Law and disorder
governance futures for vernacular landscapes
They say the week spans eight days in Battir, Palestine. At the beginning of each week, a farmer measures the Roman pool’s hydraulic head and on a daily rotation divides the water elevation equally among the eight ancestral families. Whereas traditional methods of governance embody more open and communal methods of resource distribution, the modern city controls miles of underground water infrastructure for the population’s on-demand consumption. However, unlike modern infrastructural systems which continue to perpetuate their networks, pre-modern logics of development are marginalized and even threatened by endless urban sprawl. Despite the modern perception of disorderliness, vernacular landscapes govern with much needed wisdom absent from modern engineering strategies.
Deteriorating demos
Aristotle developed the concept of politics which at the time referred to the “collective affairs of the city (polis) and the management of these affairs.”1 Olympic in technical achievement yet rapidly deteriorating in quality2, the modern city prioritizes the individual over the collective. Despite imagined amidst mythological beliefs and temples, the polis today is largely understood separate from any form of organized religion or metaphysical hierarchy. Where before beliefs or virtues were elevated in places of worship, instead city skyscrapers enshrine the ultimate strength of man over materials. However, with performance pursued as an end, the routine maintenance requirements of high tech materials detracts from broader community needs and wants.
Ummatic infrastructure
A nascent concept, “ummatics is to umma what politics is to polis.” Defined as the whole community of Muslims bound together by ties of faith, umma is explicitly understood in terms of religion than its polis counterpart.3 However, reshaping the geographies of Muslim lands, centuries of colonial engineering hegemony have underrated the role of the scripture in shaping spatial arrangements. Despite the reemergence of ummatics thinking as an alternative governance future, dependence on modern engineering to measure, connect and redistribute resources may replicate the same hyper consumption and pollution producing patterns of modern states. To achieve ummatic standards of success, a holistic understanding of infrastructure (similar to Battir’s) may revive, replicate and network fading vernacular landscapes.
Post modernity medina
Chartered in 622 CE (1 AH), the first medina (city) would serve as the DNA for a growing umma. Balancing the metaphysical and physical, the medina’s minimalist mosque and bazaar requirements for congregation and trade would marry into many cultures across the world. However in contrast to the modern city which had to ethnic cleanse indigenous populations and pollute the environment to subsist, medina’s were retrofitted and synthesized to local customs and existing spatial conditions although with a hue of prophetic guidance. As in the case of Carthage, now Medina of Tunis, the prototypical medina would gradually blend into the Roman cartesian planning grid over several generations.4 Hence, vernacular landscape governance futures may not rest in the strict boundaries of top down problem solving operations but in the informal and gradual organizing strategies of communities. Whereby an individual’s positionally is enmeshed within a web of shared human, natural and celestial relationships, scripture may serve as the engine for deploying vernacular landscapes well into the future.
https://ummatics.org/what-is-ummatics/
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/state-us-infrastructure
https://www.oed.com/dictionary/umma_n?tab=meaning_and_use#17116775
https://www.archnet.org/authorities/4016