The workshop, at the Bait Al-Bilad, will be led by professor Hisham Mortada, principal of the Alternative, an expertise house at King Abdulaziz University that specializes in architecture and urban studies, and professor Ulrike Freitag, director of Zentrum Moderner Orient (the Centre for Modern Oriental Studies), Berlin.
The workshop at Bait Al-Balad in downtown Jeddah is scheduled to be opened by Jeddah Mayor Adel Fakieh. It comes as an extension of a workshop on the same topic that took a place last December in Berlin and was opened by Saudi Ambassador to Germany Osama Shobokshi.
Although the workshop is held to provide a scientific and historical analysis of the development of Jeddah over the last two centuries in particular, it will review the importance of the city in the development of Saudi Arabia and life over the last two millennia.
Freitag is an authority on the social and political history of the Middle East. She studied history, Middle Eastern studies and literature at the universities of Bonn, Damascus and Freiburg. In 2002, she took up the post as director of the Center for Modern Oriental Studies, Berlin, in conjunction with a professorship in Islamic Studies at Freie Universität, Berlin, and is currently working on a history of Jeddah in the 19th and 20th centuries.
In a recent presentation she detailed the importance of preserving architectural record and understanding the social history that formed it. “If people are not aware of their history and where they come from, then they cannot properly understand their current society,” she said.
This, she thought, produces a state of social disconnection and isolation because they cannot trace how their culture and society arrived at its current state and resulted in a state of aimlessness and cultural identity. “And without a knowledge of the past you really cannot begin to plan your future.”
The workshop begins at 10 a.m. at the Bait Al-Balad, King Abduaziz Street in Jeddah, near the Red Sea Palace Hotel. It ends at 3 p.m. “We are open to the scientific and architectural communities but would welcome any members of the public who would like to attend,” said Mortada.
