Urban Repair (Noura Al-Sayeh Holtrop)

Urban Repair addresses a growing imperative in architectural scholarship and practice: how werehabilitate, reintegrate, and remake built environments in ways that respect heritage while enablingcontemporary life. This volume contributes to the evolving discourse on the responsibility for addressingconcerns around social and spatial rehabilitation. It draws from the case of the Aga KhanAward for Architecture-winning Pearling Path site in Muharraq, Bahrain, while maintaining an eyetoward broader methodological, cultural, and critical frameworks.

Contributions from various disciplines analyze how careful and bold interventions catalyze urbanregeneration, and how integrating architectural conservation, urban planning, and cultural programmingare essential ingredients for the rehabilitation of historic cities. They ask: What constitutesUrban Repair? How can local voices, community culture, institutional frameworks, and contemporaryarchitecture align in a rehabilitation agenda that is neither nostalgic nor sterile, but generative andfuture-oriented? Thematically structured from historical background to architectural detail, thisvolume juxtaposes theoretical essays with applied interventions, enabling direct dialogue betweenacademic reflection and built work.

The volume also introduces the newly built Pearling Path projects by Valerio Olgiati (Pearling Path Visitorand Experience Center), Anne Holtrop (Suq Al Qayssareyah and exhibition buildings), and ChristianKerez (multi-story parking structures), along with collaborators such as Office Kersten Geers DavidVan Severen on public squares and pedestrian bridges. Their architectural gestures are layered in aprocess of repair and renewal, and they span urban, institutional, and community scales.

Urban Repair invites readers to see preservation not merely as an act of conservation, but as a formof critical inquiry-one that reveals and interprets the layered histories and memories embedded in aplace's material fabric. The project's analysis explores how the preservation of the intangible-throughthe revival of traditional crafts and music-complements the conservation of the tangible. In doing so,it helps to reactivate the city's social and economic life, ensuring that the project's benefits remainrooted in the local community and become part of an ongoing, contemporary dialogue with history.