Wafa AL-Ghatam

This paper sets out to investigate what the key spatial characteristics are in the way the villages’ spaces are embedded in the urban context, which is of interest not only for themselves but also for their critical implication for creating different patterns of space use and movement. It is an attempt to explore the morphology of the villages’ spaces and looks at the key spatial properties of the layout and their suggestions as a space in which to encounter movement on a multi scale, and whether people from different distances use the village space as part of their journey or not. It examines first the morphology of village space, with the aim of identifying the villages’ configuration within a spatial arrangement of the urban system and their way embedded in the surrounding context, then uses the hypothesis derived from this analysis to explore the relation between the villages’ spaces and their social nature. The aim is to clarify how absorbed villages layout of space related to the city and does this patterning have social implication? In this paper, we explore villages’ spatial layout as an independent variables, and look for its consequences in terms of observable movement pattern of spatial living. In the next, will set the study report a set of field studies, in which observed pattern of cultural movement as an implication for social nature are examined alongside space syntax analyses to try and establish how far systematic relations between the two can be found. By using the outcomes of the first section as guiding hypotheses for the second. It is argued that if certain properties are shown to be critical in urban spatial patterning as dependent variables, then they may also be related to the way in which spatial layout acts as an independent variable. In this respect, the analysis progresses on three levels to illuminate the key spatial characteristics of the way village layouts are implanted in the urban context: First level: an attempt is made to identify the generic properties of the absorbed villages within the urban system by discerning the local system of the villages and the global morphological regularities of the village space at different scales through using the main syntactic measure of normalised integration and choice segments. Second, level is about how these generic property that maintains with high movement at different scale in relation to space use and of people movement. Third, level is about village-global relatedness; each village space constituting an urban system has certain relations to its surrounding area. The analysis identifies a mighty difference between the village configurations at a different scale. The view put forward here of those studies shows that the villages vary in the patterns and the strength of their local and global movement, along with a different generic property. When spaces are routes of this dynamic high choice of movement at multi scale, this implies a space with potential high co-presence of relative inhabitant movement from the village and the surrounding areas; the longer the route graph, the higher the potential of movement from different scales.

This paper presents the comparative analysis of ten villages absorbed by Manama and Muharraq cities in Bahrain. The two cities experienced rapid urban expansion. Villages in the vicinity were gradually engulfed by the cities’ fabrics (ALESCO, 1975; Al‐Najar 1998). But the process of absorption does not seem to have been uniform. At one extreme, the villages seemed to become part of the structure of the city, and at the other extreme, they seemed to stand apart from the city and remain more or less separate entities. These apparent spatial differences seem also to be reflected in social differences, in that most villages seemed to retain their traditional communities and values while others became more like their urban surroundings (Al‐Najar, 1998). Therefore, how far can spatial processes relating to the spatial pattern of the way villages embed in their surrounding urban areas throw light on the different pathways of the social development of these absorbed villages? The comparative analysis and space study developed in the first three parts of this paper show that there are differences in the way villages are embedded in urban context, and the way village configuration have shaped people’s movement.
In this study we found: first, there is different gender and ethnic movement in village spaces. A sort of cultural movement pattern is observed in the villages, where women avoid meeting men in some villages or local people use different spaces to non‐local. These suggest that village spaces and their cultural movement could be a key factor in revealing the village social condition. The conservative range of the village society varies from village to another. Furthermore, well embedded villages in an urban context generally have a mixture of local and non local movement, while most of the weakly embedded villages are dominated by local people. This could be related to the fact that if the village configuration is not well connected with surrounding areas then the encounter of movement will happen only between local people who are already living in the village and not with those in surrounding areas. But villages which well embedded in the urban context are bringing different types of people together in commercial and main residential streets. This confirmed Hillier’s theory that movement patterns are considered an expression of social well being; it is a key element of an influential mechanism by which urban space develops, which reflect how urban space could become a wealthy active urban space or keep apart.