The post(-)colonial Arab city

ABSTRACT

Research from the 1980s by Ronan Paddison, Allan Findlay and colleagues on ‘the post-colonial city' and ‘the Arab city' is examined. Distinguishing between ‘post-colonial' (as periodization) and ‘postcolonial' (as critique), the paper traces how elements of the latter permeated what Paddison and colleagues claimed about the former. A sensitivity to urban ‘models', histories and geographies beyond the Global North was evident, anticipating subsequent postcolonial moves to engage fully with the possibilities of multiple ‘other' urban trajectories, lives, plans and capacities for change. It is also suggested that, inspired by Janet Abu-Lughod, Paddison and colleagues were working towards a postcolonial ‘comparative urbanism'.

KEYWORDS:

• Arab city
• comparative urbanism
• post-colonial city
• postcolonialism

Acknowledgements

We wish to offer sizeable thanks to Mark Boyle for his patience and encouragement, as well as to two referees who suggestions have certainly helped to improve the final version of this paper. Thanks to Gordon MacLeod for assistance with thinking about the role of a comparative sensibility in The Fragmented State (Paddison, 1983), and thanks to Jenny Robinson for discussions about Abu-Lughod and comparative urbanism. Finally, particular thanks are due to Allan Findlay for his generous and helpful reflections on an earlier draft of this paper, a number of which have been incorporated into the final version, and to him and Anne Findlay for permission to use the photographs included here.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Emma Laurie is Lecturer in Geography at the University of Glasgow interested in the politics of health and what this politics reveals about the valuation of life, as well as matters of social justice, human rights, violence and security, especially in low-income settings.

Chris Philo is Professor of Geography at the University of Glasgow, with interests spanning the throughout contemporary human geography, its history and theory, but with specialist interests in the social and historical geographies of ‘otherness'.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 We have deliberately not sought to disentangle the ideas and contributions of the different scholars involved in this body of research, but our strong sense is that the team involved was very much a team with no single dominant voice. It is interesting to note the variability in the authors named, and indeed in the orders of their naming, on the various publications arising from the research. Moreover, as is clear from other contributions to this SI, Ronan was an exemplary collaborator, rarely wishing to single himself out as the ‘special one’, and so it makes sense to follow that lead here and hence to report on a corpus of work where Ronan was undoubtedly a significant influence and contributor but where what ultimately matters is the collective outcome (not the individual input). Findlay (2020) confirms that the research was indeed very much a team effort, while also clarifying the different expertises brought to the table by the different contributors.

2 For most of this paper, excepting when we conclude, we will not say ‘Ronan’ but rather use the normal convention of referencing authors by their surnames, hence ‘Paddison’.

3 Abichou is formally named as a co-author, once as first-named author, on two of the project’s publications. Some publications from the team listed a document authored by Abichou entitled La function commercial de Tunis (Abichou, 1981), which was likely a planning report (focussing on the city’s retail environments) produced by the District de Tunis (Paddison, Abichou, et al., 1984, pp. 293–296: Abichou’s report is referenced in Endnote 22, p. 293). Sadly, no trace can be found of this document. In their 1986 monograph, the authors acknowledge how ‘[i]n Tunis our field work progressed quickly and efficiently thanks to the generous assistance of Mr Habib Abichou’ (Paddison & Findlay, 1986, p. 5), and Findlay (2020) recalls that Abichou also worked a field season in Rabat-Salé (often the full designation given to this city). Findlay (2020) further reports that ‘Abichou would later rise to high office within the urban management team in Tunis and go on to become an international consultant working in several other African countries, including Morocco, Gabon and Burundi’.

4 We should acknowledge that neither of us are experts on ‘the Arab city’, and so this paper cannot be taken as an intervention within that specific field of inquiry: rather, it is essentially an attempt to craft a postcolonial reading of what Paddison and co-authors have to say about ‘the Arab city’ in its diverse post-colonial forms.

5 For a parallel study of colonial and post-colonial Rabat, considering the ‘complicated spatialities’ of this city arising from the overlay of certain colonial urban planning innovations by the French ‘cultural regent’ to Morocco, Louis H.-G. Lyautey, and then from attempts to rework or to heritagize the resulting spatial forms, see Wagner and Minca (2014). Paddison, Abichou, et al. (1984, p. 266) discuss Lyautey’s influence on Moroccan urban planning. Also, see Studer (2015), exploring ‘urban space in the Moroccan context’ and, without referencing the Paddison et al project but explicitly leaning across to an ‘ordinary towns or cities’ agenda (Robinson, 2006), offering insights into the ‘tension arising between urban planning and towns or cities as spaces of living’ (Studer, 2015, p. 1005). An important text discussing ‘French Modern’ social-urban forms, circulating France and its colonies, is Rabinow (1995).

6 Intriguingly, in her book Geography of Third World Cities, Stella Lowder, a colleague in Geography at the University of Glasgow, illustrates broader claims about ‘Third World’ cities emerging from periods of colonial rule through drawing upon and citing the Paddison et al. Rabat study: ‘spatial patterns can be surprisingly enduring … : in contemporary Rabat, for example, selective immigration has fossilised the contrasts between the various parts of the city centre by identifying each with an economic class’ (Lowder, 1986, p. 245).

7 Marçais (1940) spoke of ‘L’urbanisme musulman’: see Abu-Lughod (1987, p. 158).

8 Another umbrella category under which the project sits is that of ‘the Third World City’ (e.g. Lowder, 1986). Such a category is now commonly rejected as outdated, an artifice of how the world became divided up during the Cold War, and also – in more critical social science circles – because of how ‘Third World’ carries the implication of sitting at the bottom of a geoeconomic-geopolitical hierarchy within the global nation-state system. See chapter on ‘Thirdworldism and the image of global development’ in Power (2003; cf. Solarz, 2012).

9 Particularly worthy of note is the borrowing here from Milton Santos, the Brazilian geographer, famous for conceptualizing cities of the ‘underdeveloped world’ as a ‘shared space’ (Santos, 1979) hosting two distinct if related economic ‘circuits’ (some might say ‘modes of production’: Lowder, 1986, p. 250), one capitalistic, large-scale, technologically-advanced and linked to national and international contexts, and the other informal, small-scale, craft-based and deeply ‘entrenched’ in a given city’s neighbourhoods. Santos was widely regarded as having early instituted a fierce critique of Western (or Northern) models of ‘development’ as deeply flawed in capturing the specificities of urban forms and processes outwith the West (or North). As Santos (1974, p.4) asked: ‘Why should we not … rally expertise from the underdeveloped countries themselves: to develop theories which would make sense to them both as geographers and citizens? At the moment, ‘official’ geography operates as though the West had a monopoly on ideas.’ Note that Santos was prepared, in the 1970s, to use the term ‘underdeveloped’ as a deliberate political strategy, questioning why some global places are indeed underdeveloped compared to what they might otherwise have been without outside interferences. Santos’s role in the history of radical geography is touched on by Crossa (2019).

10 The MKURABITA programme (also referred to as the Property and Business Formalisation Scheme) is a World Bank-funded program in Tanzania, inspired by the work of Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto. De Soto proposes the formalization of title deeds and property rights to those informally ‘possessing’ land in so-called slums. The central tenant of his argument is that property formalization becomes a key path for development whereby newly titled homeowners can take out loans against their homes to invest in other areas of their lives. Through MKURABITA, the Government of Tanzania set out plans to ‘ensure that assets of the poor, which are currently held and exchanged outside the legal system, are adequately documented, standardised into universally accepted property records and connected to economic growth’ (United Republic of Tanzania, 2007, p. 9, cited in Campbell, 2013, p. 463). For further discussion, see also Briggs (2011) and Mercer (2017).

11 For many years she was Professor of Sociology, Geography and Urban Affairs and Policy Research at Northwestern University, Chicago.

12 There is an early Northwestern ‘mimeo’ referenced in her 1975 paper which includes the phrase ‘post-colonial’ – given a 1974 date and subtitled ‘Rabat-Salé’; Morocco, an example of a post-colonial caste system’ – and maybe there is a thread from here through to ‘the post-colonial city’ in the title of Findlay, Findlay et al. (1984). Discussing recent postcolonial critics of a Global-Northern dominance of urban theorizing, Scott and Storper (2014, p. 3) argue that, ‘[i]n some respects, these recent postcolonial approaches echo the work of earlier writers such as Abu-Lughod [and others] who define postcolonial urbanism in a quite literal way, that is, as an urban condition shaped by the experience of colonialism’.

13 One of the papers arising from ‘the Arab city’ research was explicitly badged as ‘a comparison of two North African cities’ (Paddison, Abichou, et al., 1984). Elsewhere it would not be hard to find Paddison being at least implicitly comparative in how he builds arguments based on observing, synthesizing or counterposing urban or political ‘cases’ drawn from his expansive global and historical knowledge-base. Indeed, his major monograph The Fragmented State (Paddison, 1983) might be described as an exercise in ‘comparative statism’, roaming widely when exploring different examples of how unitary or fragmented – how centralised or decentralised – states can be in their intertwined institutional and territorial compositions (see also MacLeod, 2020). That said, he acknowledges ‘the advanced industrial liberal economies with which we shall primarily be concerned’ (Paddison, 1983, p. 5), while only speaking lightly about either the colonial periods shaping some of these economies (mainly with reference to Australia: e.g. Paddison, 1983, p. 36) or the role of ‘Third World’ state formation in ‘the dissolution of empires’ (Paddison, 1983, p.viii). A postcolonial critique of The Fragmented State could certainly be imagined.

14 Here Robinson is using what is evidently a 1976 reprint of Abu-Lughod’s, 1975 Urban Affairs Quarterly piece (Abu-Lughod, 1976, 1984). Two approving references to Abu-Lughod (1999) occur in Robinson (2011, p. 7, p. 10). Introducing a virtual journal issue on comparative urbanism, moreover, Robinson (2014, p. 5) recruits Abu-Lughod (1999) as a precursor of such an approach to fostering new urban knowledges. See also Brenner (2001).