Post-Arab Spring Tunis: Materializing Revolution in the City

During the Arab Spring, Arab cities and their iconic public spaces became beacons of revolutionary practices. This dissertation focuses on the aftermath of this event and investigates the urban consequences of the Arab Spring on Tunis. The multi-scaled study traces a regional phenomenon by associating the Arab city with the Arab Spring and, drawing from international cases, develops an approach for studying the revolutionary city. The methodology employed fieldwork in five distinct sites in Tunis, selected for their contribution to the revolutionary city in three key areas: national public spaces, regime landscapes, and the capital city. At the centre of Tunis, the Medina and Avenue Bourguiba are considered national public spaces, where the stakes of revolution are developed, expanded, and communicated through conflicts over identity and difference, heritage and legitimacy, and security and control. Then, Avenue Mohamed al-Khamis and Les Banlieues Nords are situated as regime landscapes, where symbolic, monumental architecture has been inherited by the new regime. Finally, Qsar Bardo and its locality is an exceptional site of the capital city, where national and local government overlap with official representations of the nation-state. Through a synthesis of these sites, the dissertation argues that the trajectory of Tunis is one of multiple disclosure as revolution continues through differentiated, incremental practices in sites of conflict across the city. These sites are endowed with possibilities for conflict predicated on the collective memories associated with each site; their perceived value as spaces of political and cultural legitimacy; their relation to the regime and the people; their place within the city’s topography; and their physical and urban qualities. As a city that to date has received little scholarly study, Tunis shows that revolution instigates these possibilities as the new regime and the people forge a common future in the city. These findings provide insights on the extent to which Tunis is becoming a paradigmatic case of an Arab revolutionary city.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Qaddumi, Dena

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Pullan, Wendy

• Arab Spring
• revolutionary city
• Tunis
• national public space
• regime landscape
• capital city

Licence

• https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/6282dd4f-63ae-4b31-872a-831417a5e477/download
• https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/

Language dc:language

eng

Author Identifier

0000-0003-1144-8460

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/324547