Intractable Cities: Urbanism in the Islamic Sphere of the Later Medieval Mediterranean World

The urbanism of the medieval Islamic world has often been understood as a type of urbanism in which cities and the structures of states were closely entwined - a trait that has been foregrounded as a major difference from the urbanism of Christian Europe in this period. Based on a close-up study of six cities in the later medieval Mashriq and Maghrib, this article argues for a reappraisal of this interpretation. While there was a close link between urban and imperial structures in the early Islamic period, the urbanism that emerged in the period after the collapse of the 'Abbasid Empire was of an altogether different nature. Cities and states intersected in various ways, but cities were important political arenas which rulers surprisingly often struggled to control: only in some cities were rulers able to impose urbanistic schemes that dominated the spatial organisation of cities and in many cities they were frequently met with conflict and resistance from city-based populations.