Middle Eastern towns built by spacing rather than by structures in space

Evidence

What this amounted to, then, was a way of building and living that refused to resolve itself into the appearance of a frame and what is enframed. A Middle Eastern town never affected a distinction between the ‘materiality’ of building and other practices and the ‘ideality’ of their structure and representational meaning. A town was not built as a series of structures located in space. The spacing was the building, and such spacing, in the city as much as in the village, was always polarised. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 186

Categorization

• XREF: Directly sets up the contrast with the Western model Mitchell unpacks in later chapters: buildings as enframed structures in Euclidean space.