Despite strong forces toward globalization, much of late 20th century urbanism demonstrates a movement toward cultural differentiation. Such factors as ethnicity and religious and cultural heritages have led to the concept of hybridity as a shaper of identity. Challenging the common assumption that hybrid peoples create hybrid places and hybrid places house hybrid people, this book suggests that hybrid environments do not always accommodate pluralistic tendencies or multicultural practices. In contrast to the standard position that hybrid space results from the merger of two cultures, the book introduces the concept of a third place and argues for a more sophisticated understanding of the principal.
In contributed chapters, the book provides case studies of the third place, enabling a comparative and transnational examination of the complexity of hybridity. The book is divided into two parts. Part one deals with pre-20th century examples of places that capture the intersection of modernity and hybridity. Part two considers equivalent sites in the late 20th century, demonstrating how hybridity has been a central feature of globalization.

Hybrid Urbanism: On the Identity Discourse and the Built Environment

AlSayyad, Nezar

Science & Math

Praeger

The history of the Islamic world includes many unique cultural, religious, scientific, and architectural developments. Among these was the evolution of the Arab Muslim city, which occurred during the rapid expansion of the Muslim empire in the seventh and eighth centuries A.D. In this probing volume, Nezar AlSayyad examines the extraordinary characteristics of Islamic urbanism and the process by which cities and towns were absorbed and physically transformed by Islam. The early leaders of the Muslim empire--caliphs, amirs, and other rulers--had a lasting effect on what the modern scholar would call their cities' urban form. AlSayyad demonstrates that the stereotypical model of the Muslim city is inadequate, not only because individual rulers in regions of the empire were different, but also due to various cultural influences that were indigenous to conquered areas.
After a prologue, the study begins with a historiography of the concept of the Muslim city and how it was paralleled by the development of its physical form. Garrison towns, established as military camps by early Arab conquerors, are examined next by AlSayyad. His research shows that building methods and urban form in the Arab cities were products of Islamization and consolidation of Caliphal power. New capital towns and cities, AlSayyad maintains, were also results of elaborate personal expressions of politico-religious authority by certain Muslim rulers. The book ends by suggesting that the Arabs' and their leaders' changing view of the role of architecture was a major factor behind the fluid urban forms of Muslim cities. This significant contribution to the study of the Arab world and its cultural history will be of great value to Middle East, urban, and architectural historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists, as well as to students of Islamic history and urbanism.

Cities and Caliphs: On the Genesis of Arab Muslim Urbanism (Contributions to the Study of World History)

History

Middle East

Greenwood Press

The city and the cinema have become inextricably intertwined over the last century, with the identities of places becoming bound up in their cinematic portrayals. We have seen the landmarks of New York, London and Tokyo turn into iconic symbols of wealth, power, status, style and culture, and for the majority of people the images and sounds of movies form the only experience they will ever have of distant cities. Cinematic Urbanism presents an urban history of modernity and postmodernity through the lens of cinema. AlSayyad traces the dissolution of the boundary between real and reel through time and space via a series of films that represent different modernities. They include:  Cinema Paradiso It's a Wonderful Life Metropolis Brazil Blade Runner Annie Hall Taxi Driver Do the Right Thing My Beautiful Laundrette The Truman Show.  Alsayyad argues that our understanding of the city cannot be viewed independently of cinematic experience. Films do not only capture the depiction of a society; they influence the way we construct images of the world and, as a result, how we operate within it. We are beginning to blur the distinction between what is real in the everyday, and how we imagine the everyday. Cinematic Urbanism explores this dynamic, bringing together insights from urban and film studies to illuminate current architectural debate.   .

Cinematic Urbanism: A History of the Modern from Reel to Real

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Routledge

Traditions: The ‘Real’, the Hyper, and the Virtual in the Built Environment is a continuation of Nezar AlSayyad’s engagement with the subject of tradition in the built environment. In it he attempts to unsettle the belief that tradition is simply a product of history and transmission. Without dismissing the parallels between history and tradition, he argues that normative discourses which conceive of tradition as a place-based, temporally situated concept, as a static authoritative legacy of a past, and as a heritage owned by certain groups of people can no longer be sustained in the present moment of globalization. Instead he calls for an approach that recognizes how the main qualities of tradition are transient, fleeting, and contingent. While using the built environment as the primary lens of investigation, other approaches for the study of tradition, with origins in geography, history, sociology, or anthropology, are actively deployed in this book. AlSayyad offers a recasting of the epistemology of tradition as fundamentally spatial, thus providing a much-needed theoretical rudder for the emerging debates. Rather than analyzing tradition as a reaction to modernity or as its antithetical other, he examines those discursive and spatial terrains where tradition collides and colludes with modernity. AlSayyad argues that built traditional environments have been studied until recently as ‘authentic’ environments that represent ‘real’ everyday practices. But, as his research illustrates, their consumption at a mass scale, especially in the arena of tourism and mass media, has often elevated them to hyper-environments whose connection to ‘real’ places results in fundamentally ‘dis-placed’ and disembodied experience. More recently, the portrayal of traditional environments in both the virtual realm and heritage discourses has resulted in new articulations of tradition that could not be imagined just a few decades ago. AlSayyad interrogates the meanings and practices of tradition in the twenty-first century by looking at these three distinct categories of the built environment: the ‘real’, the hyper, and the virtual.

Traditions: The “Real”, the Hyper, and the Virtual In the Built Environment

Reference

Traditions: The ‘Real’, the Hyper, and the Virtual in the Built Environment is a continuation of Nezar AlSayyad’s engagement with the subject of tradition in the built environment. In it he attempts to unsettle the belief that tradition is simply a product of history and transmission. Without dismissing the parallels between history and tradition, he argues that normative discourses which conceive of tradition as a place-based, temporally situated concept, as a static authoritative legacy of a past, and as a heritage owned by certain groups of people can no longer be sustained in the present moment of globalization. Instead he calls for an approach that recognizes how the main qualities of tradition are transient, fleeting, and contingent. While using the built environment as the primary lens of investigation, other approaches for the study of tradition, with origins in geography, history, sociology, or anthropology, are actively deployed in this book. AlSayyad offers a recasting of the epistemology of tradition as fundamentally spatial, thus providing a much-needed theoretical rudder for the emerging debates. Rather than analyzing tradition as a reaction to modernity or as its antithetical other, he examines those discursive and spatial terrains where tradition collides and colludes with modernity. AlSayyad argues that built traditional environments have been studied until recently as ‘authentic’ environments that represent ‘real’ everyday practices. But, as his research illustrates, their consumption at a mass scale, especially in the arena of tourism and mass media, has often elevated them to hyper-environments whose connection to ‘real’ places results in fundamentally ‘dis-placed’ and disembodied experience. More recently, the portrayal of traditional environments in both the virtual realm and heritage discourses has resulted in new articulations of tradition that could not be imagined just a few decades ago. AlSayyad interrogates the meanings and practices of tradition in the twenty-first century by looking at these three distinct categories of the built environment: the ‘real’, the hyper, and the virtual.

Traditions: The "Real", the Hyper, and the Virtual In the Built Environment

Cairo: Histories of a City

From its earliest days as a royal settlement fronting the pyramids of Giza to its current manifestation as the largest metropolis in Africa, Cairo has forever captured the urban pulse of the Middle East. In Cairo: Histories of a City, Nezar AlSayyad narrates the many Cairos that have existed throughout time, offering a panoramic view of the city’s history unmatched in temporal and geographic scope, through an in-depth examination of its architecture and urban form.
 In twelve vignettes, accompanied by drawings, photographs, and maps, AlSayyad details the shifts in Cairo’s built environment through stories of important figures who marked the cityscape with their personal ambitions and their political ideologies. The city is visually reconstructed and brought to life not only as a physical fabric but also as a social and political order—a city built within, upon, and over, resulting in a present-day richly layered urban environment. Each chapter attempts to capture a defining moment in the life trajectory of a city loved for all of its evocations and contradictions. Throughout, AlSayyad illuminates not only the spaces that make up Cairo but also the figures that shaped them, including its chroniclers, from Herodotus to Mahfouz, who recorded the deeds of great and ordinary Cairenes alike. He pays particular attention to how the imperatives of Egypt's various rulers and regimes—from the pharaohs to Sadat and beyond—have inscribed themselves in the city that residents navigate today.

Ancient Civilizations

Belknap Press

From its earliest days as a royal settlement fronting the pyramids of Giza to its current manifestation as the largest metropolis in Africa, Cairo has forever captured the urban pulse of the Middle East. In Cairo: Histories of a City, Nezar AlSayyad narrates the many Cairos that have existed throughout time, offering a panoramic view of the city’s history unmatched in temporal and geographic scope, through an in-depth examination of its architecture and urban form.
In twelve vignettes, accompanied by drawings, photographs, and maps, AlSayyad details the shifts in Cairo’s built environment through stories of important figures who marked the cityscape with their personal ambitions and their political ideologies. The city is visually reconstructed and brought to life not only as a physical fabric but also as a social and political order―a city built within, upon, and over, resulting in a present-day richly layered urban environment. Each chapter attempts to capture a defining moment in the life trajectory of a city loved for all of its evocations and contradictions. Throughout, AlSayyad illuminates not only the spaces that make up Cairo but also the figures that shaped them, including its chroniclers, from Herodotus to Mahfouz, who recorded the deeds of great and ordinary Cairenes alike. He pays particular attention to how the imperatives of Egypt's various rulers and regimes―from the pharaohs to Sadat and beyond―have inscribed themselves in the city that residents navigate today.

Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press

Dwellings, Settlements and Tradition: Cross-cultural Perspectives

Bourdier, Jean-Paul

University Press of America

Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River

The Nile, the world's longest river system, has figured prominently in historic events over millennia. This book views the Nile as both the stage on which these events occurred and as an actor in its unfolding history. It explores the intersection of natural forces and human intervention to take readers on a series of historical journeys along the river, from its sources to the Mediterranean Sea. Each chapter focuses on a particular historical period and the cities, events, important figures and the encounters between groups and cultures that shaped it.

Africa

Edinburgh University Press

The Nile, the world's longest river system, has figured prominently in historic events over millennia. This book views the Nile as both the stage on which these events occurred and as an actor in its unfolding history. It explores the intersection of natural forces and human intervention to take readers on a series of historical journeys along the river, from its sources to the Mediterranean Sea. Each chapter focuses on a particular historical period and the cities, events, important figures and the encounters between groups and cultures that shaped it.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by AlSayyad, Nezar. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by AlSayyad, Nezar

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by AlSayyad, Nezar. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Hybrid Urbanism: On the Identity Discourse and the Built Environment

Cities and Caliphs: On the Genesis of Arab Muslim Urbanism (Contributions to the Study of World History)

Cinematic Urbanism: A History of the Modern from Reel to Real

Traditions: The “Real”, the Hyper, and the Virtual In the Built Environment

Traditions: The "Real", the Hyper, and the Virtual In the Built Environment

Cairo: Histories of a City

Cairo: Histories of a City

Dwellings, Settlements and Tradition: Cross-cultural Perspectives

Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River

Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River