The Sacred City Assemblage A Study of The Value-Based Preservation And Heritage Production Process Of The Sacred City Of Al-Madinah
Bay, Mohammed A. . 2020
Historic cities undergoing rapid urbanization are subject to constant change. This change has an impact on their urban heritage, leading to changes in the roles of their material-expression heritage. Some change is inevitable, however, due to the singularity of each city’s context as well as inevitable changes in perception of historical values.
This research is an interpretive case study and analysis of the sacred city of Al-Madinah in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The study examines and reviews the phenomenon of Al-Madinah’s heritage production process, focusing on the conflict between preservation and religious practice in the sacred city’s Holy Mosque, known to Muslims as al-Masjid an-Nabawi, and also known as ‘the Prophet’s Mosque’. The study examines in-depth the dramatic change of the built heritage and the Holy Mosque across historic periods spanning fourteen centuries, making use of Assemblage Theory. While transformational and urbanization forces of the Islamic sacred city of Al-Madinah seem overwhelming, a new urban morphogenetic conception of the sacred city is developed, and changing values of heritage preservation emerge through the city’s continuous evolution process.
This research aims to investigate the relationship between spatial development, sacred actors, and conservation practice in the sacred city of Al-Madinah. The study argues that the evolution of the sacred city of Al-Madinah is not a linear process; rather it is a result of contingent, complex and causal aspects that are bounded by the specific contexts of both the sacred city and Islam itself, which permeates the sacred city and its rich heritage. Understanding the complex production assemblage process of the Al-Madinah’s urban heritage enables a more comprehensive understanding of the dynamics and complexity of the sacred city and its urban heritage production process and how the sacred city comes to understand and negotiate its values. ‘Negotiate’ is a key word, as clearly there is, and has been, a conflict in the sacred city between preserving what makes the sacred city unique and its raison d’etre – its association with the Divine – and the goals of typical concepts and practices in the historic preservation field. By investigating this dilemma of the conflict between heritage preservation and urbanization and the Divine (sacredness), and by considering matters of context specificity, interpretation, needs, and dissonance negotiation, the research findings contribute to an understanding of different heritage capacities of typologies, ideologies and multiplicities. This study offers a fresh source of understanding and negotiation within the global heritage system and elaborates on potential tools, techniques and approaches for managing change in challenging historical cases, as this case provides a deep view into the Islamic world, a view obscured and, at times, seemingly not discernable to much of Western Civilization.
The study examines the case of the sacred city of Al-Madinah through the developing Assemblage philosophical approach, taking into consideration human and non-human actors contributing to the evolutionary process of Al-Madinah City. The study makes use of the ‘Heritage Production Assemblage’ approach as a Critical Framework for understanding and analyzing the complexity of the sacred and historic city of Al-Madinah. As a mediator, Assemblage Thinking links all central concepts and guides the descriptive discussion of the research. Through spatial analysis, interviews and discourse analysis of the city, the Sacred City of Al-Madinah reveals a complex issue that requires a complex analytical tool. Utilizing urban morphology, interviews and discourse and document analysis as methods of tracing the relationships between subject and object or among affects to support discussion and research claims, the study contributes to the body of knowledge of the production process of heritage and preservation values.
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