The impact of western thought on the urban fabric of Islamic cities

Abstract

The tremendous acceleration in all urban areas, especially in the developed countries. This has led to the developing cities taking these achievements and applying them as they are in most cases, in order to catch up and keep pace with the global trend in urbanization. As a result, overlapping negatives and positives emerged, which confused the public order and stability in taking appropriate decisions in the developing countries. Thus, the urban fabric of these cities became a stage for experiments, especially if these decisions were not taken selectively and deliberately.This has resulted in the suffering of our cities from the heterogeneous variation within the urban fabric and its details and the result of the direct effects and interactions among the changes and developments taking place in other societies as a result of the decisions that are not aware of our urban environment and its social nature. Since the interaction with urbanization is required for change and development, therefore this development should be selective imposed by the nature of society and its environment within the place and time. From here, the research problem crystallized, as the urban fabric of our Arab cities today suffers from the disappearance of personality and distinctive characteristics and a loss of ancient civil identity and our urban fabric has become a mixture of imported and exotic styles of our environment and culture Therefore, we will highlight in this research the stages of the influence of Western thought on Islamic cities in general and the most important causes and problems that the urban fabric suffers from and which most contemporary Islamic cities share. In addition to identifying the most important means that have strengthened our influence with Western thought, and as a result this will lead us to identify the negatives and positives resulting from this influence and thus avoiding negative results in the future when developing, designing and planning cities through taking into consideration our cultural and natural environment and thus enhancing the urban identity of our contemporary cities.