By challenging essentialist questioning of Islamic urbanism, this course considers the inter-animated and complex web of forces that drive cities forward by identifying repertoires of underlying logic. Through a deep and historically situated reading of Medieval Mecca, Medina, Damascus, Jerusalem, Baghdad, Cairo, and Cordoba, we will map and encode history on the urban scale to reveal what makes a city "Islamic." Visual mapping skill cultivation for communication purposes (both digital and analogue) will be taught throughout to enhance understandings of urban complexity in rich historical contexts.