Urban Development in the Middle East and North Africa: Deconstructing Visions, Politics and Identities

Christian Steiner is Chair for Human Geography at the University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt. Prior, he was Visiting Professor for Economic Geography at the Universities of Frankfurt, Osnabrück and Innsbruck and visiting research fellow at the Centre for Modern Oriental Studies in Berlin. He published extensively on the nexus of the political economy, tourism and urban development in the Arab world. Aside from that, his current research interests are to be found in the fields of human-environment relations and pragmatism inspired economic geography. His habilitation on ‘Pragmatism, Environment and Space’ was granted with the Hans-Bobek-Prize of the Austrian Geographical Society.

He studied economics and partly followed Islamic studies at the Universities of Freiburg i.Br. and Aix-en-Provence. He holds a PhD from Freie Universität Berlin and a habilitation degree (awarded the habilitation prize of the Academic Society Erlangen) from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen. He also worked with research institutions in Berlin and Leipzig (Germany), Rennes (France) and Odense (Denmark). His research focuses on regionalisation processes and urban development in MENA countries.