The Effects of Cultural Values on Traditional Islamic-Arabic Houses in the Middle East
Culture and design determine the space-influenced values; they specifically outline space variations between values within a culture in relation to design space-influenced values. By the vision of an ideal life, one can shape and mold the vision of space by reflecting cultural forces such as religious beliefs. The purpose of this study will determine cultural values and religious beliefs and, in turn, assess the effects on the formation of houses in the Middle East. For this principle, the elements of traditional Islamic-Arabic homes showed effects by determining certain elements such as the bent entrance, the courtyard, the Haramlek and Salamlik (women’s and men’s quarters), and the Mashrabiya (wooden windows). Qualitative analysis was used as the method to analyze the case studies comparing traditional courtyard homes to today’s housing. The results have shown that today’s housing was unsuccessful when trying to imitate the provision of privacy as it was in the houses during the past.
Urban Regeneration/Heritage Tourism Endeavours: The Case of Salt, Jordan ‘Local Actors, International Donors, and the State’
This paper focuses on several urban regeneration/heritage tourism projects in Jordan funded and orchestrated by international donor agencies in the 1990s. The research attempts to understand the mechanisms, rationales, internal and external forces, actors, experts, and power networks that privileged a particular discourse on urban generation based on a particular case study (Historic Old Salt Development Project). Discourse analysis and ethnographic encounters enabled the researcher to situate the Historic Old Salt Development Project as part of the overall strategy to upgrade the tourism sector and not out of a conscious motivation of urban regeneration and heritage management. The practice of urban regeneration/heritage management in Salt is tied to sporadic agents of power that generate shock treatments and very modest outcomes in the form of architectural cosmetics rather than an institutionalised practice.
"The Plain Round Tale of Faithful Thady": Castle Rackrent as Slave Narrative
Critics of Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent tend to focus on textual elements—gender issues, the symbolism of the Big House, colonial hegemony— or contextual readings by placing Edgeworth in the Anglo-Irish history and tradition. While such criticism usually in some way examines the main theme of the text, the appropriation of power and authority, little of it accomplishes both the textual and contextual analysis that Castle Rackrent deserves. Exploring Thady’s “plain round tale” as a slave narrative in content and form sheds new light on the work both textually and contextually; in Thady Quirk, Edgeworth has created a typical slave narrator who recounts a history of oppression which is ultimately mediated by an outside editor. As John Cronin writes of Castle Rackrent, “What Maria Edgeworth has given us . . . is a magnificently realised slave, a terrifying vision of the results of colonial misrule. There must have been a moment of clearly deliberate artistic decision in which she realised that what needed to be said must be said through one of the submerged people.”1 The three main textual elements of the narrative indicate its likeness to typical slave narratives: its presentation of a conflicted slave narrator, its use of the framing device of the outside editor, and its narrative structure of episodic anecdotes that utilizes memory, description, and didacticism.