Urban Repair

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

Contributions from various disciplines analyze how careful and bold interventions catalyze urban regeneration, and how integrating architectural conservation, urban planning, and cultural programming are essential ingredients for the rehabilitation of historic cities. They ask: What constitutes Urban Repair? How can local voices, community culture, institutional frameworks, and contemporary architecture align in a rehabilitation agenda that is neither nostalgic nor sterile, but generative and future-oriented? Thematically structured from historical background to architectural detail, this volume juxtaposes theoretical essays with applied interventions, enabling direct dialogue between academic reflection and built work.

The volume also introduces the newly built Pearling Path projects by Valerio Olgiati (Pearling Path Visitor and Experience Center), Anne Holtrop (Suq Al Qayssareyah and exhibition buildings), and Christian Kerez (multi-story parking structures), along with collaborators such as Office Kersten Geers David Van Severen on public squares and pedestrian bridges. Their architectural gestures are layered in a process 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 form of critical inquiry—one that reveals and interprets the layered histories and memories embedded in a place’s material fabric. The project’s analysis explores how the preservation of the intangible—through the 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 remain rooted in the local community and become part of an ongoing, contemporary dialogue with history.