Contemporary Islamic gardens and cultural identity: Three case studies from North America and Europe
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation explores the development of Islamic gardens as a global phenomenon in the contemporary world. I argue that Islamic gardens are not restricted to particular locations, cultures, or environments; instead, they can be adapted in different parts of the world, including in places that are not primarily Muslim. To demonstrate this expansion, three contemporary Islamic gardens located in Europe and North America are examined through site observation, interviews, and a review of primary and secondary sources. These cases are the Mughal Garden in Bradford, UK; the Bakewell Ottoman Garden in St. Louis, US; and the Aga Khan Park in Toronto, Canada. In particular, the case studies are intended to demonstrate the role of the designers and patrons in constructing the identity of Islamic gardens in North America and Europe.\nAn in-depth examination of the case studies shows the effect of globalization, tourism, and the flow of people in the creation of Islamic parks and gardens in the Western context. In forming this identity, the designers deliberately connected their design, both physically and conceptually, to the past by using various interpretation techniques. However, the transposition of the Islamic garden to a global context has required certain negotiations with local cultural, geographical, and climatic conditions to produce a meaningful experience and prevent cultural alienation. These adaptations reveal the flexibility of Islamic gardens as forms and concepts.\nMost previous literature on Islamic gardens has focused on the pre-modern period, with limited attention devoted to the nineteenth century or beyond. However, this dissertation extends this historical framework of Islamic gardens to the contemporary period and its defined Islamic geographical boundaries into a global context, while also addressing critical questions about their meaning and identity up to the twenty-first century.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".