ABSTRACT
City connectivity levels in the Middle Eastern/North African (MENA) region can be examined from three historically successive but overlapping and interwoven evolutions:
During colonial occupation (up to the 1970s in the Gulf region), the region was largely peripheral to the world economy and predominantly connected to its core regions (especially Europe) through colonial dependency linkages (see Stewart, 1997, on North Africa). From this historical perspective, the MENA region has only a limited number of world cities. However, colonial presence has shaped the urban tissue in various cities (e.g. les villes européennes in North African cities) and has created an urban system bypassing existing urban patterns, through a focus on the countries’ capital and, often, port cities, which enabled the extraction and transhipment of primary goods to the home country.
The discovery of oil and emergence of oil-based economies – largely from the 1960s onward – has highlighted the crucial position of the MENA region and of Gulf cities in particular. Within oil-producing countries, high oil rents have fuelled rapid urbanization processes, such as in the Gulf countries of Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, with villages and smaller towns booming into cities of regional and global importance (e.g. Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Doha, Kuwait City, Manama and Riyadh). Within the MENA region, they have also shaped flows of workers (Malecki and Ewers, 2007) and remittances between oil-producing countries and the others (e.g. Egypt, Jordan and Iran), and they have fuelled urbanization in these countries (e.g. Amman and Cairo). Simultaneously, outside linkages (most notably with the US) have been shaped by the production and export of oil and the import of virtually all consumer goods in the countries on the Arabian Peninsula, hampering the emergence of a fully-fledged regional economy or regional urban network, although a number of urban etworks (see Stanley, 2005) can be identified across various scales.
In a move to diversify economies away from oil, there are distinct shifts towards service economies in which advanced producer services (APS) firms play a central role.
