Hi Pietro,

Thank you for including me in this list.

If I were a planner in Kabul, I imagine I would wish to learn about two sets of things from an expert who has just come from abroad:

1. What sort of ideas do you have in your part of the world about cities? By this I mean the substantive part of your course (the ideas); including a history of ideas about cities in general, and about planning and urban design approaches as well as the current thinking in the West. Here I probably need to see images of lots of places and hear ideas behind them and arguments for and against them.

2. How are your cities managed? How do you make sure cities are planned? By this I mean the procedural part of things (the practices and institutions): How city government and planning is organized; what planners actually do in their professional work. (This is probably very important for Afghanistan at this stage, as they are in the process of (re)building their institutions.) The shape of these institutions in planning and how they work in other countries, therefore, would be interesting to hear about.

After learning about these things, it'll be up to me to see which parts of these ideas and practices are relevant for me. But I probably need your reassurance that there are also lots of ideas in my own culture and history that I can find out about and draw on. It would be very helpful if you could help me build the capacity to do this.

I wish you success in this work.

Ali

Ali Madanipour
Professor of Urban Design
School of Architecture, Planning and Landcsape
University of Newcastle
Newcastle upon Tyne

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11 November 2002, San Francisco, California

Dear Dr. Madanipour,
Thank you so much for your letter! As you may see from the correspondence I have received and my responses, I have been warned away from even thinking about what Afghans should do. However I have not received much advice about what I could teach or what approach I should take to formulating a course. My guess was that I should present my experience and a background about various components of planning in the US, particularly California.

However your questions are much more precise and and help me to focus. If you do not mind, I would like to use most of your questions as the basis of a course plan.

Furthermore, I sense more and more that the way I should 'teach' the course is to ask questions, and to provoke my students to ask questions. Some of my best teachers did that for me; the Socratic/critical method seems the best way to internalize a useful, living set of concepts, rather than inert data or rigid ideological models. Therefore I would ask the same questions to my students about Afghan society, now and in the past. How did the Ghaznivids and Mughals conceive of cities, and what were the actual processes of development? How were civil codes applied by Islamic courts in Afghanistan? I understand that the Ayatollah Khomeni used to teach contract law while he lived in exile in Iraq. How are the Sunni contractual, legal, and legislative traditions different than the Shiite Iranian tradition? What was the role of a civil servant in Kabul in 1975? What are the valuable lessons to be learned from Iran, Pakistan, Tajikistan, and the Soviet system?

Hopefully these questions will affirm a sense of the wealth of material that Afghans can draw upon from their own history and the diverse experiences of their immediate region. I also would love to hear the answers, and a debate about possible models for civil institutions that ranges across such a range of experience! But another vital reason to ask such questions is the immediate future: unless I am very mistaken, Kabul is about to experience a period of tremendous population growth that will test the government and all of its resources. My guess, and my opinion, is that Afghans are facing a tremendous challenge. I hope I can help in some way by providing some conceptual tools they may find useful.

I am also relieved to hear that an appropriate focus would be the structure of institutions and comparative models of institutions in relation to urban development. Although I come from a design background, I have found that understanding the process of institutions operating within a culture is the most effective way to understand urbanism and change; not the formal or material design of a place.

Look forward to hearing more from you.
Sincerely,
Pietro Calogero