Rewriting the City: Disruption as Cultural and Spatial Practice in Amman, Jordan

Abstract

“Rewriting the City” examines how everyday informal spatial practices in Amman—such as street vending, ad-hoc construction, and mobile economies—are framed as disruptions by state-led planning and municipal authorities, while functioning as strategies of livelihood for those who depend on them. Operating outside formal architectural authorship, these practices remain integral to how the city is inhabited, serviced, and sustained.

The thesis investigates how such practices come to be labelled as “disruptive” within planning and regulatory discourse, and how this designation frames them as problems of order rather than as intentional spatial practices. It argues that disruption is not an inherent quality of these acts, but a relational one: they are deemed disruptive only within systems that prioritize legibility, permanence, and control. Therefore, what is disrupted is not urban order, but dominant frameworks that define architecture, legality, and spatial authorship.

Focusing on markets, sidewalks, streets, and mobile economic infrastructures across East and West Amman, the research analyses how informal practices operate within, alongside, and against municipal planning and governance. The East-West divide is approached as a spatial condition produced by uneven infrastructure investment, zoning practices, and histories of migration and displacement, revealing how regulation itself produces uneven access, visibility, and legitimacy.

The thesis reframes disruption as persistence: the repeated, adaptive occupation of space that sustains livelihood under constraint. These practices actively shape public space, organize social relations, and maintain systems of interdependence through deliberate responses to uneven development, economic precarity, and regulatory constraint.

Methodologically, the thesis employs ethnographic research, drawing on observation, storytelling, and spatial documentation to examine how space is transformed through temporality, mobility, material decisions, bodily labour, and repeated use.

By reading these practices as architectural, the thesis expands the discipline’s scope and responsibility. It challenges the association of architecture with permanence, capital, and professional authorship, and instead positions architecture as a contingent and relational practice embedded in agency, labour, and lived experience.