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Jordan Urban Areas and Urbanization
From ancient times, Middle Eastern society has been
characterized by the interaction of nomads and peasants with the
urban centers. The region's highest achievements in cultural,
political, economic, and intellectual life took place in the
vibrant cosmopolitan centers. Arab-Islamic claims to be one of the
world's major civilizations rest largely on the products of city
populations.
No major urban center existed in what is now Jordanian
territory until the late 1940s. East Bank towns served as local
markets and administrative centers rather than as centers of high
culture. Truncated by external political considerations rather than
by internal social or cultural realities, the East Bank
consequently lacked the kind of long-established metropolis that
for centuries had dominated other parts of the Middle East.
Amman, the major city of the East Bank, had ancient roots, but
in the 1980s it was scarcely more than a generation old as a modern
city. The Circassians were the first permanent inhabitants of
Amman, settling there in 1878. In 1921 Amir Abdullah ibn Hussein Al
Hashimi established his capital in Amman. It passed its first
decades as a provincial trading center and garrison on the margin
of the desert. In 1943 Amman had only 30,000 inhabitants. As
capital of the new kingdom of Jordan, Amman grew over the next
three decades into a booming, overcrowded metropolitan center.
Population growth was largely a function of the influx of
Palestinians since 1948. A high birth rate and internal migration,
however, have also been prominent features of the urbanization
process
(see Jordan - Population
, this ch.).
In 1989 Amman lacked both the old quarters characteristic of
most Middle Eastern cities and an established urban population with
a unified cultural outlook and an organic bond to the indigenous
society of the area. Its people were a mixture of all the elements
of the country. Circassians and Christians, rather than Muslim
Transjordanians, set the tone before the arrival of the
Palestinians, who in the late 1980s probably constituted 60 to 80
percent of its population. The smaller towns of the East Bank
retained a good deal of the traditional kin- and quarter-based
social organization characteristic of Middle Eastern towns.
In rapidly urbanizing areas such as Amman, the quasi-paternal
relationship of the rich to the poor had begun to break down and
the old egalitarian values had given way to class distinctions
based on income and style of life. Increasingly evident, class
polarization was fueled by remittances from those working abroad.
Remittances were invested in residential property, thus driving up
the cost of land and housing. New urban areas, dotted with lavish
stone villas and supermarkets and boutiques supplied with expensive
imported items, coexisted with overcrowded areas where a jumble of
buildings housed the multitudes of the lower-middle class and the
poor. Furthermore, Western culture had introduced foreign ideas
among the educated that gradually estranged them from the culture
of the masses. Cultural and recreational facilities, for example,
were limited to the well-to-do because of the high membership fees
in the clubs that provided them.
Data as of December 1989
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