Ethnoengineering is a so-called culturally appropriate building method tested between 2002 and 2010 by the Ecuadorian government, among the country's poorest indigenous peoples and peasant communities. It was part of a 45 million dollar infrastructure building program named FISE III. Ethnoengineering sought to incorporate what it called the cultural particularities of an ethnic group into the process of rural infrastructural modernization, with an eye on general sustainability. In simple terms, the method proposed that modern + culture = sustainable.

By closely studying the literature on the method, building plans and reports on its implementation, and the cases of 18 out of the 31 beneficiary communities, I focus on the negotiation of encountered visions about modernity. The modern was a contentious issue that often pitted FISE and the ethnoengineering supporters against comuneros or low-income villagers. While the former advocated for a building intervention privileging traditional technologies, the latter demanded conventionally modernist constructions. A total of 165 villages, out of the 196 that were proposed the approach, refused to take part in the project, and opposition existed even in those that accepted the intervention. As a general pattern, acceptance or opposition to the approach manifested along social class lines, with elite community members agreeing and comuneros opposing.

The comuneros' challenge to ethnoengineering brings to the forefront the question of who advocates for keeping culture as a way to ensure general sustainability. As the case of ethnoengineering suggests, the advocacy of sustainable building (and of sustainability in general) is positional, as in being mediated by social class concerns--it is also constructed from a position of power as all that is good. Also, the issue of class positionality, as well as the fact that the comuneros' agency manifested in different ways, highlight the shortfalls of representing traditional ethnic communities that are beneficiaries of sustainable development interventions as homogeneous and monolithic. This is a thread that unites both the so-called green neoliberal approach, and its postcolonial criticism.

This study provides a first history of the emergence of urban and national planning in Jewish Palestine/Israel (1933-1953), placing it in the wider context of the international planning movement and the flow of knowledge, ideas and expertise within it. I do so by critically excavating the individual work of three German-émigré planners during the British Mandate period, all of whom later became senior state planners in early statehood: Eliezer Leonid Brutzkus (1907-1987), Ariel Anselm Kahane (1907-1986), and Artur Glikson (1911-1966). Their planning work, which has mostly escaped the scholars’ radar, embodies a unique encounter between German cultural sensibilities and professional traditions, British colonial practices and the Zionist ideology. Operating at a time of global turmoil, each produced a distinct imagination for national “Urban Arcadias”, grounded in the local settler enterprise, yet enthusiastically participating in the universal quest for a new social order.

Essentially a work of planning history, this project also combines the perspectives of social history, history of the built-environment disciplines and Middle East studies. It takes as its point of departure underexplored aspects of planning, a distinct policy expertise that originated in fin-de-siècle industrial Europe and which evolved in the first half of the twentieth-century from a voluntarist, urban field to an influential public policy expertise concerned with large-scale planning. It highlights crucial, yet largely neglected, questions regarding spatial policy, including national and regional land use, town-country relations, settlement structure, demography and economy, and their encounter with emergent ideas on state interventionism and technocracy.

Following an introductory chapter, which considers historiographical and theoretical aspects, a separate chapter is devoted to the work of each of the three planners during the British Mandate period. It progresses chronologically from Brutzkus’ introduction of functional-economic planning in the late 1930’s, to Kahane’s formalistic-aesthetic techno-utopian proposals for postwar reconstruction, and then moving on to Glikson’s environmentalist approach, which matured in his postwar exchange with the urban critic Lewis Mumford. The final chapter discusses how their cumulative insight was brought to bear, and compete on, post-1948 national planning, as co-founders of the first Israeli national planning team. Particular emphasis is placed on the planners’ varying conceptions of the local Palestinian population as they were either incorporated into, or removed from, their various plans. The Afterword suggests signposts for future research in connection with the postwar New Towns movement worldwide.

This research provides new insights regarding the rise of planning at a formative period of institutionalization. It illuminates both the diverse disciplinary knowledge that informed its rise and the cutting-edge work by transnational planners operating in the cultural and geographical margins of the West. As well, it pushes the boundaries of the field of planning history, demonstrating the historiographical potential in addressing this distinct set of questions to the built environment fields and beyond, as revealed through this specific case study. Thus, the findings call for a revision of one of the founding myths of Israeli nation-building by countering the conventional “architectural modernist” narrative of early statehood planning, associated with the Bauhaus-graduate Arieh Sharon—the head of the first national planning team—and the aesthetic traditions and social utopianism that he espoused. Instead, I reveal how a cross-range of planning ideas, obscured by the overarching architectural narrative, were in fact the crucial locus of influence. Further, this unknown groundwork of planners and planning knowledge during the Mandate period, and especially the agency of Brutzkus, both explored here for the first time, call for a rereading of the transition from the pre-Independence Zionist rural pioneering ethos to the post-Independence ‘urban turn.’

Oil from the Arabian Gulf has made the modern world as we know it possible. This dissertation documents representations of urban modernity in oil-producing Gulf countries that emerged in the context of British controlled oil extraction during the twentieth century. With the success of national independence movements following World War I, British imperial authorities were compelled to invent new forms of colonial rule. This study examines the bold yet stumbling beginnings of British oil company public relations practices in the modern Arabian Gulf and the emergence of cooperative corporate and state efforts to use documentary film to project new national imaginaries to citizens of oil-producing countries. It shows how oil company sponsored films constructed an imaginary of cities that linked the promise of nation building and modernization in oil-producing states to the neo-colonial practice of oil extraction. By weaving together related histories of oil, urbanization, and cinema, this dissertation provides an account of the rise of British oil company public relations as linked to the modern urban development of oil company towns and capital cities in the Arabian Gulf. Focusing on documentaries made by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and Iraq Petroleum Company before 1958, this dissertation examines the oil city in cinema as the primary object of inquiry. Based on archival evidence and filmic analysis, this dissertation sheds light on how imperial power and oil extraction have shaped and been shaped by public relations practices in the modern Arabian Gulf.

This project examines the spatial reorganization of Romanian cities during two distinct periods of economic crisis that were marked by significant expansions of state-led, urban and infrastructure development. In its last decade in power, the Communist Party undertook massive public works projects, even as its austerity measures drastically curbed universal provision. Two decades later, after Romania's 2007 European Union (EU) accession and at the start of the global economic crisis, local governments embarked on a publicly funded development campaign, reshaping not only urban space but also local governance. This fast-track infrastructure development campaign has set in motion widespread expropriations, demolitions, and population displacement. After massive public expenditures, the nation's urban landscape is marked by uneven development--a patchwork of seemingly redundant infrastructure upgrading and beautification projects in localities that remain mired in staggering disinvestment.

Based on three years of field research in Romania, this dissertation makes three contributions. First, this project contributes to studies of infrastructure development by examining how the expansion of infrastructure in Romania becomes a key mechanism in the extraction of resources and the socialization of the costs of economic crises. Seized by political patronage networks through selective and discretionary allocations of EU and public funds, public infrastructure has become a vehicle for the capture and redirection of public resources. This dissertation takes a different approach from those chronicling the collapse and privatization of public infrastructure after three decades of neoliberal urban policies. With a focus on post-EU accession Romania, this project relocates the state at the center of analysis. The seemingly inefficient or unneeded expansion of infrastructure can be productively examined when we understand infrastructure as not simply a public resource, access to which is either universal or divided, but also as an accumulation mechanism. If we view public infrastructure as a "resource that generates more resources," as Katherine Verdery terms the state's drive to accumulate means of production, we can analyze its expansion as the creation of new avenues for resource extraction.

Second, this study reconsiders literature that links the production of uneven development in postsocialist regions to inter-urban competition and a retrenchment of the public sector. It examines, instead, how the urban restructuring of recent years is driven by an expansion of state interventions in the built environment, and mobilized by what can be described as the emergence of an allocative form of local governance. This restructuring is organized around the pursuit of EU and public funding and land grabs, and the capture of such resources for political and private interests. The driving force, however, is not to maximize revenue but to maximize the allocative power of local coalitions of state actors.

Third, through an examination of the shortage economy of late socialism and the effects of the recent global recession in Romania, this project problematizes the common conception that periods of economic crisis present key speculative opportunities for paper architecture. In contrast to these views, this dissertation examines crises as key events in which the practice of architecture becomes politicized through its coupling with the notion of development. In this context, architects operate not as cultural producers with aesthetic autonomy, but as agents of central and local government institutions. In its manifold entanglements with the promise of development, architecture becomes both embedded in, and disconnected from, the redistribution of resources. Specifically, by mobilizing societal resources in the service of development, architecture embeds the promise of a better future in the built environment and provides a physical template for overcoming the failures of the present order. As such, architecture and new construction become the material markers of a new beginning in the linear, teleological temporality of development. By diverting resources away from basic needs, the practice of architecture in communist Romania became a mechanism that justified the shortages and sacrifices of the present while simultaneously allowing for a selective distribution of public resources through a state agenda that defied and disengaged from the material limitations of the present moment.

This dissertation explores the representation of urban renewal in `post'-apartheid Johannesburg and the co-constitution of subjectivities therein. It is particularly concerned with how regimes of representation, embodied in public art projects, were enlisted in the construction of national identity and the expansion of neo-liberal capitalist accumulation in the inner city. By focusing on these representational practices, this study hopes to make a contribution to a broader understanding of how regimes of representation constitute a new domain of politics in post-apartheid Johannesburg.

This dissertation locates and analyzes the mechanisms and forms of urban change that accompanied the forced mass migration of the Moriscos, descendants of Spanish Muslims forcibly converted to Catholicism. The Moriscos, converted between 1501 and 1526, and expelled first from Granada in 1570 and later from all of Spain between 1609 and 1614, were perceived as an ideological threat by the Spanish state. This population constituted a significant population of urban dwellers in Granada, and, after the expulsions, formed a large percentage of the inhabitants of the North African cities of Rabat and Tetouan.

This dissertation examines the transformation of the three cities of Granada, Rabat, and Tetouan, as sites of depopulation and urban growth that were directly transformed through changes in patterns of Morisco inhabitation. Treating urban interventions at scales ranging from that of the individual and vernacular (through small-scale changes engendered by individual actors) to the collective, this dissertation considers the city, the neighborhood, and the house as ideologically-linked urban elements, the stasis and transformation of which reflect degrees of integration into the social landscape on the part of this sociocultural minority.

The shifts caused by the massive movement of Moriscos were incremental ones that radically altered both centers and peripheries of the cities themselves. Before looking at these cities, I describe briefly the systems in place in both Spain and Saadian North Africa and the great political and social changes that surrounded the Morisco expulsion. After considering the city as a whole, particularly through historical images, I proceed to a discussion of the neighborhood as a unit of change. Through analyses of one parish in Granada that suffered massive population loss at the time of the Morisco expulsion and growth of an extra-mural area in the same city, I posit that administrative attempts to control urban density and use failed in the face of dynamic, shifting populaces. I then consider the Uyun neighborhood in Tetouan, which grew linearly and incorporated small-scale religious structures, and two small urban enclaves within the Rabat medina, in which collective decision-making and controlled points of entry created highly-defensible, rationally-planned small-scale insertions to an urban framework that had been largely defined in the twelfth through fourteenth centuries. In both Rabat and Tetouan, Morisco neighborhoods responded, ultimately, to practical concerns and needs.

I then situate the Morisco house within the larger traditions of both Andalusian Muslim-era domestic structures and both earlier and later house forms in the Maghreb. Given the informal nature of both the construction and documentation of these structures, compounded with centuries of change, I posit that the Morisco house in both Granada and the Maghreb constituted an adaptation of pre-existing forms, built at scales and densities responding to economic, social, and practical concerns.

This dissertation is a study of the urban transformations that accompanied the struggles surrounding apartheid’s ending in Cape Town, seen through the lens of architecture. It examines the practices of a number of architects, who in the last decades of apartheid, began to pose alternatives to the spatiality produced through apartheid. These architects, working through academic writings and architectural designs, sought to provide redress to the ways in which colonial and apartheid-era spatial practices had created the city as a fragmented, divided landscape.

The architectural practices studied in this dissertation are focused upon two realms: modernism and the aspirations associated with apartheid’s ending. Apartheid had worked very much through space, using modernist approaches to architecture and planning to fabricate spaces and cities of inequality and separation. The architects studied here were critical of the modernism of the apartheid landscape: they connected the ways in which its homogeneity and sprawl worked hand-in-hand with racialized policies of separation and control. However, the methods they employed and formal languages that they produced were also modernist, but differed in the precedents they drew upon and the social goals they sought to engender. The modernism produced was ‘aspirational’, that expressed post-apartheid concerns and ambitions, and distinguished itself from the modernism of apartheid by acknowledging user’s needs, agency and identity. Additionally, these concerns were not carried out in uniform ways. Rather, the architects studied employed unique approaches to transforming the urban environment as a result of apartheid’s ending, reflecting differing sets of values and beliefs regarding what the content of apartheid’s ending can and should bring.

The dissertation is structured through histories of three ‘sites’ in Cape Town. Each reflects different technologies used in the making of apartheid’s spatial qualities, and each is the subject of an architectural intervention in the latter years of apartheid and/or early years of South Africa’s democracy. The sites vary in scale and architectural typology: one is set of migrant labour hostels that was ‘upgraded’ to family housing, one a neighborhood that was destroyed during apartheid and has since been the subject of controversies around how and for whom to rebuild, and the third is a public space produced in the first decade of democracy as part of a city-wide initiative that uses public space as a method of upgrading. I approach each site in a grounded manner, studying the history of the making of works of architecture as it relates to broader political, economic and cultural practices. The dissertation is a product of methods that combine interviews with archival research. The archival data includes published texts and reports, newspaper and journal articles, personal archives, project reports, and architectural process documents – which include contracts, meeting minutes and drawings. The interviews participants include architects, architectural academics, urban designers, planners, grassroots organizers and politicians. Brought together, the different sources and types of data tell a story that is both local, documenting how the ending of apartheid was performed in Cape Town through architectural interventions, and global: illustrating how architecture works as an articulation of broader social processes, and how modernism gets used to express the contradictory, aspirational qualities of democratic movements at the end of the twentieth century.

After democratization and the successful hosting of the 1988 Olympic Games, various South Korean political actors, including the government, have criticized the reckless urban redevelopment projects under past regimes. The public clamour about the need to address the failings of developmentalist regimes has triggered the emergence of a new urban discourse that emphasizes considering non-economic aspects of development, such as environmental justice and broader citizen participation. In particular, the government has embarked on remaking South Korean landscapes in a series of urban renaissance projects through a deployment of "culture," or what I call the cultural city discourse.

This dissertation examines the processes by which architectural aesthetics and spatial practices in Global Cultural Zones in Seoul rearticulate "Korean cultures" as well as those of "others." Using the methods of urban history, critical theory, and geographical inquiry, this study examines how economic liberalization and the transnational movement of people have shaped changing urban discourses surrounding development projects. Each chapter analyzes a different urban redevelopment project in a Global Cultural Zone; these represent the city government's efforts to promote an understanding of "Korean cultures" and the concept of a "multicultural society." First, by examining the cases of remodeled hanoks in Bukchon, this study challenges the assumption that vernacular architecture represents the opposite of high architecture. Instead, it highlights the ambiguous status of the former. Then, I look at the construction of "Korean cultures" in Insadong, which takes the form of nostalgia-fueled resistance to change that can be detrimental to cultural diversity. At the same time, I examine how the government's effort to build a "multicultural society" functions as a political ideology that aims to ease the tension arising from participating in the global economy. This study then turns to the construction of the Design Plaza and Park in Dongdaemun and questions the thesis that design-oriented spaces bring further economic growth, let alone producing "cultural space." Lastly, the construction of "multicultural streets" in Itaewon is examined to show that the emergence of ethnic and cultural diversity in Itaewon is the result of coincidental historical events rather than consistent government policy.

This research shows that the emphasis on Korean "traditional culture" is not a simple reflection of a desire to re-enact past customs but a project with an objective of reconfirming the modernity of the present. By examining the interlocking relationship between the state and civil society, this study illustrates the dialectical processes of globalization. This dissertation suggests that diversification of the rationales behind urban projects--the simultaneous emphasis on "Korean tradition" and a "multicultural society"--serves as a tool for the continuation of a growth-centered economic framework.

The influx of refugees throughout the history of Jordan, from the Circassians of 1890 to the Iraqis of 2002, created moments of interruption in city planning and subsequently the opportunity for the lapse in accountability of the various municipal administrations to their intended planning and development goals. Indeed, each moment of interruption allowed for and inspired a reinvention of the city and a new modernist vocabulary for its development. In this way, the state (albeit not a monolithic actor) employed the disruption caused by each influx of refugees as an opportunity to rewrite systems of planning. These systems however, as history reveals, were only to be interrupted by the next influx of refugees, and so, planning in Amman has been historically unregulated.

Development in Amman is complicated first by these refugee interruptions, second by the inadequacies of planning savvy on the part of the Greater Amman Municipality, and finally by a continual divergence between private and public interests, mainly problematic due to the lack of state land holdings and the power of tribal land owners and the political clout of their elite. The role of the state has been thus in constant competition with the shifting allegiances within tribes and amongst their elite.

The state, throughout the 20th century, during the reign of King Hussein, exerted its power in an attempt to harness the various tribal, political, and ethnic allegiances into a united front, under the arm of the state. To accomplish this, Hussein’s regime attempted to dismantle established systems of tribalism, redirecting allegiance towards the monarchy and its state led modernization and liberalization efforts. Modernization produced a series of bureaucratic systems, such as the Greater Amman Municipality, limiting the reach of tribes and their elite by dismantling tribal village councils. Additionally, the 1988 Master Plan proposed a new satellite city as prototype for a modern way of life, one outside the network of tribal communalism.

Further, the state utilized the continual influx of refugees and subsequent lapses in planning administration to legitimize its intervention over the city or the making of parts of the city, particularly after liberalization. To this end, I will interrogate the role of the state first as an instrument of welfare, and, later, as a collaborator in the privatized enterprise of neoliberal development. In this way, the dissertation reframes neoliberalization as a process, and presents a new understanding of the relationship between state power, capital, and the built environment.

First, as a rentier state, the monarchy was able, through the dispensation of welfare funds, to purchase allegiance and maintain political quietism. Later, after the loss of rentier capital, and operating as a neoliberal state, Hussein turned to social mechanisms of moderated governance, such at the manipulation of voting rights in order to ensure the election of favorable, pro-state candidates. As a result, governance systems in Amman were highly coercive and continually rescripted in such a way as to ensure first the autonomy of the state, and second, the security of the regime.

A historical analysis of the political economy of urbanism in Amman makes clear the governance structure of the state, and reveals the limitations of civic democracy that it imposed on its public. Informed by a historical perspective of Amman’s moderated governance structure, I conclude that the state, during the reign of King Abdullah (Hussein’s son and heir), employed its coercive voice through various political campaigns to rewrite systems of planning and development and produce two major projects with agency that act on, or neoliberalize a city.

Through my research on Amman in the contemporary moment, I demonstrate that neoliberalism is not only a process, but also a placed based, or site-specific process. In this way I recognize buildings and the sites they occupy as having more agency as a neoliberal construct, as opposed to neoliberalism as solely an economic project. In so doing, the critique shifts to the built environment, and recognizes the architecture within it as a significant actor in the process of transformation. Specific to Amman, two neoliberal projects, the Jordan Gate Towers and The Abdali Plan, prompted transformation and challenge the discussion of neoliberalism as the sole agent of global change. Further, by measure of impact, these urban transformations demonstrate that neoliberal restructuring can manifest as not only a site-specific process, but also as a political project.

Un-planning is a derivative of the historic condition of unregulated planning in Amman and is defined by conditions of unregulated policy, the re-scripting or continual reconceptualization of the states role in planning, and finally, the constant battle with entrenched systems of tribalism that compete with the state for allegiance, and ultimately obstruct the formation of a national identity.

These three components of interrupted planning in Amman (unregulated policy, rescripting the role of the state, and the fight for allegiance) have evolved from a provisional system of planning into a system of intentional un-planning, one that allows for an informalization of planning policy that has since culminated in unregulated development in the city.

The dissertation will reveal that the primary reason unregulated planning is preferred is that it allows a certain range of autonomy for the state when it is not confined to planning regulations. In so doing, the state has released itself from liability to the often-detrimental cost of development decisions made in Amman, allowing it to pursue development in terms of capital incentive rather than impact study.

This dissertation examines the imperial reach of a major American corporate power in the first third of the twentieth century. With the Ford Motor Company (FMC) and its social programs at the center of the study, I trace the paths of commercial images and forms of spatial organization that were essential to the workings of Fordism. As a lesser-known aspect of the company’s global dealings, I focus on the company’s transnational exchanges with the people and regions of the greater Middle East and examine the formulation of Fordist strategies as immigrant groups from these regions traveled to and settled into the city of Detroit.

The first half of the study begins with Henry Ford’s view of the world, as his company produced some of the earliest commercial images of American automotive enterprise in emerging markets, as early as the First War. These visual devices advocated for the use of Ford products by equating American technology with modernity, civility, and Americanism, forging the cornerstones of the Ford promise. The messages were distributed worldwide, including the regions that the FMC collectively termed “the markets of the Orient,” (Egypt, Turkey, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon and India) as a means to civilize cultures and sell Ford products. As immigrant laborers followed Ford commodities and commercial appeals to their point of origin, Detroit, they found Ford’s promise refashioned as social engineering programs for workers arriving to work in the newly made industrial capital.

By the 1920s, Ford’s Detroit was mapped through lines of racial and ethnic exclusion by the city municipality, alongside the backing of its industrial giants. With the FMC as the principle corporate actor, the second half of the study shows how the factory, worker home, and city became tools of social control for the regulation of labor and enforcement of Fordist principles. Through an archival and visual analysis of the FMC’s social, filmic and domestic programs, I understand space as a vital mode of contestation and subject making for both the corporation and immigrant groups. More broadly, the dissertation contends that Ford’s coupling of social engineering programs with spatial organization allowed his company (and Detroit) to emerge as a major center of national and cultural power, even during moments of intense economic and global uncertainty.