The Nigerian city of Lagos has been the site of an unprecedented explosion in Pentecostal Christianity, even as the city's population has increased exponentially and its infrastructure has become strained. Pentecostal organizations have blanketed the city with their discourse, w…
According to the UN-Habitat, "developing countries will have 80% of the world's urban population in 2030. By then Africa and Asia will include almost seven out of every ten urban inhabitants in the world." (UN-Habitat, 2006) "the Dubai Fever can be found all over cities in count…
The transition from mobile hunting and gathering societies to settled agricultural and urban societies first took place in the ancient Near East. This transition is a pivotal phase in a process that has ultimately led to the proliferation of urbanized spaces and societies worldw…
Once Rome's greatest rival for the role of capital of the Mediterranean, the North African city of Carthage was razed by the Roman consul Scipio Aemilianus in 146 BCE immediately after the Third Punic War and remained forsaken for almost a century.1 Claiming to have found the de…
Despite decades of archaeological excavations in the western Wādī Hadramūt and its tributaries, when compared to its neighbors in Southwestern Arabia, the Pre-Islamic kingdom of Hadramūt is poorly understood. The interior Wādī Hadramūt of the Islamic period is even less well kno…
A comprehensive characterization of Old Kingdom settlement is difficult to glean from the hints of urbanism known from the few archaeological sites from this period that have been excavated. This study takes in the settlements associated with pyramid complexes of the Old Kingdom…
This thesis investigates the question of how Israeli policies have affected Palestinians urban behavior and along with it, political attitudes regarding the ongoing peace process, since the signing of Oslo Accords in 1993. Focusing on land and housing production, I explore how t…
The following dissertation provides an ethnographic study of transformations that accompany the emergence of innovative media and communication technologies in the African Muslim nation of Morocco. Drawing on field research conducted in Casablanca, Morocco, this work addresses t…
This dissertation examines the role of urbanism as a pervasive cultural ideology of place in rural Malay kampung (villages). The ethnographic portrait drawn here is based on over two years of fieldwork in the mid-1990s, the majority of which was conducted in the kampung of Sunga…
While the general notion of madina is largely familiar to a broad audience, its central importance to the making of the modern city and its sustainability as a dynamic component of the process of urbanization is often overlooked and deserves closer attention . A close scrutiny o…