“Denial of Coevalness”: Discursive Practices in the Representation of Kuwaiti Urban Modernity
Asseel Al-Ragam
Zones of Entanglement: Nigeria’s Real and Imagined Compounds
Joseph Godlewski
[In]Visibility of Death in the Built Environment: [De]Legitimating Traditional Mediterranean Cemeteries in Southern Spain
Mar Loren-Méndez and Ama Quesada-Arce
Legitimizing Everyday Tradition: The Spatial Narrative of Modernity in Cairene Old Quarters
Gehan Selim
Work, Slums, and Informal Settlement Traditions: Architecture of the Favela Do Telegrafo [Field Report]
Ana Rosa Chagas Cavalcanti
Book Reviews
Editor’s Note
“Denial of Coevalness”: Discursive Practices in the Representation of Kuwaiti Urban Modernity
Asseel Al-Ragam
An examination of selected images used to illustrate Kuwait’s mid-twentieth-century urban transformation reinforces the view that visual representations can reproduce or resist established socio-cultural narratives. The article locates this reading within debates on knowledge construction and legitimation and the ways the “other” may “speak back” against their authority. It argues that hegemonic narratives are regularly negotiated in everyday practices of living, and are constantly produced and reproduced to meet growing challenges to their legitimacy. Support is drawn from an analysis of images of Kuwaiti urban modernity collected from both academic journals and the popular press.
Zones of Entanglement: Nigeria’s Real and Imagined Compounds
Joseph Godlewski
This article examines the architectural and discursive configurations of traditional walled compounds in Nigeria. It begins by discussing the spatial and social organization of compounds in different regions of the country, focusing on the impermanent structures of the Èfik in and around the southeastern port city of Old Calabar. It then examines archival evidence to highlight the ways that compounds have been rhetorically constructed by European observers and post-independence scholars. It concludes that a more productive reading results from understanding the compound as a zone of entanglement ensnaring real, imagined, and often contradictory constructions.
[In]Visibility of Death in the Built Environment: [De]Legitimating Traditional Mediterranean Cemeteries in Southern Spain
Mar Loren-Méndez and Ama Quesada-Arce
All cultures have responded formally to death, at times giving rise to the most representative architectural forms within their built environments. This article focuses on traditional cemeteries on the Mediterranean coast of southern Spain, with the aim of understanding why so few are protected and so many are at risk of disappearing. It first offers an interdisciplinary analysis of social conditions, historical records, heritage legislation, and urban planning policies to explain why these sites have received so little consideration. It then outlines emerging academic studies on the subject that document advances and limitations. Finally, it presents a proposal for the assessment of Andalusian coastal cemeteries within the framework of an integrated reading of heritage.
Legitimizing Everyday Tradition: The Spatial Narrative of Modernity in Cairene Old Quarters
Gehan Selim
This article examines the path being taken toward legitimizing a modern spatial quality in Bulaq, one of Cairo’s oldest quarters. It documents how its historic fabric, elements of which date to the fourteenth century, is being progressively refashioned according to policies and visions that have engendered debate about the management and control of heritage. Specifically, the article questions the extent to which official attempts to create a new spatial quality in the quarter conflict with more popular appreciation of and concern for the quarter’s long history, traditional qualities, and structure. By investigating government correspondence and meeting reports, and through interviews with area residents, the article seeks to uncover the divergent meanings of legitimation with regard to officially “undesirable” areas of authentic urban fabric in the city.
Work, Slums, and Informal Settlement Traditions: Architecture of the Favela Do Telegrafo [Field Report]
Ana Rosa Chagas Cavalcanti
This report proposes patterns, guidelines, and principles for use in the design of social housing, derived from the existing “self-help” context of slums in Brazil. It is based on findings from seven years of ethnographic field observation in the Favela Grota de Santo Antonio (2008–2015). The research revealed that the presence of work activities (which generally happen within residences) has greatly modified architectural space within the favela. From a post-neoliberal point of view, the report also offers a global critique of the planning of social housing with regard to issues of labor.
Changing Chinese Cities: The Potentials of Field Urbanism, by Renee Y. Chow
Reviewed by Lyndsey Deaton
Villages in the City: A Guide to South China’s Informal Settlements, edited by Stephan Al
Reviewed by Natalia Echeverri
Building Modern Turkey: State, Space and Ideology in the Early Republic by Zeynep Kezer
Reviewed by Ipek Tureli
Global Suburbs: Urban Sprawl from the Rio Grande to Rio de Janeiro by Lawrence A. Herzog
Reviewed by Mariaa Moreno-Carranco
White City Black City: Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa, by Sharon Rotbard
Reviewed by Yael Allweil
New Architecture on Indigenous Lands, by Joy Malnar and Frank Vodvarka
Reviewed by Thérèse F. Tierney
The Humanists vs. the Reactionary Avant Garde: Clashing Visions for Today’s Architecture, by Charles Siegel
Reviewed by Howard Davis