Bringing a City Together; Sociological Perspectives on Urban Resilience and Heritage Preservation

Abstract

This paper presents an attempt to document some of the informal initiatives launched by the citizens of Alexandria City in Egypt; to create a bond with their city and help preserve part of its identity within an ever-changing public space on which they have no control. One of the greatest shocks and stresses within the case of Alexandria city is the rapid urbanization through which the face of the city has been dramatically changed within the last few decades. However, the pressing question here is: How did the people of Alexandria City react to these urban changes? Have they practiced David Harvey’s the right to the city? In order to understand the way in which the structure is changed through people’s actions, the author depends on Anthony Giddens’s ‘structure-agency’ duality to study different Alexandrian bottom-up initiatives of heritage preservation and urban resilience. The paper also derives its sociological analysis from Max Weber's theory on the city as appeared in his treatise in 1921 Die Stadt: Eine Soziologische Untersuchung (The City; a Sociological Study). The connection comes from putting Max Weber's Occidental City in parallel with the Contemporary Urban Alexandria, through juxtaposing the 5-Weberian features of the ancient and medieval city vis-a-vis the modern status quo of Alexandria City in Egypt. Methodologically, the author uses Ryo Terui & et al.'s model 'Visual Narratives of the Actantial Map,' known as the ‘Actor-Networking Map,’ in analyzing different public initiatives of heritage preservation and urban resilience. The findings ascertained new theoretical and methodological insights within the discipline of urban sociology.