Al-Ghatam, Wafa; (2024) The Village and the City: A diagnostic study of the spatial patterns in villages absorbed by cities in Bahrain. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis investigates the configuration of urban villages in Bahrain. Specifically, it examines the villages absorbed by the cities of Manama and Muharraq and asks the following question: How do village layouts get embedded within their surrounding urban context and what are their effects? The research hypothesizes that the evolution of the urban village layout has enabled a spatial relationship with the surrounding urban context, where people’s movement, economic activities, and face-to-face encounters have been maximized. To explore this hypothesis, the study examines the villages and their surrounding context at multi-distance catchments in terms of layout space, block size, and street segment density. Based on space syntax theories and methods, this study focuses on quantitative and graphical analyses of urban villages’ configuration and the generic structures of their foreground and background networks’ impact across the scale, including the evolution of the two cities, the patterns of change, and their impact on villages’ intelligibility. The study’s results reveal that a high degree of urbanity of village networks can be attributed to the distribution of probabilities within a somewhat more extensive continuous system. It lies in the fact that the village blocks, size, and density are consistent with the surrounding environments due to interdependence. This homogeneous pattern of block size and arrangement in an urban village’s context can preserve its local structures and penetrate beyond the local context. Moreover, this study is able to distinguish a generative urban village layout that aims to produce everyday activities with diverse people instead of reproducing the same social ties. The study concludes that spatiotemporal structures are perhaps the most critical factors in the social nature of an urban village. Neglecting generic structures as a key urban element is to neglect the forms of life in the city and their social existence.

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