Plan of Kuwait by Minoprio Spencely MacFarlane

Figure 3 - Plan of Low income housing dwellings built by the PAHW in 1968 5.Ibid 6. Al-Ragam pg 246

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homes or through the ‘loan and plot’ option (which people found more preferable)4. The second policy was the Public Organizing Line which designated all land outside the walls of Kuwait City as government property.

The phenomenon of decentralization in 1950’s which resulted from these two policies is called the ‘tathmeen’ or ‘appraisal’. The government purchased land from Kuwaitis in the old city at inflated prices and then offered them land and a loan (or a pre-built house) in the POL territory. Thus in the 50’s the government policy moved people out of the old city and provided enough money and government owned land to build a single-family villa in what used to be the area outside the city walls of the old city. This process was enacted with the ideals of a healthy modern city, the modern citizen, and the modern state. For planners in Kuwait (most of which were either British or Arabs from elsewhere in the region) this policy served to decongest the central city, increase the quality of life in Kuwait, and create a modern city fabric. The rhetoric used by the Kuwaiti government is not only the same as that of the other Gulf countries who enacted similar housing policies, but also to that of American and British post-war urbanists. The implementation of decentralization effectively evacuated the central city and sent a generation of Kuwaitis into the suburbs designed by Minoprio Spencely MacFarlane (MSM)5. The detached single-family villa was introduced first by the British in the oil town of Ahmadi, but took root in the master-plan for Kuwait by MSM in the form of satellite suburbs with single family housing organized around local community centers (with mosques and a market) (Figure 2). The move was from extended family courtyard houses to single-family villas which also meant a sudden change in the structure of Kuwaiti family life. The conflation of nation-building with the role of government in providing housing meant that for Kuwaitis the provision of the single-family villa became a citizen’s right and a source of governmental legitimacy. Home ownership was not only a right but having a home became part of what made a Kuwaiti citizen. As immigrant laborers were not entitled to housing, or high level government jobs, the association between home, government job and housing turned the welfare policies into citizens’ rights which had to be allocated by the government on a regular basis. Because there are no taxes in Kuwait the welfare state became a rentier state, in which oil wealth had to be transformed

into ‘citizens’ rights’; beginning a path dependency in which the government had to continue providing housing as a way of fulfilling (in the absence of democracy) the social contract.

7. Al-Ragam pg 246

The initial lack of experimentation with higher-density developments was a product of several factors. The first being the availability of land and ample funding.

The second is the adoption of policies from the British planning experience in oil-towns and garden-towns introduced by Western consultancies. The third is because non-Kuwaitis had begun to live in the denser old city or in the newer midrises of the eastern neighborhoods of Salmiya the move to distinguish between national and foreigner was reinforced by the distinction between villa for citizen and apartment for non-citizen. The structural nature of rentier states also places government emphasis on the allocation of privilege rather than the distribution of tax revenue6, which means that the challenge for housing planning authorities rests more on structures for turning oil revenue into citizen housing rather than equal and fair habitation across a city. Meaning that citizens remain entitled to a certain standard of living, while immigrant laborers or foreigners are provided for by the market which produces the higher density apartment complexes, laborer housing, or high-rises with high end apartments. Thus the state apparatus for housing is less incentivized to provide a range of housing solutions, to mix economic classes and demographics, and more concerned with the delivery of housing for the middle/upper class Kuwaiti citizen. For twenty years following the tathmeen the provision of single-family housing continued as policy by the Kuwaiti Public Authority for Housing Welfare (PAHW), without attempting an alternative. This trend continued despite calls as early as the 1960’s by government planners like Saba Shiber (a Palestinian planner in Kuwait) to diversity the variety of housing provided due to “strong social feelings about this subject”7. This is not to say there was no change whatsoever in the typology, as plot sizes began to decrease with land scarcity. But the model remained the same, and the decreasing plot sizes were compensated with an increase in the built-up area of the home.

So although alternate typologies were not introduced for the two decades after the tathmeen, densification more subtly occurred by producing bigger houses on smaller lots (Figure 3).

10. Al Shalfan pg 21

8. Al Shalfan pg 16 9. Al-Ragam pg 246

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By the 1970’s, the issue of land scarcity prompted the government to revisit the possibilty of higher density solutions. This also coincided with the entry of a new wave of architects into Kuwait. Kuwait was the site for several well-known architects; the list includes Georges Candilis, the Architects’ Collaborative, the Smithsons, Jorn Utzon, Kenzo Tange and others. As land costs increased and the city ran into the development constraints of Kuwait’s Oil Company territory (Figure 4), the PAHW began to contemplate alternative proposals for higher density housing8. Concepts like urban renewal which were part of the global discourse on architecture were imported into Kuwait as part of a critique of the suburban model. There was also concern with the loss of culture and identity in suburbanization, so there was also the desire to bring Kuwaitis back to the

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older parts of the city played a role in encouraging the government to pursue these projects. Of the many proposals made only the Architects’ Collaborative proposals and Arthur Erickson’s Al-Sawaber complex were built.

Ali Karimi

Fig 4. The relationship between housing policy changes and application backlog, property prices and sprawl, 1965–2012 - Sharifa Al Shalfan

Fig 5. Development Constraints in Kuwait - Sharifa Al Shamlan

11.Al-Ragam pg 246 12.Al-Ragam pg 249 13.Ibid 14.Ibid

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Al-Sawaber, built in 1981, is emblematic of the rise and demise of the argument for higher density housing in Kuwait (Figure 5). For the Kuwaiti government it represented “a landmark in the progressive housing program for Kuwait, serving as a prototype for future housing developments”9. Its prominent location in the heart of Kuwait, the ambition and scale of the model community, and its utopian vision of Kuwaiti society made it the herald of a new era of higher density housing.

Numerically speaking, “out of the 93,040 housing units provided by the government between 1954 and 2012 only 1,088 were apartments”10; meaning that Al Sawaber with its 524 apartments made up half of all apartments ever built by the Kuwaiti government11. Not only was Al-Sawaber a large part of the discourse on housing in Kuwait by virtue of its scale, importance, and civic character; but it literally made up half of the argument for higher density solutions to the housing landscape of Kuwait. Its prominence also meant that the failure of Al-Sawaber as a model would become like Pruitt-Igoe, Robin-Hood Gardens, and others abroad the primary argument against higher density models in Kuwait.

There are several reasons for why Al-Sawaber ‘failed’.

First of all, failure is defined by Kuwaitis to be that the complex was unable to attract and retain the Kuwaiti middle-class citizens it was designed for. So although the complex is inhabited to this day, its failure is not as a housing model per se, but as an alternative that is attractive to Kuwaitis rather than foreign laborers. The failure of complex can be attributed to several reasons ranging from the design, to the maintenance, to culture and context of 1980’s Kuwait. In terms of design, the apartments were much smaller than the housing given to Kuwaitis (although in effect still very large at 250 sqm).

The apartments were seen as smaller and them less flexible to Kuwaitis who would prefer the villa for its potential for expansion. Some apartments also did not include the space of the diwaniya, or gathering room, a critical element of Kuwaiti political and social life. In terms of execution, the number of apartments built was half that

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Fig 6 - Al Sawaber Project Proposal 1977 - Arthur Erickson

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of Erickson’s proposal which prevented the community from reaching optimal self sufficiency12. The issue of self-sufficiency was then further exasperated by the poor implementation of communal and commercial functions that were supposed to exist in the project at its launch but were not fully operational. The lack of a home-owners association also prevented the appropriate maintenance of the development, the establishment of a communal aspect for the project, and a sense of neighborly pride.

Ali Karimi

Fig 7. Axonometric of Al Sawaber Project

Fig 8. Souk Al Wataniya - The Architects’ Collaborative - MIT Archives

Over the course of the 1980’s and then with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait the Al-Sawaber complex fell into disrepair. In part due to trends beginning in the 1970’s but also due to post-Gulf War population shifts, the central city was increasingly the space of foreign workers rather than Kuwaitis. After the occupation ended, divorcees, non-Kuwaitis and widowers moved into flats that were abandoned during the war13. Others began to move out of their apartments and lease them to foreign laborers who were used to living in higher densities in the central city. The condition of the apartments worsened as the number of inhabitants would rise to as many as ten or more in a single apartment14. In the 2000’s as the value of property in the old city began to rise once more due to land speculation, there became an increasing interest in the slumification of the development as an argument for the demolishishment and redevelopment of the site.

The impetus to besmirch Al-Sawaber to serve real estate interest became part of the argument against higher density solutions for Kuwaitis.

Al-Sawaber was doomed to fail. Aside from the problem of implementation, the bigger issue is that the case for higher density was hinged on the success of a single project. Al-Sawaber reflects the fact that there was insufficient effort to change the attitude towards high density housing. The lack of effort is both in the lack of a variety and extensive testing of higher density solutions for middle-class Kuwaitis as well as in the continued push to make the alternative a success. Al-Sawaber was declared a failure within ten years of its inception in a post-war context where the single family villa had over fifty years to entrench itself in notions of citizenship and national pride. For the complex to have been successful there would have had to be continued upkeep as well as other similar projects in the central city. Additionally,

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there would have had to be a concerted effort to phase out the single-family solution or to present an alternative to break the thirty year belief in the villa as the model which represents the Kuwaiti citizen. The failure of Al-Sawaber occured in the same vein as the demise of global modernism, but its failure also spelled the end of a particular vision of alternative urbanism in Kuwait. After the Gulf War the trend towards decentralization and suburban villas continued until today with the planning of cities on the outskirts of existing developments.

This is in part due to the path dependency which begun in the 1950’s, faith in the 1950’s model as being the one which insures autonomy and privacy, the tried and tested process of delivery and habitation, and ultimately the strong cultural attachment to the typology. There is also the desire to preserve the status quo, meaning that increasing development on the fringes does not risk the possibility of politicization which higher density habitation may incur. For those who own property in the central city, the potential for money to be made in speculation and building for commercial purposes means that the market would prefer to develop for non-residential use or to develop high-end apartments. At the same time the government’s role in acquiring land and history of tathmeen mean that land is overvalued in hopes that the government may purchase it at a higher price to construct housing.

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However the potential for higher density government-built housing is is clearer than ever today. The single-family villa today has continued to change, with people adding additional floors to house children and building to the maximum lot size. The increase of land costs has prompted families to live together longer, so the building up of the villas to include parents and their children turns the villa type over time into row-houses and townhouses. At the same time, increased investment and business returning to the central city and luxury apartments have made commuting into the central city a more common occurrence in Kuwaiti life. This has given the idea of living in the central city greater prominence, and has also meant that Kuwaitis would prefer to live within a reasonable distance of the center. Younger generations in particular enjoy the proximity offered by the older parts of Kuwait city and the adjacency of new restaurants, shopping, and cultural venues. This is the same younger generation that has experienced living in apartments during their studies abroad or during their travels, so they are familar with the benefits of denser cities like London, New York or Boston. Ironically, it is perhaps in the refurbishment of Al-Sawaber that the argument for higher density housing can be made once more – arguing for preservation, up-zoning and maintenance rather than wholesale demolition and urban renewal. However ultimately the argument for higher density is not a matter of one project but of a shift in culture and education. This needs the government to address the crisis head on and to rethink its housing policies rather than to continue to reinforce the financial and urban problems of the current model. Just as housing represented a nation-building initiative in the 1950’s, so too must it be reconsidered as a national project today to reclaim the space of the city. The slow and careful shift in culture, lifestyle, and policies do not necessarily need to write off the suburban model in Kuwait, but simply to make alternative options available.

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Chapter 6 - Housing as National Project Bahrain Case Study

Ali Karimi

One of the legacies of the 20th century was the trickling-down of politics and ideology from first world countries to developing ones. Whether the notions were abstract concepts like democratic government or physical like architectural form and city planning, the developing world found itself reimagining the notions of an increasingly modern world on its own terms. Young nations borrowed ideas and terminology as they quickly forged their ties to the larger economic constellations of an almost entirely industrialized world. In the case of the Arab Gulf states of Kuwait, Qatar, the Emirates, and Bahrain these efforts played out even more rapidly, as fishing and pearling towns suddenly discovered that they sat upon over 10% percent of the world’s oil and natural gas. By the early 1970s, less then forty years after oil was first discovered in the Gulf and within the first ten or twenty years of the formation of these nations a series of changes marked their importance to the larger global chess board. The end of Bretton Woods, the establishment of OPEC, and the oil embargo which followed fundamentally changed the trajectory of the 20th century. This meant that within an exceedingly short period of time, the security of the global economy and its dependence on Middle Eastern oil were made evident and the stability of the Gulf became another key aspect of American and Western foreign policy.

In the absence of modern institutions, a host of professionals began advising the Gulf states on how to chart a course for their development - to imagine a politically stable region now that it was important to the global economy. Taking the reins from the British residents and political agents of the 1930s-50’s, international consultancies now provide a suite of services that continue existing trajectory of growth and city-making for the Gulf countries. This has created the strange mixture of global cities, tribal governance, and corporate branding that characterizes the small city states. The transition from village to oil y metropolis was the product of a brand of political and civic imagination unique to the region and the schools of thought which emerged in the early 20th century. Given the small populations, size and harsh environments of these countries, ecological and

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Fig 1. Photo of signs near East Hidd Housing Project

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Ali Karimi

Fig 2. Front Page of Akhbar Al Khaleej Newspaper - October 18th 2015 Translation: ‘Council of Representatives: Bahrain suffers from a housing crisis, the Minister [of Housing] denies’ ‘60,000 Units in Demand, 40,000 promised by 2022’ ‘Work commencing on new cities, assurances of speedy execution’

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This article looks at the phenomenon of government built housing in the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, with specific focus on the state of Bahrain where the construction of 40,000 units is being funded by the 10 billion dollar ‘GCC Marshall Plan’ . The article will move from the current housing crisis as a response to the political turmoil of the Arab Spring to its initial origins in the decolonization of the region by the British. We can understand the current political and architectural impetus for new government built cities through the fifty year transition between tribal state and petrodollar welfare/rentier state. Ultimately however, this case study presents the ways in which architectural ideas become global and are adopted in developing contexts to meet a particular political or urban vision – in the case of Bahrain government housing is more than just an idea of civic relationships, but in fact an urban addiction in need of a bailout.

Fig 3. Protest against naturalization in Bahrain (naturalized citizens are entitled to government houses) - 2011 1. Bahrain spends $4.4bn of GCC [$10bn] ‘Marshall Plan’ cash [2 years state budget] - Construction Week 2.“Over the past four years (2010 to 2014), the MoH has made significant progress in the implementation of housing projects in the country, having provided 8,395 housing units, 1,257 residential plots and 9,424 housing loans, bringing the total housing services provided between 1960-2014 to 108,576, costing the country BD3.3 billion ($8.75 billion), says the spokesman.” - Gulf Construction Worldwide

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systemic thought began to imagine these countries as total ecologies to be managed on the civic, infrastructural, and political/economic level. In the case of the island nation of Bahrain for example, the founding of the nation, the development of the welfare state and public housing, and creation of oil infrastructure all went hand in hand as the means to establish a stable ecosystem for the extraction and exportation of oil. The marriage of the welfare tribal state and affordable housing developed over the course of fifty years as the primary relationship between the government and its citizens. Through the extraction of oil, employment of the citizens in the bureaucracy and creation of an urbanism composed of government-built housing Bahrain developed into a state which ultimately sustained itself through maintaining that balance. By 2011 however these systems have become increasingly difficult to maintain. Population growth, changing demographics, the triumph of global capitalism, all have led to political and economic crises that wracked the region, culminating in the Arab Spring. This all the more acute in the case of Bahrain due to its small size, varied population composed of Sunni and Shiite sects, and dwindling oil reserves.

As Bahrain’s internal stability wavered, the Arab Gulf States began the ‘GCC Marshall plan program’ giving 10 billion dollars to Bahrain for the construction of affordable housing and infrastructure – breathing a second life into the 20th century social contract.

Fig 4. Bahrain Government Budget

Fig 5. Bahrain Government Revenues

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Fig 6. Comparison of government-housing distribution, Kuwait vs Bahrain

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Shortly after the tumults of the Arab Spring, several Gulf governments began wide-ranging government housing projects. In the UAE, Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia the national crisis was seen to be first and foremost an urban and architectural one that could be solved through the deployment of the single-family villa model. The government’s position on these protests and the popular discontent is of particular interest to our discipline - because the immediate response to this crisis was architectural. In the panic of 2011, the only solution that could be turned to – the only way the governments of the Gulf could imagine their countries after the spring was through an architectural solution.

So the Gulf governments announced expansive national housing projects, heralding a new era of town making, building cities for the 21st century. In the case of Bahrain, the Bahraini government announced that it would begin the journey to build 40,000 units by 2022 [Fig 1]. What followed was a series of announcements highlighting future projects, each larger than the next as a means of resolving the national housing crisis. This crisis and the associated metrics which drove the 40,000 number derived largely from the waitlist of applications for housing to the Ministry of Housing which numbered over the 60,000 applicants. However, and more crucially, the crisis was also derived from the confidence in the belief that political discontent was caused by the lack of housing and the associated complex that housing represents. The traditional argument being that the protestors were largely citizens that did not have the means to afford their own homes, thus being agitated, unstable, unable to marry or to start a family. Or simply citizens who felt they had no stake in the government or representation, and who looked to some sort of financial recompense to their ills. There was also the belief that in a built environment noted for its small size and high land costs relative to average income, the solution to housing problems was a systemic issue that could be solved most easily and rapidly at the delivery stage – bypassing the need for mortgages or land use reform. So the solution – substituting strawmen for government housing is tried and true in the Bahraini case, and if enough citizens were given housing then issues with the government and land governance would be forgotten. Thus the government decided to undertake the construction of forty thousand units of housing - which in the Bahraini context

corresponds to increasing the existing housing stock of almost 160,000 units by twenty-five percent, housing approximately two hundred thousand people (a fifth of the Bahraini national population), and matching the last forty years of government built housing production. By 2022 approximately half of the Bahraini population will be housed in government-built housing, and largely in one of a few variations on a single housing typology. In a turn of architectural bait and switch, what began as a political crisis soon became an architectural one, and the solution was strictly numerical: 40,000 villas.

Fig 7. Charles Belgrave James Bell ‘He said Forward! To the Backward’ Life Magazine, November 17, 1952

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Of the rights that protestors were demanding, housing was deemed to be the one which would resolve the other issues - a revalidation of the welfare state through the element which most represents the citizen: the home. Yet this number is not an easy one to achieve, particularly in the small island context where land scarcity makes the wide scale construction of mass housing a financial and logistical challenge. The cost is also magnified by the fact that the current solution demands extensive land reclamation - the creation of dormitory islands and cities on the edges of existing ones in the island nation. The Bahraini government has been in deficit since 2009 [Fig 4, 5], so a ‘GCC Marshall Plan’ aimed at supporting housing and infrastructure in Bahrain has been endorsed by regional Gulf governments. The 10 billion dollars were put together by the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar as an means of financing Bahrain’s development plans (infrastructure and housing) and to help boost the economy as a means of combating the unrest2. In the case of Bahrain then, the need to solve a political problem with an urban solution is not only a domestic issue but a regional and international one. The architectural crisis of Bahrain is not only one shared by regional governments, but is one in which all regional governments are financially, and politically entrenched. How is it then that the Bahraini government has arrived at a point where urbanization and the deployment of a single typology (the government built single family villa) has necessitated not only vast government expenditure and effort, but the cooperation of nearby countries to achieve said goal? What has caused a country to aim to house half its population in national housing, to request funding from neighboring countries, and to solve this crisis through altering the land mass of the country?

3. Ministry of Housing - A Journey of Accomplishment and Giving -Ministry of Housing Publication 1992 pg 33 4. Abdulla, Khalid M., The State in Oil Rentier Economies: The Case of Bahrain

Fig 8. Awali Bapco

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Fig 9. Isa Town Master Plan

Fig 10. Isa Town Gateway

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As in the case of the other Gulf countries, the process of arriving to the current housing crisis begins in the early 20th century, prior to Bahrain’s independence.

The first person to imagine Bahrain as an ecological project was the British financial advisor to the Sheikh of Bahrain, Charles Belgrave. Belgrave, although legally only a financial advisor, was the defacto administrator of Bahrain from 1926 to 1957 and began a series of modernization efforts prior to and after the discovery of oil. For Belgrave, Bahrain as an system (similar to Siwa Oasis in Egypt where he had been before) was to be subject to an extensive series of modernization efforts to bring the tribal state to the stature of a modern country. He described these efforts in tandem – the idea of modernity as being the complete set of physical and conceptual hurdles which needed to be leaped by the fledlging protectorate. These efforts were funded through customs fees and trade taxes but were hastily expedited by the discovery of oil which helped fund the construction of bridges, schools, hospitals and public parks [Fig 11].

Concurrent with the growth of the rest of the country through oil rent was the creation of the oil company town of Awali by BAPCO (Bahrain Petroleum Company).

This heralded the introduction of western single-family villas in a suburban configuration [Fig 12] as the first planned town in Bahrain.

Built in 1934, Awali housed primarily British and nonBahraini residents and was the ‘world’s first centrally air conditioned town’ (according to Awali brochures).

Belgrave also began what would become the first case of public housing in Bahrain, in the form of Madinat al Ummal (worker housing city) built by the municipality in Muharraq in the 1950’s. Belgrave’s time cemented in the case of Bahrain the beginnings of the transition from tribal state, establishing municipalities and courts while also respecting the tribal loyalties and systems which existed prior to the discovery of oil. Many of the post-war British attitudes towards urbanization, health and development were translated to the Middle Eastern context and found a middle ground between European liberal politics and tributary relationship of the leading tribe to its supporters. Tribal politics was built on rewarding allegiances through gifts – usually in the form of money and land – and in an economy increasingly

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1990

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Fig 11. Land-mass of Bahrain over time Good Arab Bad City

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1990

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Fig 12. Government Built Housing of Bahrain over time Source: Urbanization from - Al Ansari, F., Al-Sayeh, Noura, Al-Khalifa, Mai Bint Mohammed, Bahrain. Ministry of Culture, & International Architectural Exhibition. (2010). Reclaim. Bahrain: Ministry of Culture, Kingdom of Bahrain.

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Fig 13. Government Built Housing in Bahrain 2015

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dependent on oil rent rather than trade or industry these easily translated into the beginnings of welfare governance.

The modern attitudes about the virtues of housing, and modern cities and the power that these could have as civilizing artifacts were adopted and so for the nascent government the creation of housing cities was both an exercise of governance, an opportunity to create a loyal bureaucracy, a way of legitimizing the government, a way of civilizing the citizen and managing cities, and a way of establishing a system of power relations and benefits relative to loyalty.

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Five years after Belgrave’s departure, the plans were drawn for the first Bahraini government built housing community in Isa Town. Designed by British consultants Wimpy Associates, Isa Town was envisioned as a modern city, clean and sanitary and more appropriate for the 20th century citizen. Built with the aim of reducing population density in the cities of Muharraq and Manama and better distributing the population throughout the country - Isa Town also aimed to provide amenities like parks, soccer fields and health centers in addition to the “appropriate and healthy architecture environment for the modern citizen”3. As a Ministry of Housing publication puts it: “Therefore construction of this town is considered to be a pioneer step towards the formation of new urban societies equipped with essential urbanized requirements to catch up the modern rise in standards of living began in the era of His Highness Sheikh Isa”.

The apparent emphasis on sanitation and health distinguished the modern city from the old towns of Muharraq and Manama. Designed around automobile transportation with the introduction of a new detached family villa model the project was intended to provide six thousand homes, and built with schools, mosques, playground and other functions. The establishment of Isa Town began the conflation of the welfare state and government legitimacy with housing, and the idea of urbanization through government housing and city planning as allocative process. This occurred for several reasons; the first reason is the idea of legitimacy through allocation - a product of the transition from tribal state to welfare state. The tribal society of the Gulf was built on the relationship of loyalty between the sheikh/emir and subservient tribes. In return for pledging their loyalty to 56

Fig 14. Hamad Town 5. Al-Watani, Abbas, New Towns and Urban Communities in the 21st Century Concepts Issues Approaches, June 2000 Ali Karimi

6. Ibid pg 15

Fig 15 Hamad Town Housing Pamphlet

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the Sheikh, the Sheikh would distribute wealth, land or favors upon his subjects. So prior to the 20th century, the sheikhs in Bahrain would repay the favors of other families (such as the Jalahma or Bin Ali) with land or money. The modern state’s welfare programs then stem from similar programs in Europe but also from the “tribal tradition of securing loyalty and allegiance through the distribution of favors”4. The city was named after Sheikh Isa, the ruler of Bahrain at the time as a confirmation of this relationship between the ruler and the citizen. The second contributing factor to the conflation of housing and state is the establishment of a rentier/welfare state.

Building off the first point, the establishment of a series of welfare programs helped legitimize the new government of Bahrain. The ability to provide housing began as a commitment to introducing new typologies of housing to the country and to further the agenda of modernization in Bahrain. This also cemented the government’s role as a driver of progress but also to play a role in defining the Bahraini citizen. Prior to the Isa Town models, Bahraini citizens lived with their extended families in courtyard houses in the denser context of the pre-oil city. Thus the introduction of the villa-type heralded a new era of nuclear families in an automotive urbanity, separate from the tribal networks of the older cities. The introduction of the Isa Town typology could be argued for several reasons, cynics may view it as the decision to separate families of the same origin into more atomized units rather than maintaining the grouping of people or families along tribal lines. However the proximity of the Awali model, the presence of British consultants in the region who were working on the oil towns as well as projects for regional governments, and the idea of modernization as a ‘catching-up with Western standards’ meant that the Isa Town model derived largely from models implemented in Europe and being experimented with elsewhere in the world. The idea of the welfare state itself, and the need to urbanize through government housing was also the context in which Bahrain was becoming independent, thus it is only natural that the post-war housing efforts of Europe were applied by European consultants in the Middle East. The difference being the political path dependency which was incurred in the Middle East due to the importance of this initiative which Europe, and the U.S. did not experience. While first world countries decided to phase out their government

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Fig 16. Government Housing Units over time

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Fig 17. Hamad Town Housing Plans

Fig 18. Contemporary Unit Plans

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housing programs in favor of neo-liberal policies and market dynamics to produce affordable housing, the countries in the Gulf became more and more tied to the production of housing and the addiction to a single housing typology. The abstracted oil company town and the paternalistic relationship therein became the model but also the professional precedent to the first models of government built housing cities. The two social contracts of the tribal society and the oil-town are combined into that of the rentier state, with welfare programs that aim towards the distribution of oil rents, primarily through the distribution of land and housing. This phenomenon combined with tribal practices becoming state practices and the adoption of welfare policies from Europe as well as the importance of progress as an ideal cemented the housing town as one of the most important components if not the most important of the fledgling Gulf city-state.

The mode by which Isa Town was delivered became by independence the de-facto mode through which future developments would be conducted. On British advice, the Ministry of Housing was established to take over the completion of Isa Town and to continue the trend of constructing mass housing.

Established in 1975, the Ministry of Housing was structured to house the Physical Planning Directorate and the Survey Directorate. This meant that until the restructuring of Ministries in 2002, the very idea of planning in Bahrain was in service of the provision of government built housing. The planning process was largely the process of surveying, allocating and constructing government built housing and that would explain why Bahrain would not see an overall master plan until the 2000’s. Although smaller scale plans were done for separate areas of the country, mainly in the form of laying out blocks or infrastructure, there was no comprehensive plan for the country. The city as a plannable entity was then either envisioned as the aggregation to existing cities, the creation of layers of suburban development around a central core through reclamation or the construction of infrastructure – or the creation of new cities in the same mode as Isa Town. The city as an idea was only present at the national level as a political ideal, a legitimizing entity for a national government - not as a strategy for organizing a country or for producing nondormitory cities. Planning, the exercise of strategizing

Fig 19. Demographics of different governorates in Bahrain

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Fig 20. Application numbers and types to Ministry of Housing

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Fig 21. Population Density

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San Francisco CA 6,898 p/km2 Fair Banks, Alaska 379 p/km2

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and conceiving a particular political vision for the nation was seen in Bahrain as the implementation of a particular urban and architectural scenario in hopes of that scenario yielding a political climate to match. Planning produced the government built housing cities which would in turn appease the population and promote stability. The very idea of planning in Bahrain as a political project is the provision of government built housing. Looking at the growth of Bahrain over time, a country whose landmass increase by 20% over the course of the past fifty years we see why almost half the population [Fig. 11, 12, 13] lived in government housing at a time, as nearly 30% of all of Bahrain’s urbanized area was built by the Ministry of Housing. Housing was not just the driver of urbanization but the lion’s share of it. Government-built housing was the idea of what urbanization would be and the tools of state towards the creation of an urban environment.

The civic and national project of Bahrain was thus the same as the creation of government-built housing towns.

Although Isa Town and then Hamad Town attempted parks and smaller public spaces, the plans for these cities remained dependent on the business districts of Manama for non-residential land uses. Poor maintenance of the spaces that did exist was due also to conflict over the cost and maintenance of landscaped areas (which would not fall under Ministry of Housing jurisdiction) which over time reduced the number of green areas and public spaces which were built. This is also a result of the focus on the delivery of housing and meeting specific numbers, more than the creation of cities - the spread of a diffuse rentier urbanity produced the isolated villa in the dormitory town – a retreat of the welfare state, the ideas of public and social, into a social contract or neoliberal framework in which public is eliminated and political representation occurs through the distribution of housing. The proliferation of private urbanization became the public project, in part as a political strategy that aimed at the dissolution of the public as a political space, in part the faith in the idea of democracy as the space of private consumption and in part the ease of delivering individual housing rather than cities. The elevated walls of the lots, offering privacy in the no-man’s land of the setbacks and backyard demarcate the lot and the plane of ownership of the villa. The integration of a public room in the majlis for men and gatherings at the front of the home provides and element of communal function in the

residence. Almost all the government units (and many of the apartments) since Isa Town retain these rooms as they represent the adaptation of the courtyard typology and its relationship of public to private as an interiorized element of public program. However, the removal of rooms for the extended family and the unusable setback area mark a significant departure from existing typologies of housing in the region.

Fig 22. SOM Plan 2030

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The Bahraini government did attempt to introduce alternate models of housing, like the apartments first prototyped in the late 1970’s as closer and denser alternatives to Isa Town and Hamad Town housing as they were sited in Muharraq and Manama [Fig 23]. These were however introduced primarily as a place for those on the waitlist to live until a government house was delivered. The apartment however remain viewed as inappropriate for the Bahraini citizen, fitting for foreigners and immigrants rather than Bahainis as indicated by the decreasing number of apartment requests over time while housing applications increase dramatically [Fig 29]. A decade after Isa Town, the Bahraini government embarked on the development of Hamad Town (twelve thousand units [Fig 14]), although it was becoming increasingly clear that for Bahrain to be able to maintain the goal of consistently delivering housing, projects the scale of Hamad Town would have to be constructed every three years to keep up with the increasing waitlist and demand for housing5 [Fig 16].

After Hamad Town the government continued to build housing neighborhoods like Zayed Town and other units elsewhere, but none with the scale or ambition of Hamad Town. With the global recession in 2008 and then the Arab Spring in 2011, the Bahraini faced a weak economy yet still had to deal with inflated land prices, and reduced government built housing initiatives. This resulted in a a difficult landscape for the prospective homeowner – land was too expensive for someone to afford to buy their own home, and if you chose to wait then you would most likely do so for 10 to twenty years. So the government decided the solution to the Arab Spring was to reinvigorate government housing once more, and embark on a journey toward 40,000.

This challenge is further exasperated by two factors; the first is the number of people eligible for government built housing and the second being the plot/unit sizes

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Fig 23. Housing Units over time (MoH publications)

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Fig 24. Models of Housing Units over time (MoH publications)

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Fig 25. Plot Sizes over time

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Fig 26. Facades of various MoH units

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Fig 27.

Isa Town House 1976 Single Floor Plot Area 400 m2 Building Area 115m2

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of the government built housing units. As of 2011 most government employees and families where the male or head of household was making less than 900BD became eligible to apply for a house from the Bahraini government.

Considering that the average wage of a private sector employee in Bahrain is around 600BD and a public sector employee is around 900BD and approximately 30% of the Bahraini population is employed by the government the average Bahraini is eligible for a government-built home.

This has added to the waitlist numbers as more and more people choose to apply for homes rather than loans or financial services to aid the process of homeownership.

An application is not reviewed upon the time of delivery of the unit either, so a housing unit is guaranteed upon eligibility at the time of application, meaning if the wait is ten years someone who does not need the financial aid for a home will still receive one. In addition to the increasing number of applicants, the housing program throughout the 1980’s to 1990’s increased plot sizes as a way of encouraging people to accept the move to distant Hamad Town [Fig 19]. This means that scarcity is an issue of too many applicants but also the size of plots which further limits availability for later generations. We see by the time the government housing program has entered the 1990’s that housing became a national right, and that citizens felt entitled to a home as a fulfillment of a social contract between nation and citizen. What was once the testament of a new nation’s commitment to progress has become a social contract that the government must uphold to insure its legitimacy. The need to consistently distribute housing has produced an urbanism of distance dormitory towns, and peripheral islands all planned for political stability.

The case of Bahrain exhibits an intensified version of a narrative playing out elsewhere in the Gulf, the ability to imagine cities was overtaken by the desire to maintain a legible and legitimate national project. The result however was an urbanity which served a particular rentier system whose emphasis on delivering an unwavering singlefamily typology [Fig 17,18] resulted in a diffuse autonomy of individuals across the country. We can see the various layers of the growing Gulf city as they accrued over time in the case of Muharraq [Fig 20] and how the idea of a city would become subsumed by the commitment to the parcel, the single-family villa, and the inability to imagine alternate political or civic agendas. The story of the Gulf City in the 20th century then is one of an addiction to

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Fig 28.

Hamad Town House 1982 Single Floor Plot Area 360 m2 Apartment Model 5 Building Area 100m2

Fig 29.

Apartment Model 5 1979-1982 3 Floors Unit Types 3 BR + 2 BR Unit Area 116m2 + 97m2

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an architectural and urban set of norms which serve to stabilize an idea of a national and a post-tribal set of relationships. This phenomenon over time becomes increasingly difficult to maintain, expensive to continue, and urbanistically unsustainable, yet (in the context of the Arab Spring) near impossible to discontinue. As Bahrain embarks on the project of producing 40,000 units in ten years the go-to solution is the reclamation of land around the Bahraini coastline and the creation of islands like North City, Diyar al Muharraq, as well as housing peninsulas like East Hidd and East Sitra housing. As part of the Skidmore Owings & Merrill Master Plan for Bahrain 2030, this extensive reclamation will change the northern coast and usher in a completely different landscape for the island country. Yet the insistence on maintaining the same housing typology, the same urban configuration, and the cost of reclamation vs. infill or higher density developments does call to question for how long Bahrain will insist on the current model of government housing despite the increasing difficulty of maintaining said model. Trends show government housing is moving towards more privatization and the governments want to move towards regulating rather than building. The market in Bahrain does build luxury housing and workforce housing, but the government does everything the in-between (for approximately 30% of the Bahrainis). Projects like Diyar Al Muharraq and portions of the North City show the government’s desire to work with developers in public-private partnerships but the relationship is founded largely on the government purchasing or commissioning units, and then subsidizing them before doling them out to citizens. Bahrain’s experiment with government built housing over the past fifty years provides a case study in how a developing country can find itself in a path dependency as a result of the conflation of architectural type and urban strategy with political stability and the idea of the nation-state.

Fig 30.

Budaiya House 1986 Single Floor Plot Area 446 m2 Building Area 159m2

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If the original Marshall Plan was envisioned as a way of establishing US economic hegemony by offloading American inflation onto the Japanese and Europeans as well as insuring that the Breton-Woods system (and with T3M House it the US dollar) became the standard for global capitalism.

This second Marshall Plan, imagined largely by Saudi Arabia, props up the unsustainable system of government built housing in Bahrain as a way of maintaining the

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Fig 31.

AM Apartment Model T3M House 2012 Two Floors Plot Area 215 m2 Building Area 209m2

Fig 32.

AM Apartment Model 2012 Six Floors Unit Type = 3 BR Unit Area = 170 m2

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MoH unit is 150 BD/m2

Reclaimed land purchase is free Cost of reclaiming land near Muharraq (ie East Hidd) is 55 BD/m2 Cost of an MoH unit on reclaimed land is approximately 205 BD/m2

MoH unit is 150 BD/m2

Cost of land in Muharraq is approximately 323 BD/m2 Cost of an MoH unit on non-reclaimed land is 473 BD/m2

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Standard house in Bahrain is roughly 250-300 BD/m2

Cost of land in Muharraq is approximately 323 BD/m2 Cost of a normal house is 623 BD/m2

Diyar unit is 200 BD/sq.m

Reclaimed land purchase is free but primary infrastructure costs 35BD/m2 (not secondary) Cost of reclaiming land Diyar was 19 BD/m2

Cost of an MoH unit on reclaimed land is approximately 254 BD/m2

Fig 33. Prices of Land and Housing

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status quo and the current religious-military-political authority in the region. This Marshall Plan along with the redeployment of government built housing models of post-war Europe and US marks the full watering down of those concepts and application in the Middle Eastern context. In this case, developing countries imagine postWorld War policies as the intellectual and economic means to establish their own fiefdoms within their parts of the developing world. The adoption of ‘developed world’ models in the Gulf has had a mixed legacy, equal parts success and failure, and in some ways reimagining the traditional hallmarks of western liberalism as tools for conceiving entirely different monarchical states.

At the scale of the Gulf, the question of the national is also the question of the city. Changing demographics, population size and the role of cities demands an assessment of the city as a social endeavor. It is both timely and critical that we ask how housing as the primary social and political endeavor has created these cities and drives the imaginary around what a national government can and should do. The Gulf continues to, as all societies do, wrestle with the relationship of the individual to society, asking how the appeasement of the individual or the creation of a moment in which the national and the civic was defined and then unchanged. With housing it is clear that we construct the idea of the citizen, the city through architectural convention – and the agency of the architect in constructing the vision of these societies. Governmentbuilt housing tells the story of the Arab city-state over the past century; marking the transition from tribal protectorate to a modernizing nation to today’s politically hostage rentier state. What was once the testament of a new nation’s commitment to progress has become a social contract that the government must uphold to insure its legitimacy. The need to consistently distribute housing has produced a disconnected Gulf city, one which serves not the principles of “liberty, equality, and fraternity” but “free housing, no taxation, and no representation”. As the national housing program reaches the end of its financial, ecological, and political viability it is the time to restart the discussion on mass housing as an urban and civic act.

As these young nations reach the event horizon of the 20th century ideologies on which they were founded, they must ask which ideologies – new or borrowed – will guide their direction in the 21st century.

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Fig 34. Photo of Apartment Complex

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7- A Thousand Units for Muharraq

Fig 1. Present Day Muharraq

Fig 2. Derelict lot in central Muharraq

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This thesis takes Muharraq as the place for a new way of tackling government housing in the Gulf. Looking at it now as the planning of suburbs or dormitory cities, but as a reimagining the typologies of a region, reintegrating the idea of the public and civic into the national project.

Using government housing as a way of both dealing with brownfield or neglected sites- as a way of densifying existing parts of the city while also reconnecting reclaimed and disconnected fabric. Muharraq was chosen as a site for intervention for several reasons. It is paradigmatic because it is a summary of the condition of the contemporary Gulf City. It grew over time through reclamation around a historic core – the tribal arabic city of which most is still existing. We can also see the layers of aggregation over time which end with the villas as well as a government housing complex. These layers show the growth of the city, the evolution of the dominant typologies in Bahrain, but they also reveal the aggregation of infrastructure over time through reclamation.

The result is increasing sedimentation of disconnected urban tissue, each new layer further cutting the center of the city from easy access to transportation. The project takes this cross section as the starting point for an argument on how to deal with that problematic growth and history. It spans across a strip of Muharraq in which we see the different rings of the Gulf City – creating a thousand unit complex which spans the length of the island.

1900

1945

1955

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1800s

1977

Fig 3. Reclamation over time

1980

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Fig 3. Mosques in Muharraq

Fig 4. Commercial/Retail Program

Fig 4. Empty

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Muharraq is currently the subject of debate in Bahrain for although it has a strong street life, heritage and history – the lack of parking, the inaccessibility of its central areas, and disrepair of is housing stock has led many Bahrainis to leave the city. So aside from it being a ripe case study and site for intervention, its position in the public eye makes it a particularly useful site for intervention and debate.The government’s stance in Muharraq’s historic district with regards to government built housing has been to take particular neighborhoods, tear down the buildings and rebuild them with the same lot lines but increased setbacks. At the same time other buildings elsewhere are abandoned and are eventually demolished.

Most large scale government housing is built nearby in Arad, or Hidd on reclaimed land.

The proposal images a solution in which the project of the nation becomes the project of the city. The government built housing complex composes the disconnected fabric into a single texture while also leaving behind the important pieces of the fabric as objects in public space or skirting them. The building runs for two kilometers but is perhaps the minimum about of demolition needed to make Muharraq viable, the integration of parking below ground and public amenties as well as increased population renergizes the city and allows for the market and community to take care of developing the rest of the city. In a context where all buildings are no more than 100 years old – the persistance of type is more important that of buildings themselves.

Prior to the 20th century all the houses in Muharraq would have to regenerate, rebuild due to the nature of the construction from mud and coral stone – thus what is precious is less what is demolished but the relationship of type to the idea of community and the city.The relationship of the housing units to the public space created both open public space as well as the shaded public ground with its majlises, the housing development becomes a frame for the community. while also integrating the larger scale amenities like offices, shopping into the city center.

A series of courtyard public spaces of different scale texture and program guide the passerby through the housing development. Thus the urban agenda is between the traditional souks and markets of Muharraq and

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Fig 5. Muharraq layers cross section (East-West)

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Manama, but integrating the public logic of courtyards from traditional institutional complexes and religious buildings.

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Fig 6. Proposal to rebuild houses in Muharraq by MoH (Fireej Bin Hindi)

Fig 7. View of proposal from above

Fig 8. Concept diagram of central spaces/plazas

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Although the notion of a 2 kilometer demolition of Bahrain’s historic core is drastic - by using the plazas to maintain the most important buildings, the project itself embodies a discourse on history and the way we perceive permanence and emphemerality. Muharraq is a victim of its own need to preserve history, unable to provide access to the amenities that would allow its own citizens to live there. Rather than the eventual demolition which would destroy the city, the alternative is just enough demolition to insure its viability. A horizontal band which spans different tissue and integrates parking, different mixed use and shaded space brings in all the programmatic, social, and economic drivers to allow Muharraq a minimum amount of viability. Citizens can deal with the rest of the city.

The shaded space in inspired by the development of housing typologies in Bahrain over the past half century.

They respect three aspects of the existing buildings. The first is the need to touch and claim ground. The second is a measure of flexibility and modifiable architecture within a clear boundary. The third is the idea of a majlis as a semi-public communal room which has its access from the street. The project proposes 4 different unit types, all lifted above the ground floor and housed in a 12x12m module, meaning it gives the same area as the existing housing units. The different units all share the same parti wall, and their only element of ground floor program is the majlis. This means that when agglomerated together, the result is a shaded ground plane, occupied only by a field of majalis, public rooms and shaded outdoor space.

This creates a space apart, neither interior not exterior but intermediate, and the units are oriented such that there is grouping and difference, so that the field condition creates smaller clusters and neighborhoods while still retaining the monumental scale of a large civic colonade. Since the units only share a parti wall, one can build whatever they would like on the second floor, however the more that is built the less natural light falls on their majlis thus the building code creates its own idea of conduct and civic duty. The architecture constantly prompts one to ask what their obligation to the public space is and to their

Tennis Courts

Soccer Fields

Office Space

Mosques

Shopping/Walking district

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Public Park

Fig 9. Axonometrics of various options for central spaces

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Fig 10. Model of Muharraq Site and proposal at city scale

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Fig 11. Plan of Muharraq Site and proposal at city scale

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Fig 12. Model of proposal at neighborhood scale

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Fig 13. Plan of Muharraq Site and Proposal

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Fig 14. Model of proposal at neighborhood scale

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Fig 15. Plan of proposal showing second floor

Fig 16. Plan of proposal showing ground floor

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Fig 17. Model of proposal at unit scale (3 units by 10 units shown)

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Fig 18. Detail photo of unit model

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Fig 19. Perspective of central plaza

Fig 20. Section through proposal showing open spaces, units, and underground parking

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Fig 21. Perspective showing field of shaded majalis on ground floor

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Fig 22. Unit 1

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Fig 23. Unit 2

Fig 24. Unit 3

Fig 25. Unit 4

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own interest in well lit spaces. The proposed units offer a few glimpses at possible architectural scenarios to play out within the plot lines, each offering varied relationships to the ground, the sky, and the creation of smaller outdoor spaces as well. In addition then to the flexibility afforded by only imagining the armature for architecture, one can also begin to imagine that some of the majlis rooms could be converted into commercial uses as well, thus offering economic flexibility as well. The piecemeal nature of the intervention also allows it to be developed piecemeal, rather than necessitating one large singular investment and construction effort.

The project however understands itself as perhaps being too late to imagine such drastic approaches to the city, it is unsure that anything of such a scale can be attempted.

Especially in a historic district and a political climate where risking such expenditure could become a gross misadventure. Ultimately then the proposal argues for both imagining a new civic program, new architectural and social contracts writ in concrete and space. The proposal presents both anathema - asking if the 1000 unit building is the sort of wanton construction and ecological crises we wish to perpetuate or if there are in fact alternatives to the path-dependency that began half a century before.

The project is a critique of modernity but also a chance to reassess it, saying that maybe somethings can be demolished and forgotten, if only because it forces us to save something else. It underlies the need to constantly reimagine new forms of inhabitation and coexistence - without nostalgia or regret but instead invention and reappropriation of spaces that have lost utility of appeal over time. The project acts as a lens through which to view the current state of the Bahraini and Gulf city, it presents what is at stake in the Gulf city and asks what the alternatives are. In attempting to stitch together the last sixty years of Muharraq, a two kilometer bandage to heal the passage of time it asks how future generations will view the present day urban actions that will one day define the landscape of Bahrain. Perhaps in that case a two kilometer band for Muharraq seems too late to be of use, but in the case of all the reclamation projects to come, which will be as disconnected and isolated as their forerunners twenty years prior - perhaps it is just

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Fig 26. Unit 1

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Fig 27. Unit 2

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Fig 28. Unit 3

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in time. Along that line of thought then it is too late for Muharraq, but it is only a matter of time before in between a reclaimed land hastily developed, and the infrastructure that once supported it will lie the armature to repair a century of identity finding and experimentation on how to create a good city.

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Fig 29. The future

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8- Conclusion

Ali Karimi

At the scale of the Gulf, the question of the national is also the question of the city. Changing demographics, population size and the role of cities demands an assesment of the city as a social endeavor. The collection of essays that compose this book aim to shed light on what the city has been and can be in the Gulf region. It asks how housing as the primary social and political endeavor has created these cities and drives the imaginary around what a national government can and should do. Good Arab, Bad City wrestles with the relationship of the individual to society, asking how the appeasement of the individual can result in an urban injustice. It asks how we construct the idea of the citizen, the city and the purpose of both. Do we look to Al-Farabi’s model or Al-Mansour’s? The Prophet’s or Charles Belgrave’s? Or do we choose to imagine an alternative?

Questions aside, this book puts to rest the idea of a placeless Gulf or one without context - elucidating the city as the clear and lucid result of a series of political relations, social contracts, and negotiations between international and local. It shows why the Gulf city is the way it is, the typologies that have composed its urbanism and the desires embedded therein. But more than a historical survey this book is a call for change, and to reimagine the city. For in this, the present moment, we are not Muslims, nor Arabs, nor nationalists. Perhaps only good, or perhaps only capitalists. Or perhaps only a collection of peoples paralyzed by the question of who and what.

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Fig 1. Photo of Isa Town, Bahrain taken in the 1968 Tim Graham - Getty Images

Fig 2. Photo of Housing in Abu Dhabi Taken in 2015

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9- Extended Bibliography

Additional Texts 1- Aureli, Pier Vittorio (editor) City as Project 2- Aureli, Pier Vittorio Possibility of An Absolute Architecture Ali Karimi

3- Bianca, Stefano Urban form in the Arab world : past and present 4- Jayyusi, Salma K. (editor) The city in the Islamic world 5- Smith, Simon Britain’s revival and fall in the Gulf : Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and the Trucial States, 1950-71 6- Nadir Lahiji (editor) Architecture Against the Post-Political. Essays in Re-claiming the critical project 7- Reisz, Todd Al-Manakh 1 & 2 8- Attilo Petruccioli, Khalil K. Pirani Understanding Islamic Architecture 9- El Sheshtaway, Yasser Evolving Arab City: Tradition, Modernity and Urban Development 10- Fuccaro, Nelida Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf 11- Parker, Georey Sovereign City: City-State Ancient and Modern 12- Rabat, Nasser (editor) Courtyard house : from cultural reference to Universal relevance 13- Edwards, Brian Courtyard housing : past, present and future 14- Spahic, Omar Origins and functions of Islamic domestic courtyards 97

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Government-built housing tells the story of the Arab city-state over the past century; marking the transition from tribal protectorate to a modernizing nation to today’s politically hostage rentier state.

What was once the testament of a new nation’s commitment to progress has become a social contract that the government must uphold to insure its legitimacy. The need to consistently distribute housing has produced a disconnected Gulf city, one which serves not the principles of “liberty,equality, and fraternity” but “free housing, no taxation, and no representation”. As the national housing program reaches the end of its financial, ecological, and political viability it is the time to restart the discussion on mass housing as a urban and civic act.

This thesis looks at government housing as a tool of state for reinventing the citizen and the city; asking how housing can recuperate the national as a 21st century project.