Middle Eastern Cities 1900-1950: Public Spaces and Public Spheres

The first half of the 20th century witnessed the birth of most Middle Eastern cities as we know them today. New public institutions such as the cinema and the museum emerged as populations tripled, while older public spaces such as the street itself became arenas for novel forms of social and political intercourse. At the same time, there was a consolidation of the public sphere that new educational institutions and the popular press had given rise to in previous decades.Despite the radical transformations of this period, most studies of the Middle Eastern city focus either on what earlier have been called Islamic cities or on the contemporary city, while those that do look at the early 20th century tend to concentrate on the cities' physical alterations and administration. The present volume, which does not investigate urban space so much as it does the interaction between space and consciousness, seeks to elucidate how the people who lived there experienced these far-reaching changes.Some of the nine essays collected here examine a particular aspect of a single city, such as night-clubs in Cairo, sex and cinema in Damascus, the Garip poets of Istanbul and the appearance and disappearance of public space in Sana'a. Others utilise a regional canvas, considering early museums and the formation of their publics, 'order' and modernity in Egyptian popular media, and the construction of the public sphere in the Middle Eastern medina.Readers will find a strong interdisciplinary appeal in this volume, drawing as it does on urban planning, colonial studies, sociology, popular culture and Middle Eastern studies.Marjatta Nielsen is the author of 'Middle Eastern Cities 1900-1950: Public Spaces and Public Spheres', published 2001 under ISBN 9788772889061 and ISBN 8772889063.