The Village and the City

Abstract

During the growth of cities villages are frequently absorbed into the fabric of that conurbation. But what are the consequences of this? To what extent and how well do these villages become part of the overall fabric of the city? What is the effect on the village and the wider city? How do these villages interact with the configuration of the city to create a rich spatial urban structure? This study focuses on the spatial distribution of the internal and edge commercial activity within the villages absorbed by Manama and Muharraq, cities of Bahrain, and their correspondence with the syntactic factors as a key factor for the subject. Fully understanding these interactions entails answering three critical questions: Does the commercial activity on the streets in the ten villages of Manama and Muharraq differ in configuration and scale? If yes, what is the level of the differences? How does the commercial activity in these villages relate to the structure of the city? Are the commercial activities related to the local or global structure of the city? Are the commercial activities in absorbed villages part of the context or are they distinguished? What are the spatial dimensions of the commercial activity of the village and how do they determine the means of creating a superior spatial structure in the city? Theses questions are addressed in this paper against the background of a coherent body of literature which uses the space syntax theory and methods, and offers a certain rigour in the analysis of spatial layout. Its syntactic concepts also provide a rigorous spatial framework for the analysis, enabling us to study the key attributes of the absorbed villages in a city context. It is the intention of this paper to develop deep syntactic studies of villages absorbed in a city's fabric by identifying different spatial factors, and looking at their performance over different scales from local to global radii. It focuses on explicitly exploring the properties of contextual structure in the formation of absorbed villages rather than simply the properties of the internal structure. It seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the spatial city structure. The framework is built through a comparison case study of ten villages absorbed by the cities of Manama and Muharraq. The paper explores the relationships between different components such as, on the one hand, spatial factors, and on the other hand, social and economic factors of the villages. It shows that the main dimension of spatial layout of commercial activity derives from a set of basic principles. Depending on the way a village's commercial streets become part of the context or are kept separate from the context, it is possible to distinguish different spatial relationships between the village and the city's fabric.