Order and Disorder: Urban Governance and the Making of Middle Eastern Cities
Edited by Luna Khirfan, Planning, 
University of Waterloo (Canada)
(McGill-Queens University Press, 2017)

As Middle Eastern cities weather the second decade of the twenty-first century, they face a number of challenges to their economic resilience, competitiveness, and internal stability. In this uniquely tense realm for the urban public, an understanding of the dynamics of decision-making processes, citizen power, and the rule of law is critical to the direction of policy in the future. In Order and Disorder, Luna Khirfan weaves a cross-national comparison of Amman and Cairo that dissects the many layers and complexities of urban governance. Through case studies on a diverse array of development projects and their associated challenges, the contributors demonstrate how three actors - the state, the market, and civil society - interact with each other within the same urban political space. [more]

Also see Prof. Khirfan’s article in this collection on participatory planning in Amman, Jordan.

GUHP profile, Editor website

"The Keyi Mappila Muslim Merchants of Tellicherry and the Making of Coastal Cosmopolitanism on the Malabar Coast" in Asian Review of World Histories
by Santhosh Abraham, History
Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai (India)
Vol. 5, no. 2, 2017, 145-162

The Keyi Mappila Muslim merchants of Tellicherry (Thalassery) on the Malabar Coast were one of the few early modern Indian merchant groups who succeeded in carving out a powerful political and social configuration of their own on the western coast of the Indian Ocean during the British period. Today, several branches of Keyi families remain a cultural unit in the Islamic community of Kerala. This article attempts to locate the group in the larger theoretical context of Indian Ocean cosmopolitanism and argues that the Keyis developed a distinct and significant type of coastal cosmopolitanism in an Indian Ocean setting; Chovakkaran Moosa, an influential merchant from a Keyi family during the colonial period, serves as a representative figure. Through their trade and financial relationships with British and local elites, and the characteristic architecture of their warehouses, residences, and mosques, the Keyis successfully integrated the practices of a global cosmopolitan space into a local vernacular secluded commercial space. This article presents a synthesis of a lively coastal urban and local rural cosmopolitanism that included several networks and exchanges, foreign and native collaborations, and an amalgamation of local and external cultural spheres. [full text]

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“Spatially Polarized Landscapes and a New Approach to Urban Inequality”
in Latin American Research Review
by Zaire Dinzey-Flores, Latino and Caribbean Studies,
Rutgers (USA)
Vol. 52, no. 2, August 2017, 241-252

Displays of wealth and opulence in the face of dire need and poverty have become commonplace as the rich and the poor increasingly share city spaces around the globe. Research shows that it is the perception of inequality, more than raw measures of inequality, that has important political consequences and that is most concerning for social well-being. In this article, I propose a theoretical move from a general, statistically driven conceptualization of inequality to a spatially informed concept that recognizes how people experience inequality. Relying on findings that show that the perception of inequality is most important for life chances, I suggest that it is key to understand not only where inequality is located but how it is spatially distributed. [full text]

GUHP profile, Author website

“Securing the City, Securing the Nation: Militarization and Urban Police Work in Dalian, 1949-1953” in Toby Lincoln and Xu Tao, ed.,
The Habitable City in China: Urban History in the Twentieth Century
by Christian Hess, Chinese History, Sophia University (Japan)
(Palgrave, 2017)

"Securing the City, Securing the Nation" examines the origins, organization, and early operations of one of Communist China's first municipal police forces, established in November 1945 in the port city of Dalian. While some scholarly attention has been paid to the CCP's takeover tactics in coastal cities like Shanghai, Tianjin, and Hangzhou, comparative work from other regions remains limited. At the southernmost tip of China's northeastern provinces, which had been heavily urbanized and industrialized under Japan, Dalian was home to major port and industrial facilities and was occupied by the Soviet Union after 1945. [more] 

GUHP profile, Author website