MECAM Transregional Workshop: Cities in the Arab Imagination

Established in 2020, MECAM is a joint initiative between Tunisian and German universities and research institutions. Funded by the German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR), MECAM has quickly become a hub for interdisciplinary research in Tunisia and the wider Maghreb region. Guided by the theme 'Imagining Futures – Dealing with Disparity', MECAM aims to facilitate discussion on the (re)negotiation of complex social and political conditions, expectations, norms, and legacies. To encourage vibrant exchanges among scholars from Tunisia, the Maghreb, and Europe and beyond, MECAM offers a rich program of academic activities, including Travelling Academies and Transregional Workshops.

Cities as real and imagined spaces

The MECAM Transregional Workshop, which was held on 24–25 June 2025 at the École Supérieure des Sciences Économiques et Commerciales de Tunis (ESSECT), brought together researchers, writers, and artists from Tunisia, Lebanon, Germany, Egypt, and even futher. Convened by Teresa Pepe (University of Oslo) and organized by Diana Abbani (MECAM/Forum Transregionale Studien), the event invited participants to reflect on the city as both a real and imagined space.

Over two days, discussions explored how urban futures are shaped through literature, comics, music, memory, language, and gendered experience. Participants examined how Arab cities are imagined in fiction—as places of nostalgia, control, division, or collapse—and how these representations intersect with current social and political conditions. Cities appeared as spaces of fear and desire, of fragmentation and survival.

Fiction as lens

After a brief welcoming by Amel Guizani, MECAM’s Tunisian co-Director, and Mohamed Faker Klibi (Director of ESSECT), Teresa Pepe opened the workshop by examining how Arab literature has increasingly turned to post-apocalyptic and dystopian cityscapes—urban environments marked by surveillance, control, isolation, or total collapse. These fictional spaces, she argued, are not disconnected from reality; rather, they reflect anxieties about authoritarianism, environmental degradation, and social disintegration. Rasha Chatta explored similar themes through dystopian comics set in Beirut, where the fragmented city is portrayed through ruins, silences, and fractured narratives. Both contributions asked how fiction can act as a lens to understand the failures of existing systems and the emotional costs of urban life in crisis.

Urban Space is never neutral

The workshop emphasized that urban space is never neutral. Cities are shaped by power, exclusion, and memory. Hanan Natour discussed how Tunisian women writers reconstruct cities from the perspective of memory and exile, while Hager Ben Driss examined Fay Afaf Kanafani’s 'Nadia, Captive of Hope', revealing how autobiographical fiction expresses the pain and resilience of urban life from a woman’s perspective. These reflections raised questions about how women navigate cities that often remain closed or hostile to them—and how literature becomes a tool of resistance.

The past inhabits the future

The case of Tunis was central to the discussions. Presentations by Douja Mamelouk and Cyrine Kortas explored how trauma, silence, and sacredness shape the city’s liminal spaces—from the medina to taverns and underground settings. Vanessa Barish examined cultural festivals like Dream City and Carthage as decolonial practices of reclaiming urban imagination. These talks revealed the emotional layers of Tunis as a city marked by both erasure and creative reinvention.

In her keynote, Samia Kassab-Charfi turned to the city of Testour and the legacy of the Moriscos to examine how migration, exile, and memory shape symbolic urban geographies. The past, she argued, continues to inhabit the present through layers of cultural reconstruction and place-making.

A recurring theme throughout the workshop was nostalgia—for imagined moral pasts, lost urban aesthetics, or former rhythms of life. Nermin Elsherif explored how the longing for al-zamān al-gamīl reflects discomfort with the present and a desire for moral order. In her presentation, Diana Abbani traced how satirical songs from 1930s Syria and Lebanon offered a form of sonic critique—reflecting on modernity, family, and colonial control. These songs functioned as musical archives of dissent and collective memory.

Questions of violence, voice, and rural–urban imaginaries were also explored. Haikel Al-Hazgui reflected on how the city speaks through sound and silence, while Rached Khalifa examined how Maher Abderrahman’s novel constructs the village of Ksibet as a mytho-historical space of memory and resistance.

Cities as a literary and emotional landscape

The final session brought together writers Messaouda Ben Boubaker and Walid Soliman in conversation with Moncef Ben Abdeljelil to discuss how cities are translated into language—how metaphors, dialects, and imagination shape urban belonging. In the concluding roundtable, participants reflected on the city as a literary and emotional landscape. What does it mean to write the city? How do literature, language, and voice preserve urban memory when the city is fragmented or silenced?

Beyond the Arab region

The workshop’s relevance extends beyond the Arab region. In Germany, as in much of Europe, cities are deeply entangled in questions of migration, identity, and collective memory. The transregional lens of the workshop opened space for shared reflection—showing that imagined cities are also global cities, shaped by interconnected struggles and dreams.

One of the workshop’s key outcomes was to affirm the role of literature, music, and storytelling in helping us reimagine cities—not simply as material spaces, but as emotional, political, and imaginative terrains. As cities face increasing pressures—political, social, and ecological—this workshop reminded us that urban futures are not only planned in offices or blueprints, but also dreamed up in novels, songs, and memories.
 

Author: Dr. Diana Abbani, Science Communication Coordinator for MECAM at the Forum Transregionale Studien/Germany.