Comparing Cities: The Middle East and South Asia

This book is based largely on a series of papers from a conference at Lahore University in 2004 on Comparing Urban Landscapes. It presents a comparative analysis of the everyday dynamics of contemporary urban spaces (and experiences of men and women) in the South Asia and Middle East regions. The study draws both on a shared history – of colonialism, modernity, nationalism, urbanity – and the cultural backdrop that shapes social life in these spaces. The editors seek to fill a gap in the literature on urban space in the Middle East and South Asia, which they argue is attributable to a lack in understanding of the (subaltern) social histories of cities. They claim that this approach can both result in a more complex understanding of contemporary urban forms and “…explore how urban life, and urban marginality and activism, takes on quite distinct local forms in the two regions.” (page xv)
This is a collection of 12 essays (in five parts) by different authors who pose questions on the envisioning of cities, the conceptualization of zones of inclusion and exclusion, languages of belonging and the production of moral spaces (e.g. raced or gendered), to name a few, in order to explore processes (at different levels) in the “making and unmaking” of the modern city in the South. The stories are told using a creative combination of methodologies, including iconography, genealogy, narration, case studies and visual essays.