Studies of public space focus disproportionately on cities. Complex and densely populated urban built environments—with their streets, plazas, institutional buildings, housing projects, markets—make concrete and visible attempts to manage difference. They also structure the ways that less powerful residents challenge and sometimes remake elites’ spatial visions of the social order. The robust literature in Middle East studies on Islamic cities, colonial cities, dual cities, quarters and ethnicities, port cities, and so forth is no exception to this urban focus. As James Holston and Arjun Appadurai have argued:

A prime example is the rather passive politics facilitated in post-1848 Paris by new boulevards and their commercial spectacles. David Harvey has found that “the public space of the new boulevard provides the setting, but it acquires its qualities in part through the commercial and private activities that illuminate and spill outward onto it. The boundary between public and private spaces is depicted as porous.”Footnote ² Harvey's insistence on public space's link to nonpublic, and specifically commercial, space—that the politics produced by space depend on “symbiotic connectivity across the public, institutional (commercial) and private realms”Footnote ³—reminds us that constructions of space are always relational.

Although scholars have begun to investigate electronic and global institutional spaces (those of social media in the Arab Spring, for instance), in an effort to broaden the purview of contemporary space and new forms of politics, few studies of nonurban space (rural, village, agricultural, desert, riparian) have entered debates about the production of public space.Footnote ⁴ This impoverishes our view of politics, as it relegates large segments of the population outside the arena of citizenship and narrows the range of foils for public space. Particularly striking in its absence is research on the vast desert spaces of Middle Eastern countries, or on their powerful rivers—both nonurban areas that abut rural communities and even cities.Footnote ⁵ Such places have historically acted more often as a third kind of space: a commons, which is “neither public nor private space. It implies open access and shared participation without the shadow of the state (with its heavy-handed power to tax or regulate); and it implies a space for community assembly apart from the hard sell of the market.”Footnote ⁶ Stripped of facile utopic and redemptive associations, “commons” as an analytical category brings questions of property rights and the status of ownership directly into debates about the production of space. Both deserts and rivers at times come under the control of states and private interests, for instance, to exploit resources (oil, hydraulic or hydroelectric power, reclaimed agricultural land, etc.) or to house state institutions (military infrastructure, prisons), thereby eliminating common access. Charting these changes over time raises, then, new questions. What are the technologies of the creation and demarcation of public space outside cities? Are the most important areas of symbiosis private and commercial, or something else altogether?

Conflicts over hunting make visible the definition of nonurban public and private spaces. Since animals move between the common space of the desert and the private areas of cultivatable land, hunters constantly mark out boundaries between the two.Footnote ⁷ In the early 20th century, close scrutiny of the lines between public and private space was a hallmark of legal inquiry into Egyptian hunting cases. Conflicts over hunting and rights to enter village land produced one of the most important events of Egyptian politics in this period: the 1906 Dinshaway affair that catalyzed popular support of the nationalist movement.Footnote ⁸ The crisis pitted British officers hunting pigeons in a rural village against Egyptian peasants who relied on the animals for food and fertilizer. British Major Pine-Coffin's testimony at the trial included his response to a question put to him by one of the defense lawyers: “On going to shoot, did you know whether the pigeons were private property or wild pigeons?” His answer revealed the crucial role space played in understanding this divide: “I thought that pigeons were public property when at certain distances.”Footnote ⁹ Villagers, by contrast, named the pigeons’ owners.Footnote ¹⁰ Likewise, a conflict over British officers who went fox hunting in 1901 just outside of Cairo on the property of Wilfrid Blunt contested the boundaries between public and private land. As one British official explained:

These cases forced participants repeatedly to make plain how they distinguished desert from cultivated land, commons from private property, by detailing descriptions of walls, canals, vegetation, pathways, wildlife, and so forth. They also raised crucial political questions about the legal immunity of foreign residents. The crowds of villagers that responded to Dinshaway and to the incidents in Blunt's garden testify to wide community mobilization in conflicts over resources, property rights, legal status, and social differentiation. While in both these instances, “native” Egyptian voices are mediated through British accounts and legal proceedings, it is clear that the rules of access and the material technologies and practices of producing public space differed outside and inside cities. Without a full understanding of the changing ways that rural space was marked off from wilderness and city, we miss crucial dimensions of citizenship and politics.