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This chapter begins with a brief survey of the literature that constitutes the present spatial turn in Middle East studies (MES). This review has two aims: to examine the (often undertheorized or loosely defined) understandings of space at work in MES research and to explore the central or emerging research interests in MES developed by this spatial turn. The chapter then considers the theories of space discernible in research on the Middle East for many decades before the present spatial turn. It argues that not only does an interest in space have a far longer history in MES than recent critical research lets on, but that attention to this issue is important because it illuminates the ways in which evolving understandings of space accompany changing research agendas and, possibly, new theoretical, methodological, or conceptual assumptions in the interdisciplinary arena of MES more generally. Next, the chapter discusses questions of disciplinarity, particularly in relation to geography, and the ways in which disciplinary and institutional histories have shaped the contours of the spatial turn in Middle East area studies. It concludes by identifying new directions for research.

In a moment of global urban change, migration, and political transformation, the politics and practices of cultural heritage might seem to have little import. However, this paper argues that focusing on cultural heritage in the Middle East provides two key insights with much broader relevance. First, examining how heritage is made (and unmade) shows one way that regions are constructed through the articulation of material and symbolic connections. Second, these regions might be better understood not as containers but as complexes in and in relation to which people articulate and communicate shared meanings. These insights build upon and extend recent theorizations of cultural geopolitics. In surveying an interdisciplinary body of scholarship on Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Turkey, Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and the Gulf, this article seeks to expand the linkages between geography and Middle East area studies scholarship. It begins by connecting current debates about planetary urbanization in relation to a historiography of the "Middle Eastern city" and suggests that thinking in terms of heritage provides a novel approach for understanding both new and old regional imaginaries. It then highlights three dynamics that make the politics of heritage distinct in this region. It closes with a discussion of the dual role that heritage can play in both contesting and facilitating topdown projects of dispossession and urban transformation.

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In this paper, I describe a method of learning to work with an Istanbul archive. This archive, containing the papers of the Council for the Preservation of Antiquities, provided a crucial resource for understanding one part of Istanbul's 20th‐century urban transformation. This archive felt exceptionally accessible, without the mediating staff and distance that typically define archival fieldwork in Istanbul. However, this accessibility in fact presented a methodological problem. In the absence of any documentation on how this archive was formed, I realised that apart from a handful of examples, the archive seemed to be a disorganised collection of paper that told me very little about the city. Building on recent discussions about archival fieldwork, I explain how I learned to work with this in a different way. This involved using the multiple materialities of the archive as a starting point to identify three linked practices generating the archive and shaping the relationships between its various objects: papering, arranging, and depositing. This methodological argument draws on recent interventions that ask us to follow “archives in formation,” but extends this scholarship by focusing on an archive whose formation was not documented and could not be observed. This paper's identification of the practices of papering, arranging, and depositing thus seeks to provide a model for other scholars interested in using the materialities of archives as a way to reconstruct their contexts of use and transformation.