The Arabian City and its Territory. Historical Identity and Heritage Issues

This volume brings together a selection of articles related to the urban history of Arabia, with specific regard to the countries where the author resided periodically doing fieldwork. The chapters originated either as papers presented in international conferences or as essays appearing in books and journals over the last decade. The urban framework, within an interdisciplinary approach, becomes a key to understand more thoroughly both the roots of contemporary statehood in the region, and the challenges represented by nation-building, heritage preservation and human development in modern Arabian cities. Gulf Arab countries represent one of the most densely urbanized regions in the world, but urbanism is not a new phenomenon here, since some settlements go back to the most ancient times and they developed in well-defined historical regions representing the Past of the modern Gulf Arab States. All of them give us the most interesting examples of settlements, that historians can study by complementing textual evidence with material data provided by other sources, from archaeology, to epigraphy, numismatics and monumental evidence. The urbanist and architectural approach to issues of identity (modernization versus tradition) and nation-building allows to re-read some pages of the region’s modern and contemporary history. This book aims to reflect the interplay of the most significant aspects as emerged from the author’s surveys in this domain. Some specific case-studies are considered, shedding light on the roots of the developing “national identity” discourse, referring to the local cultural heritage and to the models of organizing space and time in historical and traditional cities in Arabia.