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.

This essay marks a return — not only to Cairo’s Qala’a district, but to a version of the city I once carried within me. What begins as a research visit for My Cairo becomes something more unsettled: a confrontation with demolition, displacement, and the uneasy distance between memory and redevelopment. Walking between Sultan Hassan, Mohamed Ali Street, and a vanishing bridge, I found myself searching not only for what the city has become, but for what remains beneath the rubble.

This essay reflects on the long and uncertain journey behind Arab Modernism(s): City, History, and Culture — a book that began as a conversation in London and evolved into a deeply personal reckoning with cities, memory, and responsibility. What started as a scholarly inquiry into the Arab world’s encounter with modernism gradually became something more intimate: an exploration of how urban transformation reshapes not only streets and skylines, but also the way we see ourselves.