Seminar on selected topics from the history of Islamic urbanism. Examines patterns of settlement, urbanization, and architectural production in various places and periods, ranging from the formative period in the 7th century to the new cities emerging today in Asia and Africa. Discusses the leading factors in shaping and transforming urban forms, design imperatives, cultural and economic structures, and social and civic attitudes. Critically analyzes the body of literature on Islamic urbanism. 

Research paper required.

This course offers a wide review of the history of Islamic architecture, tracing fifteen centuries of development across three continents — Asia, Africa, and Europe. Beginning with the House of the Prophet in Medina in the 7th century and culminating with the skyline of contemporary Dubai, the course presents architecture as both a material record and a cultural expression of the historical conditions in which Islam was formed, practiced, and continually reinterpreted.

Each session centers on a city, monument, or building type, while keeping sight of the larger narrative that links diverse regions and periods into a coherent story.  Lectures analyze form, construction techniques, materials, style, ornament, and decoration, as well as the social, religious, political, and cultural frameworks that shaped architectural production.  Particular emphasis is placed on the role of patronage and on the ways architecture served as a stage for identity, power, and community.

Cross-cultural exchanges are examined throughout, from the absorption of Late Antique traditions in early Islam to encounters with the West during the colonial and postcolonial eras. The course concludes by exploring the revival and reinvention of Islamic architecture in the modern age of nation-building, globalization, and rapid urban development.

The destruction of cities has historically functioned as an act of punishment, retribution, the projection of absolute power, or the fulfillment of an oath, a dream, or a divinely sanctioned intervention. In modern times, additional factors entered this causative inventory, linked to the enormous advances in the technologies and strategies of destruction and reconstruction, the modernist philosophical and legal reframing of the individual and the collective, and the rise of economics to the top of the modern state’s metrics of self-evaluation and international standing. Throughout history, the destruction of cities has been, first and foremost, an architectural and urban gesture of no less significance than the construction of cities themselves—a condition that gave rise to the critical term urbicide, coined in response to the destructive streak embedded in the grand American urban vision of the 1960s. These developments have had profound effects not only on architecture and urbanism, but—perhaps even more importantly—on urban identity and memory, on the mapping and definition of territories and states, on the conceptualization of ethics, and on the complex relationship between the city and the world’s political and religious systems.

This seminar examines the history of urbicide as it unfolds across time and space, from the divinely sanctioned destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, to the ancient obliteration of Babylon, Troy, Carthage, and Jerusalem, to the medieval devastation of Nishapur, Baghdad, Teotihuacan, and Cusco, moving onward to the ravages of the two World Wars and the wars of decolonization, and concluding with the destruction of Middle Eastern cities in the present. Through close analysis of paradigmatic cases, the seminar reframes urbicide as a privileged site where power, violence, and representation converge. Rather than treating the destruction of cities as a purely military, political, or technical phenomenon, the course interrogates how urbicide has been narrated, visualized, justified, aestheticized, and erased across imperial, colonial, and postcolonial contexts. In doing so, it positions the city as one of the most intricate artifacts human society has produced and organized itself around. Alongside urbicide, the seminar critically engages key concepts such as the city, ruins, violence, destruction, memory, and urbanism understood as a historically contingent sociospatial process.

Note for MArch students: Serves as an Urbanism elective

MIT Certificate Protected Syllabus