Two Thousand Years of Non-Urban History

Reclaiming the architectural history of the Arabian Peninsula through preindustrial practices

The advent of the oil economy and its subsequent industrial narrative has overwritten previous traditions of landscape and territory in the Arabian Peninsula. This is evident in the long spans of highways that disinterestedly cut across the Arabian desert, the vast reclamation of the sea along the Gulf Coast and the clearing away of agricultural land to build cities. Technocratic solutions to the problems of living in an arid climate have replaced practices entrenched in land knowledge, and the availability of desalinated water and imported food has oriented the economy toward rent-based urban development, backed by oil revenues. Two Thousand Years of Non-Urban History acts as a primer to an alternative architecture of the Arabian Peninsula through the work of the Bahrain- and Kuwait-based firm Civil Architecture. Its case studies pair examples of pre-oil formal planning and ecological practice with design interventions and proposals for the region.

This book was published in conjunction with Civil Architecture.