Planning Middle Eastern Cities (Elsheshtawy ed., 2004) is a collection of essays about six cities spanning the Arab region, including three cities in North Africa: Tunis, Algiers and Cairo. Written by Arab academics who have studied in the West, the essays combine a critical Western perspective on the development history of these cities with deep local and cultural knowledge of each. Through this approach, the authors aim to move critical discussion about these cities beyond the limits of current discourse in which Middle Eastern cities seem to be bound. These limits are defined by two parameters: a spatial boundary characterised by Orientalism (the exoticisation of the East, the superiority of the West) (ibid: 6) and a temporal boundary characterised by loss (today's cities as mere shadows of past departed glories) (ibid: 3). The authors thus hope to situate their discussion of these cities in the context of contemporary trends like decolonisation, globalisation and capitalism. When analysed from this perspective, the developmental histories of Cairo, Tunis and Algiers show remarkable similarities. First, the mediaeval fabrics of the cities are deeply shaped by modern capital flows. Critically, the reason these cities came under colonial domination had less to do with military defeat by imperial powers and more to do with the impoverishment of local political leaders by unequal trading relations with the West, leading to local leaders defaulting on debts to the West and the imperial powers occupying these cities as a way to enforce repayment of the debts. During colonial times, foreign capital reformed the cities, be it through developing new quarters modelled on European cities to house the new trading houses and financial services needed to service Western debts (such as the Quartier D'Isly in Algiers or the European City in Tunis), or by laying out entirely new districts in response to Western speculative investments (like Heliopolis in Cairo). And today even after independence, the cities continue to remake themselves in an effort to attract global flows of investment and talent to them, leading to such developments as the North Lake Tunis area in Tunis and Dreamland in Cairo. Secondly, the spatial growth patterns of these cities are significantly marked by informal settlements. Due to the development of the urban economies under colonialism, rural-urban migration picked up with a vengeance, greatly outstripping the ability of municipal authorities to provide sufficient housing. Thus, informal settlements occurred primarily in two forms: bidonvilles on the outskirts (such as in Algiers and Tunis) and increasing density in the mediaeval cores (such as the medinas of Algiers and Tunis and the old city of Cairo). The more well-off citizens of these cities reacted with strategies of displacement. Either the poor were displaced away from their informal settlements into planned housing (such as the Zones d'Habitation Urban Nouvelle in Algiers), or the rich displaced themselves away from the decaying city centres. In Cairo, we can see this in the development of Heliopolis at the beginning of the 20th century, a new district that offered European-style environments in the middle of the Cairene deserts, and in the development of Dreamland in the early 2000s, where those who can afford it can enjoy California-style gated communities. In Tunis, also, the North Lake Tunis developments around Carthage Airport that were started in the late 1990s seem to cater to the rich, with well-ordered street grids, ample amenities and well-designed public spaces. Indeed, as North Lake Tunis is near the airport, the jetset crowd may not have any reason to visit Tunis's old medina and to encounter the poorer residents. Thirdly, Western ideas of urban planning continue to have a strong influence on these cities. The colonial-era European quarters of these cities were laid out to invoke the urban fabric of cities in the imperial homelands, with French colonnades framing the waterfront of Algiers's Quartier D'Isly, European plazas and avenues defining a central axis in Tunis's European city, and French architecture heavily influencing the local vernacular in Cairo's Heliopolis to produce a strongly exoticised Orientalist style. And these cities' expansions after independence continue to be influenced by European urbanism, through the adoption of Western planning concepts like master plans and strategic plans, a reliance on Western capital and construction techniques, and the setting up of central control as an ideal in urban planning. Local practices of incrementalism and informality thus stand in stark contrast with the preferred modes of urbanity adopted by the powerful in these cities. By adopting a Western critical perspective to approach the development histories of these three North African cities, the authors productively and effectively bring out how these cities' development trajectories are deeply embedded in larger global forces, and rightly debunk the notion that these cities are somehow the product of unique Oriental factors or a unique Arab/Middle Eastern character. However, these readings come at the cost of de-emphasising the actual influence of local factors on these cities' forms. Local residents seem to disappear into the background, becoming relegated to the role of passive victims lost amidst great forces beyond their control. Surely the reality is that local actors are able to adapt to the larger forces, developing novel strategies of resistance and even coopting these forces for their particular interests. I believe it would be simple to find such strategies and practices in the informal areas of these cities. This is, perhaps, beyond the scope of this book, but it is an aspect of these cities that should be elucidated to give a fuller understanding of how these cities came to be, and how they may develop in the future.