Arab Middle Eastern Urbanization

This article explores urbanization in the Arab countries of the Middle East and covers contributions published in English. The literature offers a wide diversity of topics, some of which represent cross-cutting themes across the entire region (e.g., the diffusion of Dubai’s urbanization model throughout the Middle East under the “contemporary urbanization trends” theme) while others are context-specific to a sub-region (e.g., the Levant or the Arab Gulf), a country, or even a city (e.g., Beirut’s postwar reconstruction). A thematic presentation highlights the areas of concentration and those of omission that warrant further exploration vis-à-vis each context whether theoretically and/or empirically. Urban governance is one of the most broached topics, particularly the roles of civil society and the market. Indeed, studies abound on the political economy of place, namely the impacts of neoliberalism and globalization and the transfer of contemporary urbanization trends from the Gulf to the rest of the region. Paralleling this focus on high-end urbanization is a focus on urban informality whether in its strict form in Cairo, or in the form of refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. Postwar reconstruction and place memory have received much attention and are connected, especially in Lebanon, to urban rehabilitation. Notably, the emphasis in the literature remains, for the most part, on capital cities with far fewer contributions on other urban centers within each sub-region/country. Also, while studies abound on urban heritage, there is a need for contributions that connect the rehabilitation of historic urban landscapes (HULs) to housing availability and affordability. In terms of omissions, there is a dearth in contributions pertaining to urbanization and environmental sustainability, particularly environmental planning, urban ecosystems, and ecological designs (nature-based solutions), and also climate change including risk and vulnerability assessments, mitigation (decreasing greenhouse gas emission), adaptation (urban systems’ adjustments to climate change), climate justice, and urban resilience. Throughout, there is little variation in the theoretical framing and the empirical methods among the abundant contributions. While the prevailing qualitative empirical approaches offer valuable insights, there is an evident lack of quantitative studies probably attributed to the challenges in the availability and accessibility of census and geospatial data. The latter may also be the reason for the near absence of urban morphological studies throughout the region.