Abstract
This paper is concerned with the structure of quarters in traditional Arab Islamic cities. Previous studies have stressed the idea of an urban structure that corresponds to social groupings, in that it is seen as a collection of neighborhood quarters. This spatial model has often provided the rationale for the design of new housing layouts. The purpose of this study is to examine this issue and to argue that the structure of these cities presents a global whole. To achieve this purpose a general and a specific question are addressed. The general question is about the physically sub-areas within the city, and the specific question is about the issue of social groupings and the kind of relation that space has to society. The proposition thus invokes the idea of a physical structure which appears to correspond to a social pattern. The city of Damascus is used as a model of analysis in which the urban structure is described and characterised. The argument is advanced that the traditional Arab Islamic city has a sub-area structure which is historically generated, but whose morphological combination is fine-tuned and adjusted so that the whole comes to dominate and unify the parts.
Highlights
The structure of neighborhood quarters in traditional Arab Islamic city invokes the idea of a physical layout which appears to correspond to a social grouping
If the relation is found not to be straightforward; that is, not a correspondence projection or reflection of social groups and institutions, this may provide some clue to an alternative hypothesis about the social strategy which was adopted in relation to the “deformed” urban structure of the traditional Arab Islamic city
A by- product of the structure of urban blocks within the city is that the houses of the wealthy are contiguous with everyday dwellings, and everyday dwellings with the houses of the poor. This degree of spatial contiguity is unacknowledged by the literature on neighborhood quarters, which prefers space to associate the homogenous elements within society and to separate the heterogeneous
Summary
The structure of neighborhood quarters in traditional Arab Islamic city invokes the idea of a physical layout which appears to correspond to a social grouping. For him quarters defined by certain shared ethnic, religious, economic, and regional identities were developed into quite self-sufficient and defined communities with their own social, political, and economic structures (Lapidus, 1969, 1970) If this is the case, this should be revealed directly by configurational analysis of the physical structure of the traditional city. The specifics significance lies in the fact that these cities are known to have had a “devolved” institutional structure (quarters) and trade groupings were all locality- specific or at least regionalized within the city (Luz, 2014; Lapidus, 1970; Serjeant, 1980; Hakim, 1986; Akbar, 1988, 1992) This might be suggestive of a correspondence between space and society. If the relation is found not to be straightforward; that is, not a correspondence projection or reflection of social groups and institutions, this may provide some clue to an alternative hypothesis about the social strategy which was adopted in relation to the “deformed” urban structure of the traditional Arab Islamic city
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