ABSTRACT
It is generally agreed that the first cities appeared in the region of modern-day southern Iraq, bound by the two mighty rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. These were the Sumerian city-states such as Eridu, Ur, Uruk, Lagash, and Zabala that are credited with being the first politically structured human settlements. In the harsh environmental conditions of the region, the city functioned primarily as an interface between constantly mobile human groups. Transitional thresholds between the city and the desert either in the form of suburbs or farmlands were redundant. Several Gulf cities already had a long history as small regional trading centers and modest pearl fishing ports. The Arabian cities of the 1960s and 1970s exhibited a configuration similar to that of many colonial Third World cities that had already taken the high road of modernization. Like the rural immigrants in the old colonial cities, the workers in the Arabian cities are poor, unskilled, and unaccustomed to city life.
