I started this blog as a way to think out loud about the places that shaped me, the cities I work on, and the urban questions I keep returning to. What makes a city feel familiar? What gets lost when places are redeveloped too quickly? Why do some neighborhoods remain alive in memory even after their buildings disappear? How do we plan cities that are not only efficient, modern, and competitive, but also generous, rooted, and humane?
A city is never just a skyline, a masterplan, or a collection of buildings. It is also the smell of a bakery in an old neighborhood, the shaded route to a mosque, the corner grocery store you visited as a child, the family house that no longer exists, the empty plot that still carries a story, and the people who give meaning to streets, homes, and public spaces.
Cities from Salt is a space for essays on Gulf urbanism, planning practice, heritage, public space, climate, housing, infrastructure, and everyday life.
Much of the writing begins from Qatar and Doha, but the questions are wider. They are questions that many cities in the Gulf face today: How do we grow without erasing ourselves? How do we build modern cities without treating memory as an obstacle? How do we make public spaces work in extreme heat? How do we move beyond imported planning models and develop urban ideas rooted in our own climate, culture, and social life?
I write as someone who is from within the Khaleeji urban condition: as a resident shaped by these cities, and as a practitioner involved in planning them, exploring the space between the city as planned and the city as lived. That position shapes the blog. These essays come from living in these cities, working on their plans, watching their changes, and trying to understand the gap between the city as imagined on paper and the city as lived every day.
Sometimes the blog is analytical. Sometimes it is personal. Most of the time, it sits somewhere in between.
The title is inspired by Abdulrahman Munif’s novel Cities of Salt. In Munif’s novel, the “cities of salt” are places rapidly transformed by oil, power, and modernity, yet vulnerable to dissolution.
I borrow from that image, but I also want to push against it.
Cities from Salt asks what it would mean to build from that salt instead, to take the material of the Khaleeji urban condition and turn it into something more resilient.
Salt is a trace. It belongs to the sea, to pearling, to trade, to labor, to memory, and to the desert’s edge. It is what remains after water recedes. It marks the land quietly.
The cities of the Gulf are often described through speed and scale: rapid urbanization, instant skylines, mega-projects, global ambition. But beneath that speed are older geographies and older memories: coastal settlements, pearling towns, tribal landscapes, religious life, trade routes, family houses, demolished neighborhoods, and new districts still trying to invent a sense of place.
Cities from Salt is about reading those layers. It asks what remains after transformation: what dissolves, what hardens, what is carried forward, and what we still have a responsibility to protect.
It is about refusing the idea that Khaleeji cities are temporary or artificial. It is about imagining cities built from salt that can endure: rooted enough to remember, flexible enough to adapt, and resilient enough not to wash away.
A Note on the Writing…
Cities from Salt is a collection of personal essays, reflections, and urban observations. The writing is informed by planning practice, lived experience, light research, memory, and conversations, but it is not written as formal academic research.
I treat the essay as a way of thinking through the city: to test ideas, follow questions, make connections, and reflect on the places we live in and shape. Some pieces engage with policy, history, theory, or planning documents, while others begin from a street, a house, a souq, a regulation, or a memory.
The essays can be read as starting points for thinking about Gulf urbanism, not as final answers. For academic or professional research, readers should return to primary sources, official documents, and more detailed studies.
And, fittingly, perhaps they should be taken with a grain of salt.
