Ibn Khaldun analyzed political life as cycles of urban building and decay.

Evidence

Ibn Khaldun discusses such political conditions not in terms of some abstract framework such as ‘the state’, but in terms of the rise and decline of the built environment. Political life is examined as the building and decay of cities. The word to build, in this context, is amar (the here refers to the Arabic letter ayn), a word which for Ibn Khaldun can mean to live, prosper, flourish, be full, fill with life, inhabit, raise, be in good repair, build, and rebuild. It is from this word that is produced the term umran, with the same kinds of meaning: activity, bustling life, fullness (of a market well-stocked with goods, for example, or a harbour frequented by ships and merchants), prosperity, building. Ibn Khaldun’s study of `umran is a study of the conditions that can bring about this building, this fullness, which we awkwardly translate as culture. Building is an active, undetermined process, marked in cycles of abundance and decay, rather than simply the material realisation of a predetermined ‘plan’. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 183

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains umran and amar — Arabic terms where political/cultural flourishing is inseparable from physical building, etymologically tying civilization to construction.
• XREF: Connects to my ‘On Sacrifice’ and infrastructure readings — the idea of civilization-as-built-environment, and to Jane Jacobs’ organic views of cities versus planned abstraction.
• SEED: Article angle: what if we read modern states the way Ibn Khaldun did — not as abstractions but as cycles of concrete building and decay? Could pair with contemporary urban blight and ‘smart city’ rhetoric.