Is Kuwait really like any other Gulf city? My latest Hidden Cities blog argues that it is not. Drawing on personal encounters dating back to my first visit in 2007 and my chapter in Arab Modernism(s): Cities, History and Culture, the essay reflects on Kuwait's extraordinary transformation from a fragile pearling settlement into a modern oil state. Through the story of the Al-Sawaber housing complex, the work of artist Dana Al Rashidi, and the novel The Bamboo Stalk, it explores how architecture, urban planning, and modernization have shaped questions of exclusion, belonging, and memory. Ultimately, it argues that the true measure of a city lies not only in the buildings it constructs, but also in the people whose stories it chooses to remember.

What can a giant teddy bear in Doha's airport reveal about a city—and about the Gulf itself? In this latest Hidden Citiesessay, I reflect on Doha through the themes of home, belonging, and transience, drawing on personal experiences spanning more than a decade. From the teddy bear beneath the lamp at Hamad International Airport to walks through Najada, Msheireb, Souq Waqif, and the National Museum, the essay explores the tensions between spectacular modernity and everyday urban life. Drawing on my Doha chapter in Arab Modernism(s): Cities, History and Culture, it asks whether a city built by millions who are expected one day to leave can ever truly become home.

Increasingly, while visiting cities—or even watching a film—I have found myself experiencing a strange phenomenon: an apparition that unexpectedly places Dubai right before my eyes. It is an unsettling sensation, yet one that feels entirely real rather than a mere figment of my imagination. What does it mean when Dubai seems to appear in places as diverse as Milan and New York City? And what does it tell us about our urban future when Dubai becomes a global urban reference point, whether admired or feared? In my latest Hidden Cities blog, I explore these questions through personal encounters, urban theory, and reflections on why the "Dubai apparition" may be revealing more about the future of our cities than we realize.

Inspired by Fairuz's haunting ode Li Beirut, this latest Hidden Cities essay reflects on a city where memory, longing, and resilience are inseparable. Returning to Beirut after many years, I explore how music, cinema, and literature illuminate dimensions of the city that architecture and urban planning alone cannot capture. Drawing on personal encounters and my Beirut chapter in Arab Modernism(s): Cities, History and Culture, the essay considers a city that wears the appearance of recovery while carrying the weight of unresolved histories. Moving between films, streets, cafés, and song, it reflects on urban memory, belonging, and why the true measure of a city is found not in its monuments but in the everyday lives unfolding between them.

Here's a concise introductory synopsis suitable for introducing your Amman blog on your website or social media.

What makes a city feel like home? In this latest Hidden Cities blog, I revisit Amman through the lens of memory, literature, and everyday urban life. Drawing on personal encounters, the city's layered hills and cafés, and the themes explored in my Amman chapter in Arab Modernism(s): Cities, History and Culture, the essay reflects on how a city often dismissed as quiet or ordinary reveals itself through its subtle rhythms of belonging, resilience, and coexistence. More than a portrait of Jordan's capital, it is a meditation on why the most memorable cities are often those that reveal themselves slowly, one encounter at a time.

What can a film about a man transformed into a chicken tell us about Cairo? Quite a lot, it turns out. In this latest Hidden Cities blog, I reflect on Omar El Zohairy's acclaimed film Feathers and its unsettling portrayal of poverty, inequality, bureaucracy, and survival in contemporary Egypt. Drawing connections to my Cairo chapter in Arab Modernism(s): Cities, History and Culture, the essay explores the gap between the spectacular visions of modernization embodied by new cities, monorails, and the New Administrative Capital, and the everyday realities experienced by millions of Egyptians. Through cinema, Feathers offers a powerful lens through which to reconsider Cairo's ongoing encounter with modernity—and the contradictions that continue to shape life in the city.

What makes a mosque a mosque? Is it a dome, a minaret, or something less tangible? Inspired by a recent visit to Liège, Belgium, where I served as an external examiner for a dissertation on the geography of mosques, this essay reflects on visibility, belonging, and the hidden spaces of worship that exist within cities around the world. Moving from Beijing and Cairo to Riyadh, New York, and Belgium, it explores the idea of "mosques without minarets" and asks whether faith is better expressed through architectural assertion or quiet coexistence. Part travel narrative and part urban reflection, the essay considers how architecture shapes identity, why some places of worship remain hidden, and what these spaces reveal about belonging in an increasingly diverse world.

Returning to Berlin more than four decades after my first encounters with the city, I expected a familiar journey. Instead, the visit became an unexpected meditation on memory, belonging, and urban change. Moving through neighborhoods shaped by migration, coexistence, and layers of visible history, I found myself thinking less about Berlin than about Cairo. This essay reflects on how one city can illuminate another, exploring what Berlin’s embrace of contradiction reveals about the challenges facing Cairo and, more broadly, about the future of cities in an age increasingly defined by erasure, redevelopment, and the struggle to accommodate difference.

What happens when a visionary architect sets out to build a better future for others? Drawing on a chapter from my book Arab Modernism(s): Cities, History and Culture, this personal reflection revisits my first encounters with Hassan Fathy and his celebrated village of Gourna, tracing a journey that began with a book, continued through a student trip to Upper Egypt, and evolved into a lifelong fascination with one of the Arab world's most influential—and controversial—architectural experiments. Part memoir and part critical reflection, the essay explores why Gourna failed, how Architecture for the Poor became an architecture for the privileged, and what Hassan Fathy's legacy still reveals about identity, power, and the unfinished search for an alternative modernity in the Arab world.

A rumination on Algiers through the lens of Albert Camus’ The Stranger, this essay explores how literature, cinema, and urban space reveal the complexities of colonial modernity and its enduring legacy. Moving between personal reflections on reading Camus and watching a recent film adaptation, it uncovers a city marked by division, resistance, and reinvention, where imposed visions of modernity were continually reshaped by everyday life. In doing so, the essay offers a glimpse into the Algiers chapter of Arab Modernism(s), inviting readers to reconsider one of the Arab world’s most fascinating and contested urban landscapes.

A photograph taken through the glass façade of a coffee shop in Maadi becomes the starting point for a meditation on friendship, memory, and belonging. Weaving together a song by Majida El Roumi, childhood friendships, cafés in Cairo and America, films, literature, and personal reflection, this essay explores how cities live within us through the encounters that shape our lives. In the end, it suggests that home is not a place we inhabit, but a relationship we carry with us wherever we go.

Berlin is a city of contradictions: a place where history remains visible, where memories linger in the urban landscape, and where every visit reveals a different face of the city. Moving between childhood journeys through a divided Germany, student adventures in Cold War Berlin, encounters with architecture, cinema, and migrant lives, this essay traces a personal relationship with a city shaped by rupture, reinvention, and resistance. Part memoir and part urban reflection, it explores Berlin not as a collection of landmarks but as a living archive of longing, conflict, and possibility.

In this latest Hidden Cities blog, I turn to two Gulf novels—Mohamed El-Bisatie’s Drumbeat, set in a Dubai-like city of spectacle and migrant labor, and Fahd al-Atiq’s Life on Hold, a deeply evocative portrait of Riyadh’s transformation from the mud lanes of Shumaisi to the isolating suburbs of the oil boom. Read together, the novels reveal contrasting ways of seeing the Gulf: one filtered through external stereotypes and fantasies, the other emerging from lived memory and everyday life. Echoing themes explored in my book “Arab Modernism(s)” and recalling the enduring shadow of Cities of Salt, they invite us to rethink Gulf cities not as spectacles of wealth but as places shaped by migration, loss, aspiration, and the unfinished struggle to build more just and inclusive urban futures.

This personal essay traces my long relationship with the UAE’s Sha’abi house, from my first encounters with these modest homes in Al Ain in 1997 to years of research, photography, exhibitions, and fieldwork across the country. Moving between memory, architecture, and everyday life, the piece reveals how these houses became living archives of belonging, adaptation, hospitality, and social transformation—offering a deeply human counterpoint to the spectacle of Gulf urbanism.

This blog is a journey through the vanished cafés, cinemas, alleyways, and street corners of Cairo—a city experienced through memory, desire, and everyday encounters. Moving between personal recollection and urban observation, it reveals how cities quietly shape our emotions, identities, fantasies, and sense of belonging. In reading these fragments of Cairo, readers may ultimately discover something about themselves: the places they carry within them, the worlds they have lost, and why memory remains inseparable from the city.

On January 5, 2026, I returned to Zamalek—the Cairo district where I grew up in the 1970s—to retrace the streets, places, and routines that shaped my early life, in a journey that forms part of my My Cairo project and offers a glimpse into the book where Zamalek is explored in depth. Moving through familiar landmarks—from Maison Thomas and Diwan Bookstore to the vanished German School and our former home, La Pergola—I encountered a neighborhood marked by both continuity and loss, where cafés, shops, and everyday spaces carry traces of personal and collective memory even as others have disappeared or transformed. This walk became more than an act of recollection; it was an attempt to understand why Zamalek continues to hold such emotional weight, revealing how memory anchors us within a rapidly changing city, and how the past persists—quietly but powerfully—within the evolving urban fabric of Cairo.

This blog reflects on how cities erase memory through both destruction and redevelopment, beginning with the demolition of the Pearl Roundabout in Manama and moving to Dubai’s historic Al Fahidi Historical Neighborhood (formerly Bastakiyya), founded by Iranian migrants in the late nineteenth century. Through personal encounters—from overcrowded worker housing in the 1990s to its later conversion into galleries and heritage spaces—the narrative traces how the district evolved into a curated cultural enclave. The construction of the nearby Al Seef waterfront development, however, transformed accessible public space into a controlled, consumption-oriented environment that imitates tradition while displacing everyday users. The piece argues that such interventions constitute a form of urban violence, replacing lived memory with sanitized spectacle, and raises broader questions about preservation, belonging, and the role of urban planning in a region facing ongoing turmoil and destruction.

In this blog, I reflect on my 2008 visit to Dubai’s Iranian Hospital during a mapping project that took me beyond the city’s iconic skyline into its lived-in neighborhoods. I recall how the hospital, which served not only Iranians but residents of all backgrounds, stood out for its distinctive architecture—a hybrid of Persian and Islamic influences—and for its deep integration within a vibrant urban tapestry linking Jumeirah, “Little Manila,” and Satwa. Recent geopolitical tensions and the closure of Iranian-affiliated institutions have left the hospital’s future uncertain, prompting me to question whether it will be repurposed, stripped of its character, or erased altogether. I argue that the possible loss of this institution reflects Dubai’s troubling tendency toward transience, where memory and built heritage are often sacrificed in the name of progress. Ultimately, I suggest that when such places disappear, residents lose more than buildings—they lose anchors of belonging, and the city risks becoming a place without memory, and therefore without soul.

In this piece, I revisit Khan el-Khalili and the Fishawy café as a journey into memory as much as an observation of a place in transition. I recall the district as I knew it in the 1970s and 1980s—vibrant, open all night, and a formative rite of passage that exposed me to sides of Cairo hidden from middle- and upper-middle-class enclaves. Through personal memories with my father, encounters with architectural figures, and the story of a mashrabiyya fragment that accompanied me across different phases of my life, I connect the place to notions of home and belonging. On my most recent visit, I observe how security measures, mass tourism, and shifting urban dynamics have altered the district’s character without fully erasing its spirit. Between past and present, Khan el-Khalili continues to beckon, and sitting in Fishawy café becomes a fleeting moment through which I return to the Cairo that still lives within me.

On January 3, I returned to downtown Cairo. The visit was not planned as an act of nostalgia, yet it quickly became one. For anyone who grew up in Cairo during the 1970s and 1980s, downtown was more than a district of elegant façades and fading cinemas; it was a dense social landscape where bookstores, cafés, sidewalks, and movie theaters where part of everyday life. In recent years, however, this terrain has begun to change. Restoration projects, new cafés, heritage branding, and heightened security have gradually transformed the area into something both familiar and strangely distant. What follows is not simply a walk through streets I once knew well, but a personal reckoning with a city in transition—one where fragments of memory persist amid renovation, and where the downtown of my youth survives only in scattered traces.