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Planning and Unplanning Amman: Between Formal Planning and Non-traditional Agency

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The Palgrave Handbook of Bottom-Up Urbanism

Abstract

In Amman’s fluxional state since the 1920s its East–West divide has remained constant. This chapter analyzes the socio-economic and demographic origins and current status of this divide and reveals that twentieth-century planning has effectively bridged its disparities. In contrast, a favouring of the market in recent initiatives has instigated a regression in formal planning, leading to an unplanned Amman. The chapter delineates civil society’s informal yet influential rise in Amman’s urban governance networks which, especially after the Arab Spring uprisings, have transformed a coerced apathy into forms of non-traditional agency, including: revolt, subversion, and innovative negotiation.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Circassians were displaced from the northern Caucasus with the Russian conquest and immigrated to the Levant. The first group arrived in Amman around 1879.

  2. 2.

    I received funding for the first two research projects from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and from Columbia Global Centers, Amman and for the third research project from the Arab Council for Social Science (ACSS).

  3. 3.

    Palestinians refers to Palestinian refugees who are not naturalized Jordanian citizens; Palestinian–Jordanians refers to Jordanian citizens of Palestinian origins, including naturalized refugees; and Transjordanians refers to East Bank Jordanians.

  4. 4.

    The Levant or Greater Syria includes contemporary Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine. These refugees arrived during the Great Arab Revolt against the Ottomans in 1916–1918 (Hamarneh 1996).

  5. 5.

    The French Development Agency loaned GAM US$152 million for the BRT project (Cornock 2015).

  6. 6.

    Wrongly dubbed a Roman theatre.

  7. 7.

    Details of these plans are available at: http://www.sanabel-flowers.com/landscape_public_project.html.

  8. 8.

    There are some generalizations that these social non-movements are tribally-based (see, for example, Clark 2012).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada

    Luna Khirfan

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  1. Luna Khirfan
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Planning and Landscape Architecture, University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, Texas, USA

    Mahyar Arefi

  2. University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA

    Conrad Kickert

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Khirfan, L. (2019). Planning and Unplanning Amman: Between Formal Planning and Non-traditional Agency. In: Arefi, M., Kickert, C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Bottom-Up Urbanism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90131-2_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90131-2_13

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