The evolving Arab city : tradition, modernity and urban development / edited by Yasser Elsheshtawy.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

First published in 2008.

The great divide: struggling and emerging cities in the Arab world -- The new arab metropolis: a new research agenda -- Amman: disguised genealogy and recent urban restructuring and neoliberal threats -- From regional node to backwater and back to uncertainty: Beirut, 1943-2006 -- Rabat: from capital to global metropolis -- Riyadh: a city of "institutional" architecture -- Kuwait: learning from a globalized city -- Manama: the metamorphosis of an Arab Gulf city -- Rediscovering the island: Doha's urbanity from pearls to spectacle -- Cities of sand and fog: Abu Dhabi's global ambitions.

"This collection written by Arab architects/urbanists is a sequel to Planning Middle Eastern Cities. Studies of Arab/Islamic cities used to be the province of 'outsiders' who not only prematurely generalized to a genre, but to one encapsulated in timelessness. In contrast, the case studies included in the earlier volume (Dubai, Sana'a, Baghdad, Algiers, Tunis, and Cairo), now supplemented in this volume by studies on three older cities (Amman, Beirut, and Rabat) and five newer oil cities (Riyadh, Kuwait City, Manama, Doha and Abu-Dhabi), focus, often critically, on the cities' rapid transformations." "Each case study traces the city's colonial and post-colonial history, the evolution of its distinctive social and physical structures, and its intersection with the region and the world."--BOOK JACKET.