Building and Rebuilding the Palimpsest of Urban Memory: The mechanics of urban space-making in the early-medieval cities of Samarqand and Bukhara

Collaborators: Manu P. Sobti

The genesis of urban public spaces within the city has been an area of growing interest to urban historians. However, within the Islamic cultural sphere, not only has the concept of urban public space been thoroughly contested, but seldom researched to elaborate on its evolution across time and space. This research project specifically examines the processes of building and re-building of urban elements within two early-medieval urban spaces - the so-called Rigistan - located outside the citadels of Samarqand and Bukhara in Central Asia, and created soon after the Arab invasions on this region beginning 675 AD. Several ninth and tenth-century texts describe these urban exemplars and dramatic physical changes following the arrival of Islam in this region. Structures in and around the Rigistan were now built amidst areas of ruined buildings. Most significantly, many new structures remained incomplete, as if their political roles had been pre-maturely fulfilled; the urban spaces themselves were never paved to generate the intended political impact. In essence, the architecture of the two Rigistan spaces - deliberately continued the past into the present, consciously accepting, rejecting and synthesizing elements of the Sogdian past with the Arab present.