Comprised of ten case-study chapters and an introduction, this book provides an empirically rich collection that will appeal to researchers of urbanism in the Middle East. The book's focus is on examples, or more appropriately, experiments of social housing in the Middle East. The two editors situate the intellectual and emotional desire to bring the volume to light by poetically reminiscing on encountering the Think Global, Build Social! exhibition in Izmir, Turkey. The exhibition seems to signal to two contexts to which the editors are responding, and according to which I will structure my review: the changing social nature of architecture and an intellectual intervention in postcolonial urbanism.

The first, is the academic and activist soul-searching of the architectural profession to become more “socially concerned” within a time of neoliberal urbanism and the withdrawal of large-scale state-led provision of housing for lower-income groups (p. 5). This simultaneously demonstrates a welcomed shift to principles of participatory design and faces the challenge of the lack of revolutionary or developmental support from the state, as the editors write. I would argue, however, that this humble, yet, critical turn is made possible because of the disinvestment from the high-modernist desire to shape, order, and civilize the population, a desire that has been the subject of critiques for decades in the work of James C. Scott, or, in Middle East Studies, of Timothy Mitchell. In a way, this critical conversation highlights how the grand-modernist ambition of the post-war moment might still influence the profession. The desire for modernity, and the lamentation of the modernist promise that seems to fail and disappoint is a running thread through many of the chapters presented. Mohammed Elshahed's chapter (Chapter 3) recovers archival material from Egyptian Architect Mahmoud Riad to recount one of the many moments of Egyptianizing the architectural profession as well as an unmistakable modernist desire to respond to a crisis of housing. Jaleh Jalili and Farshid Emami's fascinating chapter (Chapter 10) also traces the emergence of architects as national experts on housing and urban planning by shedding light on the generation that established the Society of Iranian Diplomate Architects (SIDA). Together these chapters highlight the complex ways in which a modernist global discourse was professionalized and—at times—nationalized in local contexts. They also pay attention to the ways in which these endeavors grappled with defining and articulating “modernity.”

Of course, this moment of modernity has its afterlives, which are the focus of most of the volume's chapters. In a way, a common theme in the chapters is to chart the trajectory, and fate of earlier architectural plans and designs through tracing their appropriation or their failure to meet their original intentions. To mention a few examples: Mae al-Ansari's essay on Kuwait and the question of gender marginality (Chapter 8) recovers the original intention of the Sabah al-Salem Housing Project (SSHP) by highlighting the material from original designers Krzysztof Wisnioswski. A master-plan that attempted to respond to the original competition call's emphasis on “Islamic norms of life” took a different trajectory when the project was eventually dedicated to house Kuwaiti women and divorcees (p. 212). Noam Shoked's chapter (Chapter 9) similarly traces the paradoxical relationship of modernity that went into the design of settlements for Ultra-orthodox settlers in the case of Immanuel. The failures, paradoxes, and contradictions evidenced in these and other chapters hint towards what the editors conceive of as “extending the meaning of spatial agency from the designers to the receiving end of the spectrum” (p. 7). That is, the unmistakable realization that inhabitants shape, reappropriate, and contest the desire for ordered design.

The second context is intellectual. It corresponds to what the editors beautifully word as “finding ourselves now awkwardly staring at an empty map” (p. 7). During the Think Global, Build Social! exhibition, the editors noted some examples in North Africa but a disconcerting absence of evidence from within the broader Middle East in experiments in social housing. This gives the second drive and purpose of the volume: to document cases from across the Middle East, to rectify this awkward gaze, and to write more inclusive architectural histories. This context, therefore, situates the volume within “the broad spectrum of critical postcolonial studies of architecture and urbanism” (p. 20). This postcolonial conversation is my final theme of this review.

The book sets for itself the task of thinking through transnational experiences and writing more inclusive architectural histories by bringing in lesser known cases from the Middle East. And on this task, it delivers with cases spanning from Tunisia to Iran including Turkey, Jordan, Israel, Egypt, Cyprus, Tunisia, and Kuwait. The introduction pays attention to the effect of colonial and postcolonial experiments in provision of housing, and the case studies indeed document some of the myriad ways in which housing has been intertwined with nationalism, translation, and questions of class, identity, and religion. The editors define social housing as “all types of subsidized housing built-by public institutions, municipalities, national governments, or housing agencies for lower-income groups who are in need of accommodation and who, in existing market conditions, could not afford to purchase or rent with subsidies” (p. 2). Defining social housing in broad brush strokes like this allows the volume to speak to different and changing political arrangements for housing provision across the Middle East. It attends to the changing role of the state, and the dynamics that particularly shape urbanism in the Middle East (namely neoliberalism and ongoing violent conflicts). Despite this potential, not all the case studies manage to push boundaries that the editors suggest can be pushed. For instance, the editors mention that political conflicts in the region truly shape the debates around social housing (p. 13), and they pay specific attention to the spatial politics of refugee camps and the ways in which “housing needs [are used] for colonial expansion” in the case of Israel (p. 13). These are perceptive lines of inquiry that cut across contemporary debates on the endurance of colonialism and colonial relationships in the Middle East and elsewhere. Yet, besides Chapter 2, which tackles the question of Palestinian refugees by looking into the legitimization of the Jordanian state, these threads appear only tangentially in the two case studies from Israel (Chapter 6 and Chapter 9). For a volume that situates its contribution within postcolonial urbanism there is a tension between the critical aspiration of the volume's introduction and the silence on settler-colonialism in these specific cases. Based on this, I wonder if there might be room for a more ambitious attempt to engage with the broad postcolonial and decolonial agenda beyond writing case studies in a global narrative.

As with edited volumes it is impossible to do justice to each essay. It is indeed hard to read all contributions with the expectation of a similar tone or texture, yet some consistency with editing and style might have strengthened some of the individual chapters. Overall, this is an exciting volume in terms of empirical richness and a multitude of cases. Theoretically, the introductory chapter written by the two editors is a well-written overview of the changing context of social housing in Europe as well as the Middle East. It provides an ambitious agenda to rethink social housing from within the context of the Middle East. Together with the empirical chapters, it provides a good resource for documenting some of the experiments in social housing.