Middle Eastern cities, 1900-1950 : public places and public spheres in transformation / edited by Hans Chr. Korsholm Nielsen and Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen.

Includes bibliographical references.

The city conceived, perceived, and experienced / Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen -- Colonizing popular culture or creating modernity? Architectural metaphors and Egyptian media / Walter Armbrust -- Town planning schemes for Cairo conceived by Egyptian planners in the "Liberal Experiment" period / Mercedes Volait -- The pleasure of public space Muhammad ʻAli Street and the nightclubs in Cairo (1900-1950) / Karin van Nieuwkerk -- Sex and Cinema in Damascus : The gendered politics of public space in a colonial city / Elizabeth Thompson -- The early museums and the formation of their publics / Christel Braae -- Istanbul in the 1940's and the Garip poets / Henning Goldbek -- The appearance and disappearance of public space : Sanaʻa during the first part of the century / Hans Chr. Korsholm Nielsen -- Construction of the public sphere in the Middle Eastern Medina during the first half of the 20th century / Anton Escher.

"The first half of the 20th century witnessed the birth of most Middle Eastern cities as we know them today. New public institutions such as the cinema and the museum emerged as populations tripled, while older public spaces such as the street itself became arenas for novel forms of social and political intercourse. At the same time, there was a consolidation of the public sphere that new educational institutions and the popular press had given rise to in previous decades. -- Despite the radical transformations of this period, most studies of the Middle Eastern city focus either on what earlier have been called Islamic cities or on the contemporary city, while those that do look at the early 20th century tend to concentrate on the cities' physical alterations and administration. The present volume, which does not investigate urban space so much as it does the interaction between space and consciousness, seeks to elucidate how the people who lived there experienced these far-reaching changes. -- Some of the nine essays collected here examine a particular aspect of a single city, such as night-clubs in Cairo, sex and cinema in Damascus, the Garip poets of Istanbul and the appearance and disappearance of public space in Sana'a. Others utilise a regional canvas, considering early museums and the formation of their publics, 'order' and modernity in Egyptian popular media, and the construction of the public sphere in the Middle Eastern medina."