Tag: infrastructure

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A medina (from the Arabic: المدينة القديمة‎ meaning “old city”) is an area found in many North African cities, including those in Morocco. A medina is comprised of a densely-packed collection of buildings, typically walled off from the outside world. It is usually accessible only by pedestrians through a handful of gates. Because the winding streets of a medina are rarely wider than the hallway in your school, they are generally off-limits to modern automobile traffic.

Medina quarters have usually been inhabited for a thousand years or more, and often contain historical public works – features important to the whole community – such as fountains for drinking water, schools, markets, shops, public squares, mosques, and churches. Traditionally, the medina was the city, and its residents rarely needed to leave its confines.

Aside from the addition of some electrical wires and modern plumbing, most modern medinas look a lot like they did in those bygone glory days of the trans-Saharan trade one thousand years past.

The streets are rarely wider that six or seven feet, and are sometimes as narrow as two or three. Mules and men with carts do most of the heavy lifting in the streets, delivering or carrying away what can’t be done by hand. In part because of the difficulty of moving bulky items without a motor vehicle, most people buy groceries for today, and maybe tomorrow, but rarely more. Furniture, modern appliances, and large construction supplies are often transported into the medina over a neighbor’s rooftop, then lowered down into a home through the central, open air courtyard. Anger your neighbors, and you might have a hard time remodeling your house. 

Fresh fish – caught this morning – for sale in the souq, or market. It will likely be carried home by the purchaser, wrapped in yesterday’s newspaper. Sometimes a map pushing a cart full of iced fish will delivery it straight to residents’ doors.

Mosques – identifiable by their lighted minarets – serve each neighborhood within a medina, offering a space to pray, socialize, connect, and to resolve dispute with the community.

The crowded street of the medina in Fez. The ditch is in the center of the street, channeling water away from buildings and allowing pedestrians to stay dry even in the rain, beneath the awnings that are common in front of homes and shops.

In this cafe, refrigeration is provided by cool mountain water fed from a small mountain stream – there is no electricity.

Across North Africa and the Middle East, millions of people live this way in the modern day. It’s tempting for an American to view this life as old-fashioned, but that would be an ethnocentric point of view. That is, it would be evaluating other peoples and cultures according to the standards of one’s own culture. This can be a very limiting way to understand the world, because it often leads us to judge other societies unfairly. On the other hand, members of different societies might learn valuable lessons if they approach each others’ culture with an open mind. Someone learning about a different way of life in this way would not say “right” or “wrong,” but instead perhaps “different” and “similar,” “useful” or “not useful.”

So, instead, let’s try a thought experiment…

Don’t think of a medina as “backward.” Think of it as an example which might inspire an American to think about alternate, perhaps more healthier patterns for organizing our cities… What, at first glance, appear to be drawbacks to medina life, when described another way, are what many Americans list as desirable qualities in a neighborhood.

It is walkable, by necessity. Most anything you need – shopping, school, work, healthcare – is available in a five to ten minute walk from your door.  

It is communal – there are basically no police present in the medina, so most problems are solved in the community. Violence is squashed through neighbors’ intervention and social pressure. Public fountains with fresh, safe drinking water can be found at most major intersections.  Same with mosques, which, in addition to the streets lined with small, locally-owned shops, are at the center of residents’ spiritual and social lives.

Most all food is organic, fresh, and affordable, sold with zero plastic packaging.

The narrow streets are shaded between high-walled homes. As a result, temperatures within the medina are typically  several degrees cooler than the open air outside of it. So, while most who live within the medina don’t have air conditioners, they don’t really need them either.

All of this means that the carbon footprint of the average medina dweller is much smaller – much more sustainable by many order of magnitude – than the average American.

Dusk falls on the densely packed medina of Fez. In this rooftop photo, it is easy to see the density, the open courtyards, and the mosques – recognizable from their tall towers – stretching into the distance.

Since there are few-to-no vehicles in the medina, the streets are designed for human traffic – stairways are common in mountain towns.

At their narrowest, the streets of the medina can be narrower than the hallway in your house. Extended families might build passover hallways to join two households across the street.

In an effort to maximize living space, some families build additions to their homes – which extend over the street. This does provide additional shade to pedestrians below.

The soul is the market section of the medina. Many small shops – usually highly specialized, selling only meat, only women’s clothing, only fruit, sometimes only one kind of fruit – characterize the shopping experience. All of this is within a few minutes walk from home.

Larger deliveries in the medina might be made to by mules. As a result, pedestrian fatalities – a real problem in every American community – are almost unheard of in the medina.

Occasionally, streets of the medina are wide enough to accommodate small motorbikes, such as this one making deliveries in the souk of Essaouira, Morocco.

For hundreds of years before running water was widely available to every home, Moroccan rulers built fountains at close intervals throughout the medina – fed sometimes by springs, sometimes by aqueducts carrying clean water from distant mountains to the corner by your house.

In Muslim countries, the symbol for a pharmacy is often the green crescent moon. This pharmacy serves a small neighborhood in the medina – and offers shade to pedestrians below.

A small public mailbox serves the neighborhood.

In the medina of Chefchaouen, residents have cultivated a vast, interwoven web of grape vines that grow overhead. The grapes can be eaten or turned into wine; their leaves provide fresh air and shade, and can also be eaten.

In the medina, streetlights are usually fixed overhead, right to the side of buildings – there is far less light pollution, because it takes far fewer lamps to light such narrow streets.

Electrical wires, added long after these ancient cities were originally built, are often run directly alongside buildings, or buried beneath the streets alongside waterlines.

Chickens often range freely, living on rooftops or in the courtyards of homes, providing fresh eggs and meat to their owners.

This public street runs completely underneath a multi-story home. Public parking typically means room for a bicycle or a hitch for a mule.

The public street continues into this tunnel.

Living in the medina can mean cramped corners, however. Each of these doors leads to a different home.

Traditional doors in the medinas of Morocco feature a smaller door nestled within a larger one, each with a seperate knocker which resonates with a distinct tone. The smaller door is for close family, as well as for ventilation while cooking – it allows for a modest amount of privacy within. The larger door is opened to welcome company or celebrate special occasion, symbolically opening the home to the wider community.

Air conditioning is rare in traditional medinas. Thick brick or mud walls and windows open at the right time of day help to keep indoor spaces cool.

This wall is made from sun-baked mud and straw, which insulates well against the heat of the day – and is durable in the arid, rainless climate that covers much of Morocco.

In most medinas, there are at least a few public squares filled with restaurants, shops, kids playing soccer, as well as musicians and other entertainers, such as snake charmers. Much of life outside of work and school takes place in open, public spaces like this square in Marrakesh, Morocco is by far one of the largest and busiest.

This cart is loaded with scrap metal for recycling. Any waste collection within the medina is done this way, on a human or mule-drawn carts. In truth, residents of the medina purchase most food without packaging in the local souq, meaning that they produce little inorganic waste. Large trash trucks are not really necessary here, even if they were possible.

Medinas are traditionally walled, guarding against attack from raiders or rival nations.

Industry can take place very close to residential areas. This tannery emits the strong smell of ammonia, which radiates for blocks around – neighbors live with it.

Without glamorizing social problems like poverty and sanitation issues that persist in some medinas (as they do in many American neighborhoods), it is easy to see why this way of life has persisted since prehistoric times. 

On the other hand, the patterns of American suburbanization are barely a century and half old. They have led to many comforts for those fortunate enough to afford this lifestyle – but the American way of life is sometimes criticized for the social isolation encouraged by our preference for single family homes, by the unsustainable carbon emissions and lack of exercise encouraged by our urban sprawl, and for water wasted irrigating green lawns, even in parts of the country where grass does not naturally grow.  

As we said earlier, there is no “right” or “wrong” when we attempt to look at cultures in this comparative way. But is it possible that Americans might learn valuable lessons from this way of life, persisting as it has with so little change since ancient times?

THIS LESSON WAS MADE POSSIBLE THROUGH A GENEROUS GRANT FROM THE QATAR FOUNDATION.