Though a multidisciplinary field, Middle East studies has historically had little engagement with the theoretical and methodological contributions of the discipline of geography. In the wake of the Arab Spring, there was a turning point, as scholars of the region noted the importance of public space to the uprisings, thus sparking engaging debates about urban spatial politics. In fact, Middle East studies is not alone in its newfound affinity to geography; a shift to what many have called “the spatial turn” across the social sciences and humanities has put geography in the limelight. Geography is in fact the original “area” studies—geographers of the early 20th century saw the main rationale of their discipline as identifying and describing regions, and the region was the core geographical concept.Footnote ¹ The post–World War II area studies boom occurred much at the expense of the discipline; after Harvard University closed its geography program in 1948, the University of Pennsylvania, Yale University, Columbia University, and other Ivy League schools soon followed and Title VI essentially led to the closing of numerous other geography programs around the country—including Stanford University, the University of Michigan, Northwestern University, and the University of Chicago. A growing sentiment within the ivory tower found the discipline too ambiguous and asserted that a university did not need geography to be a great institution.Footnote ²

Now, geography has arguably made a comeback as the quintessential interdisciplinary discipline; there is increased recognition of the interconnected relationships between humans and the environment, and to the importance of space and scale as theoretical tools. Since geography consists of numerous subfields, engaged with work from the physical sciences to the humanities and everything in between, each subfield encourages different ways of knowing and distinct methods for thinking about spatial relations, for examining patterns and processes, and for thinking through relationships across temporalities and the relationship between knowledge, power, and territory. Here I will highlight some of the ways a geographical perspective contributes to our understanding of urban transformation in the Middle East and North Africa. I begin with a discussion of the so-called “Arab street” before moving to everyday material spatial practices, the neoliberal city, and exclusionary sociospatial politics. I conclude with a discussion of critical cartographies as a methodology for analyzing and representing urban transformations.

The notion of the Arab streetFootnote ³ was used mostly metaphorically in the mainstream media in the 1990s and 2000s to characterize protest and urban unrest; it symbolized a space of resistance to occupation, imperialism, and war. While Western media coverage of the Second Intifada and, later, the post-9/11 protests in response to the Afghan War characterized the Arab street as angry and violent, 2011 saw a marked shift in the use of the term, from metaphorical to spatial. Today the jubilance of 2011 and the calls for bread, freedom, and justice seem like a distant memory amid a wave of violence and destruction and a return to autocracy, but the revolutionary movements that gripped the region following the death of the Tunisian street vendor Muhammad Abu Azizi both sparked and marked a revolution in spatial practices. In the face of dictators and their security states, frequently characterized by police brutality, state controlled media, surveillance, and intrusion into the everyday lives of citizens, the Arab street witnessed a revival in multiple senses: push back against the security state, mass mobilization of populations in public space, and the reclaiming of the street through art and performance. 2011 was the turning point when Middle East studies could no longer leave urban studies and spatial analysis to the margins. It could no longer attempt to understand urban politics without attention to everyday spatial practices, whether scholars are interested in the formation of a collective populace or the everyday conflicts over zoning, territoriality, or graffiti. While post–Arab Spring politics might be symbolized by the death of public space, the political mobilization occurred concurrently with the rise of the street as a creative space, a revival in performance, street art, music, and collective expression, only in part captured through the images of Tahrir Square as a carnival.

Moving beyond the “great squares” and the physical space of organizing, a spatial lens draws our attention to the network structures and daily confrontations over territory as a form of power.Footnote ⁴ Asef Bayat, who despite being a sociologist has arguably made the largest geographical contribution to Middle East studies, first developed the concepts of “the quiet encroachment of the ordinary” and “street politics,” with which he analyzed the spatial claims, improvisations, survival tactics, and everyday practices of the poor in Iran. Street politics, he argues, is the “modern urban theater of contention,” a site for the everyday politics of ordinary people.Footnote ⁵ The broader significance of Bayat's contribution lies in how these concepts have been extended to understand the production of and contestations over spatial practices across the region and beyond. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre, material spatial practices and representations of space—ranging from confrontations with police or the microgeographies of occupation to physical infrastructures, zoning laws, and land use changes dictated by urban plannersFootnote ⁶ —literally and figuratively produce cities.Footnote ⁷ The transformation of the city occurs as much through representations of space as through material practices. Signs and symbols of identity claims such as the life-size photos of Nasrallah hanging off balconies in Hizbullah-dominated areas such as al-Dahiye change the everyday politics of space.Footnote ⁸ By asking us to see beyond the frames of protest or resistance, to examine instead the underlying power struggles made visible in space, Bayat drew critical attention to the notions of the micro-, mundane, and everyday lives while connecting sociospatial practices to questions of political economy and security.

A turn to the spatial also renders the impact of neoliberalism on cities more visible. Cities such as Cairo, Amman, and Casablanca were redrawn along exclusionary logics, producing a neoliberal landscape of urban regeneration marked by displacement of the poor, the rise of gated communities, and a growing landscape of consumption.Footnote ⁹ This redrawing was guided by a consumption-security nexus, with landscapes of state power attempting to mask the scars of war, as in Solidere's neoliberal consumption space in Beirut, which was designed as a “sanitised Middle Eastern theme park.”Footnote ¹⁰ New spaces of consumption, from malls and hypermarkets to theme parks, leisure facilities, and cafes, reflect both the production and expansion of neoliberal spatial practices and can be observed in cities from Tangier to Dubai. The conversion of desert environments in the Gulf into “green” cities also demonstrates the conflicting visions of modernity that play out spatially, leading to distinct patterns of sociospatial change across cities in the region. While many narratives of neoliberalism focus on repetitive cycles of political-economic analysis, neoliberalism does not occur in a vacuum, and interacts with many other factors such as Islamism; in my own work I have analyzed the spatial ramifications of the Islamic revival and how it interacted with neoliberal piety, while other scholars examine how this merger transforms neighborhoods and changes social, class, and gender relations.Footnote ¹¹

Just as important as what happens in the city is what is excluded from the city, from subaltern youth cultures to exploited migrant laborers. The hallmarks of the so-called neoliberal city include declining public infrastructures, rising income polarization, and sociospatial exclusion, perhaps also captured under the rubric of urban informality. Cities have witnessed density and sprawl simultaneously as “undesirable” residents unable to participate in the neoliberal economy are displaced to build “tunnels and bypasses.”Footnote ¹² Despite growing practices of displacement and relocation, urban informality is the norm in most cities of the global south. Informal settlements and the war on them have become embedded in urban policy, increasingly understood within the rubric of security.Footnote ¹³ Seeing urban transformations from the margins, the informal or unplanned, and the space of the slum, demonstrates the importance of looking at the scale of the city in connection to other scales of analysis. Different actors territorialize cities as they claim space and spatialize their identity. Turning attention to the broader sociospatial transformations that change the built environment is critically important, as it shifts attention away from either the nation-state or “the local” and toward interactions across a variety of spatial scales. A scalar lens, then, allows one to see how contestations in everyday life are about the home, the street, the neighborhood, the city, the metropolis, the province, the nation-state, and the region simultaneously. Traversing scales opens up a whole new world of analysis, enabling researchers to describe phenomenon from multiple perspectives.

While geography offers numerous analytical devices, it also offers an important methodological contribution to Middle East studies. Critical or countercartographies are mapping practices that dismantle dominant narratives and power relations reinforced by mapping and instead offer maps as a power tool for creating new narratives.Footnote ¹⁴ Maps make space knowable, definable, and controllable and work to legitimate territorial definitions, usually constructed by and for the state. The technological transformations of the past twenty years has also transformed who maps, the way people map, and how maps circulate, and has led to a broader understanding of the power of maps. Counter-cartographies work as a disruption, revealing the deceptive nature of maps and working to represent information in innovative ways. This critical axis of research-praxis has also gained attention in Middle East studies mostly through scholar-activism that uses counter-mapping and open-source mapping to disrupt dominant power structures and produce new forms of awareness, from segregated road networks in the West Bank (Visualizing Palestine), to sexual harassment in public space (HarassMap), to maps of poverty and municipal budgeting (Tadamun).Footnote ¹⁵ The pioneering work of all three of these sites has demonstrated that mapping is not just a tool of the state for the state by the state but can serve as an important mechanism for decentering spatial knowledge production and rendering new images of spatial practice legible. Thus critical cartographies highlight the ongoing contestations and collective struggles to not only present data in new ways but also to make demands for new forms of data and legibility. A geographical perspective in the analysis of urban transformations, then, offers a wide lens through which to understand the spatial nature of these transformations occurring at multiple scales, and provides a means of capturing the ruptures, transgressions, and spatial contestations occurring across cities in the region.