ABSTRACT
Historically, traditional settlements in the Middle East have incorporated climatic, cultural, social, economic and religious control mechanisms that manifested themselves in the way in which physical elements, and barriers, were built in the environment. In the Old City of Jerusalem, for example, the urban morphology included quarters as a form of self-segregation on ethnic-religious reasons. Here, each quarter is made up of a number of neighbourhoods, each neighbourhood (or hara) is made up of a number of ahwash (singular hosh – or courtyard complex), and each hosh is made up of a number of flats and tightly packed interlocking houses. Although there is little data available regarding the division of Jerusalem into quarters prior to the Muslim conquest of the city, Hopkins (1971) points out that the mixture of races and languages in the city would have made such divisions likely; the Muslim quarter, for example, was subdivided into smaller groupings based on tribal, village origins or family groups.
