International Journal of Islamic Architecture - Volume 13, Issue 1, 2024

This article examines the everyday adaptation practices of marginalized inhabitants in present-day Morocco as they respond to their urban domestic environments and resist recent slum relocation projects. We first address urban policies implemented during the French protectorate era (1912–56), many of which have continued to impact Moroccan cities in the twenty-first century. Our research emphasizes the inadequacy of current urban policies and architectural designs, as well as their incompatibility with inhabitants’ ways of living and spatial needs. We explore how different socio-spatial practices in traditional medina cities, shantytowns, and social housing complexes illustrate marginalized social groups’ adaptation to official policies and sociocultural changes. Acknowledging that the built environment expresses the beliefs, cultures, and social backgrounds of inhabitants, we aim to illustrate their ways of living through case studies of two marginalized communities in the Douar El-Garaa shantytown in Rabat and a social housing complex in the suburbs of Casablanca. Our findings identify socio-spatial appropriation and adaptation practices that are rooted in sociocultural habits codified by Islamic customs and other Moroccan cultural norms.

From 1941 to 1967, modern architecture in Iran shifted from a phenomenon confined to the upper class with a focus on urban monuments and government buildings to a public commodity. Three of the period’s architectural journals, Arshitikt (Architect), Bank-i Sakhtimani (Construction Bank), and Mi‘mari-yi Nuvin (New Architecture), were among the most effective tools for spreading notions of modern architecture in Iran at this time. This article traces mid-twentieth-century Iranian architects’ conceptual constellation of modern architecture through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of these periodicals. We argue that the transformation of core architectural concepts in each journal were due to changes in the sociopolitical context and in Iranian architects’ professional status as models of modern architecture were increasingly disseminated. In particular, our article demonstrates how the idea of architecture as fan (technique) in the journal Arshitikt (1946–48) was defined as the exclusive expertise of modern Iranian architects. Fan was replaced by the notion of architecture as construction in Bank-i Sakhtimani (1955–62) to justify the ongoing engineered mass production of modernized houses. By the 1960s, journals like Mi‘mari-yi Nuvin (1961–65) situated architecture as an art and a science, reflecting newly emerging views on national modernist architecture in a stabilizing professional condition.

This article examines how migrants from the island of Bawean in the Indonesian Archipelago architecturally responded to the urban environment upon migrating to Singapore in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Baweanese migrants translated architectural traditions and everyday life routines by adjusting the layouts of existing urban forms to facilitate their socio-religious needs. The continuity of the Bawean langkher (prayer hall) was formed by dynamic links between the community and their changing circumstances, motivations for Baweanese migration, and spontaneous acts of agency and resistance to colonial intervention in and away from the homeland. I explore how the Singapore ponthuk (migrant house) continued to perpetuate the socio-religious norms, mores, taboos, and laws of the Baweanese in the first half of the twentieth century. Within the hinterland, this led to a religious identity that was distinct from that of the larger Malay community. I argue that these continuities can be brought to light through a consideration of the memory of socio-spatial practices in everyday settings. I further suggest that the case of the Bawean langkher in the ponthuks of Singapore expands upon the notion of invisible geographies in the field of Islamic architecture.

The discovery of oil in Masjed Soleyman, Iran, in 1908 prompted the foundation of the British-owned Anglo Persian Oil Company (APOC), and the construction of a massive refinery in Abadan in the southwest. It also sparked astonishing industrial and urban development in the region. Within a span of fifty years following the discovery of oil, Abadan developed from a small tribal village to one of Iran’s major modern industrial cities. This study examines how the rapid modern transformation of Abadan under the management and control of APOC influenced the everyday lived experiences of the local population. As a typical colonial company town of the era, Abadan’s patterns of industrialization, urbanization, and modernization became archetypes for other oil cities in Iran and the Middle East. Shaped by dependence on a single commodity, the architecture and urban planning of Abadan reveals hierarchies of economic, social, and political domination. Using the oral histories of Iranians familiar with the period and the area, this research argues that early twentieth-century company towns in Iran such as Abadan served as rhetorical instruments, which foreign-owned companies and their hired architects and planners used to impose specific visions of modernity upon subaltern or indigenous populations.

Social marginalization at the urban scale can stem from an ingrained fear within opposing societal blocs that their identity is inevitably destined to be undermined, or even lost, due to cultural conflicts. This article argues that the design of projects that juxtapose different cultural traditions and practices and encourage an openness to the exchange of knowledge and learning can both promote the reinforcement of identity, and set the stage for the willing and mutual acceptance of difference. With this perspective as a starting point, this article explores an unrealized project for an Islamic Culture House in Genoa, Italy, intended to be a place in which Islamic culture can be shared with the Christian and non-Christian residents of the city. This unrealized project, which received the European Muslim League’s support in 2012, proposes the transformation of an old building located in the Darsena area, the dockyards of Genoa, into a centre of Islamic culture.

Review of: From Granada to Berlin: The Alhambra Cupola, Anna McSweeney (2020)

Dortmund: Verlag Kettler, 193 pp., 77 colour illus.,

ISBN: 978-3-86206-831-9, £22.75 (paperback)

Review of: Architecture of Co-Existence: Building Pluralism, Ed. Azra Akšamija (2020)

Geneva: Aga Khan Award for Architecture, and Berlin: ArchiTangle, 292 pp., approx. 100 illus.,

ISBN: 978-3-96680-008-2, $45 (hardback)

Review of: Caliphs and Merchants: Cities and Economies of Power in the Near East (700–950), Fanny Bessard (2020)

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 400 pp., 79 b&w and 31 colour illus.,

ISBN: 978-0-19885-582-8, $125 (hardback)