The paper analysed the gap in scholarship on housing styles in Middle Eastern cities. It identifies two contemporary trends that have resulted from insufficient housing, and insufficient government interesting in housing, in the Middle East: the rise of informal settlements and self-built homes; and the role of small-scale contractors. Persistent conflict has also given rise to sprawling refugee camps. Social Housing in the Middle East attempts to incorporate all these kinds of spaces for low- and middle-income urbanites – as opposed to the large, flashy housing projects, targeting the affluent, that have been developed by neoliberal networks.

It  brings together analyses of cities in Jordan, Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia, Israel, Cyprus and Kuwait. Many chapters focus on colonial echoes in older versions of social housing, such as the Social Housing in the Middle East that grew along with post-war urbanization in Cypriot cities. Another common theme is public housing as a way of expressing the legitimacy of the state – most starkly in Israel – or a particular branch of politics – as with Islamist political parties in Turkey.