Conversations on Global City Aspirations in Middle Eastern Cities

ABP Research Seminar Series 2022: Melbourne Cambridge Conversation on urban poor and global city aspirations in Middle Eastern cities

This seminar series covers two seemingly contrasting but interrelated aspects of contemporary cities in the Middle East: the urban poor and global city aspirations. The first two talks reflect on the experience of the urban poor. While the first one offers a gender perspective on an informal settlement in Karaj, Iran, the second talk presents an ethnography of the urban poor’s interpretation of property rights in a gated community in Cairo, Egypt. In contrast, the third talk presents an elite ethnography of ‘global cities’ interpretations in Dubai.

Please note:

This seminar will be held in‐person in the Japanese Room, Level 4, Glyn Davis Building, University of Melbourne (45 seats only), and also streamed online via Zoom webinar - please ensure you select your preferred ticket type when registering.

About the panel

Sombol Mokhles is a PhD candidate at the Melbourne School of Design, and Melbourne Centre for Cities, interested in alleviating the inequalities of urban life and global climate governance. Her current PhD is a data-driven approach to reimagining networking between cities beyond global cities. Her MPhil at Cambridge University investigated role of place in women’s everyday life in an informal settlement in Iran.

Michele Acuto is Director of the Melbourne Centre for Cities, Professor in Urban Politics and Associate Dean (Research) in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning. His work is centred on the intersection of international and urban governance and the globalisation of cities. He has recently published How to Build a Global City (Cornell, 2022)

Nicholas Simcik Arese is Assistant Professor of Architecture and Global Urban Studies at the University of Cambridge, where he directs the MPhil in Architecture and Urban Studies (MAUS), and a Research Affiliate in the PEAK Urban programme in the Department of Anthropology, University of Oxford. He is an urban theorist, ethnographer, and architect with an interest in improvised city planning, property theory, and popular notions of value and morality in the built environment.

Moderator

Dr Julie Tian Miao is an Associate Professor at the University of Melbourne. Her research focuses on the ‘intrapreneurial state’ and ‘innovation-space’, which explore the interfaces between planning, property, governance, innovation and the knowledge economy. She has published over sixty research outcomes on these themes from multidisciplinary approaches.

Presentation 1 - Sombol Mokhles

Women’s personal mobility patterns and social infrastructure in informal settlements in Iran

The impact of different places on women’s mobility and social has not been much explored in the context of informal settlements in Iran, where they face many restrictions due to socio-cultural norms. Using a qualitative approach, this research investigates how different geographies of place affect women’s practices for social interaction and physical activity. Focusing on an informal settlement in Iran, this research shows that unlike mainly western studies that emphasise the benefit of parks, in this case women’s social life flourished on streets and in private and semi-private everyday places such as shops, areas around houses, and workplaces. The results show a considerable difference in the impact of different urban fabrics on women’s practices.

Presentation 2 - Assistant Professor Nicholas Simcik Arese

Sayi‘: Cairo’s Urban Outlaw as Property Rights Experimentalist

In a gated community on the outskirts of Cairo, a group of former slum-dwellers invade 500 hundred homes, build a bustling street market, and use rights language to organize and protect their occupation. However, to navigate the intricacies of private covenants and policing, amidst extreme hostility from a housing corporation and homeowners, squatter leaders must reframe the notion of property rights all together. In doing so, they proudly appropriate the sharpest insult that homeowners use against slum-dwellers: sayi‘, an Egyptian term meaning ‘lazy, immoral bum.’

Based on 16-months of participant-observation with the occupiers, research shows how they re-fashion the sayi‘ as an ‘honourable outlaw,’ a figure that is enchanted by the prospect of dispossession, cultivating a near-alchemical power to experiment with property ownership for the common good. In practice, the sayi‘ inverts the common law notion of ‘property as a bundle of rights,’ instead imagining ‘rights as a bundle of properties’ to enact a duty-based system of micro-property rights that can be easily parsed, blended, and brokered.

More generally, this case calls attention to the notions of “economic embeddedness” (Polanyi) and “legal personality” (Maitland) as powerful analytical devices for understanding ‘informal neighbourhoods’ as incubators for profound political-economic and legal innovation.

Presentation 3 - Professor Michele Acuto

What we speak of when we speak of ‘global cities’ in Dubai: an elite ethnography.

Dubai has been much discussed as a meteoric rise in the echelon of ‘global cities’ and an equally contested paradigm of deeply unequal urban development. Drawing on a comparative study of how the ‘global city’ is interpreted by urban development elites, this short research brief offers a snapshot of how global urbanism plays out in the Emirate and how it could be better attuned to a cosmopolitan imagination.

This is seminar is #4 in the Series focussing on South Asia. This seminar is organised in collaboration with the Colour Diversity Group.

COVID Safe Measures

The University is operating under Victoria's COVID Safe Settings. All visitors to University of Melbourne must be fully vaccinated (or have a valid exemption).

Please do not attend campus if you are experiencing any COVID symptoms.