Building the Arab City

Lecture by Ziad Jamaleddine, founder of L.E.FT Architects and Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia GSAPP

Building the Arab City

The lecture will look at the urban and architectural evolution of the ‘Arab City’ through the formation and the making of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) regional political map.

Throughout the 20th Century MENA’s political map has been continuously redrawn onto what was once an open contiguous geography with a great impact on its cities and landscapes: From the Ottoman empire control and management of a big swath of that land, to the western colonial powers fragmentation of that terrain with an urban laboratory agenda that was applied on its cities; From the postcolonial birth of the Nation State, to the rise of Pan-Arabism as a political and territorial project of unification through the engine of modernity; From the gradual decline and sometimes violent collapse of the cities of the Nation State, to the surge of political Islam along a reconstruction project in a transnational economy.