The Arab city is a nested hierarchy of gates, not a public-private divide.

Evidence

At night, the gates of the city would close upon the world outside, those of the impasses upon the streets and lanes, of these upon the main thoroughfare, and of the thoroughfare upon the neighbouring quarters. The city, writes Berardi, is ‘a network made up of enclosures, of prohibitions and accorded rights. There is no more than a sliding between its moment of permission and its moment of prohibition. It is in fact this sliding between degrees of opening and accessibility, of closure and exclusion, that in everyday practice is lived.’ Rather than a fixed boundary dividing the city into two parts, public and private, outside and inside, there are degrees of accessibility and exclusion determined variously by the relations between the persons involved, and by the time and the circumstance. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 191

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in space-as-produced and to Foucault’s heterotopias of enclosure.
• SEED: Possible essay: how ‘public space’ as a modern abstraction flattens pre-modern cities’ graduated access, and what that means for contemporary urban design debates.