Toward a relational understanding of the urban margins in Jeddah: informality, group interdependencies, and urbanisation

Supervised by Ryan Powell and Dr Melanie Lombard. 

My research mainly focuses on urban informality in Saudi Arabia, particularly on how local residents relate to their groups, their politics, and their society. Urban informality literature is rich with different perspectives from both the global North and South, Saudi Arabia's case is absent from the field, although its social and political structure may bring new insights into the study of this area. To fill this empirical gap, the research developed an approach that aims to combine two distinct subjects together: figurational sociology and urban informality. This new theoretical approach focuses on the interaction between the practice of everyday life in informal areas in order to examine the ways that residents construct their identities and to investigate the ways in which this identity shapes their relations with each other and with the environment around them. All these processes happen under a structural factors (e.g. urbanisation, Saudization, migration, ...etc) that affect how these groups live in the neighbourhood.

The research was carried out in the area of AL-Jameaa (ALJ) which is one of the biggest informal areas in the city of Jeddah. In addition to its proximity to the holy city of Mecca, ALJ is located in the centre of the city and its location makes it an attractive area for citizens and immigrants alike. This provides an opportunity to develop the adopted theoretical approach to capture the social dynamics and the complexity of urban informality in Saudi Arabia.

In 2011, I got a bachelor degree in urban planning from King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Then I worked a few months in both private and public agencies before getting a full-time job in Al-Baha University in the department of architectural engineering. In 2015, I got my master degree in urban planning from Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana (USA). After that, I taught for about two years some architectural and planning courses in my university in Albaha. Mainly I was teaching basic design concepts for architecture students as well as an introduction to basic planning concepts. In 2017, I have started my PhD here in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at Sheffield University.