Providing a critical overview of the state of contemporary urban design in the Arab World, this book conceptualizes the field under four major perspectives: urban design as discourse, as discipline, as research, and as practice. It poses the questions: how can such a diversity of practice be positioned with regard to current international trends in urban design? And what constitutes the specificity of the Middle Eastern experience in light of the regional political and cultural settings? This book is also about urban designers ?on the margins?: how they narrate their cities, how they engage with their discipline, and how they negotiate their distance from, and with respect to global disciplinary trends.