For the past ten years, the North African, Red Sea, and Gulf areas have been at the center of intensive construction projects. Today the urban landscape presents a prevailing image of interrupted development, a collage of traditional elements amid unfinished new towns.
Superficial attempts to modernize, based on the standards and concepts of Western societies, have failed, as have attempts to seek legitimization in the past. Attempts to modernize the East without recognizing the development forces of its culture and history lead only to a dead end.
Five centuries of relationships and confrontations with the West have significantly altered the sociocultural background of the Arabo-Iranian world. But, while the traditional East may have lived out its life, the modern Orient is an emerging phenomena that cannot ignore its past. The history and formation of Arabo-Iranian cities, and the development of Western towns, reveal considerable differences between these two urban forms.
Prior to the seventh-century Islamic conquest, the region extending from the Tigris and the Euphrates to the Nile had been inhabited by Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, and Persians. Earlier in this area, the first stages of urban phenomena and the evolution of writing occurred. The question of the Babylonian city's influence on the Arabo-Iranian pattern remains pertinent, because many of the constitutive elements of the traditional habitat and city evolved before Islam.
The influence of Western laical and industrialized centers was noticed by the middle of the nineteenth century. Expansionist Europe found itself confronted with a society endowed with a network of cities, routes, and equipment services. But Eastern or Islamic urban entities can not be described as towns in the Western or industrial sense.
The Islamic city reflects a central purpose to permanently maintain and safeguard religious values. The industrial town is the product of an enterprising society, welcoming invention, innovation, and renewal. Within the two urban entities, one tied to mass production, distribution, and consumption, the other connected to handicraft modes of production, human relationships differ fundamentally. These differences are evident in the design of housing and production and distribution networks.
The sociocultural, economic, and political contexts of the Iranian shahr and the Arabian medina have nothing in common with the advent of the Western industrial town. Likewise, the transition of an Islamic Oriental city into a modern town is not a repetition - with a five-century delay - of the development of the Western city from the Middle Ages to the contemporary metropolis.
The first colonial European urbanizations in the Arabo-Iranian area were based on a destruction-substitution process, for instance, in lower Algiers. In this case, the town was built outside the boundaries of the medina. The creation of European-type towns came at a later stage. Decolonization in the 1950s led to a rapid expansion of the urban framework, including the destruction of cities and ancient living quarters. This same phenomenon had been evident in the 1920s and 1930s in noncolonized independent countries such as Turkey and
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