Inside war-torn Yemen's ancient skyscraper city, dubbed the 'Manhattan of the desert,' that's on the brink of ruin

James Pasley,James Pasley

Oct 10, 2019, 20:30 IST

Inside war-torn Yemen's ancient skyscraper city, dubbed the 'Manhattan of the desert,' that's on the brink of ruin

View of the historical city of Shibam in southeastern Yemen.

Shibam in Yemen is an ancient, desert city.
Originally settled 1,700 years ago, it's the world's first city of skyscrapers. Many of the buildings, built from mud bricks, date back to the 16th century.
As Yemen struggles with a violent civil war between the government and Houthi rebels, Shibam's future is uncertain.
The war has been going on for five years, resulting in 6,000 deaths and putting 22 million people in a position where they need assistance - for food, water, shelter, or sanitation.
For Shibam, things have been tenuous since 2008. Flooding, terrorist attacks, the Arab Spring Revolt, and the civil war have all put pressure on the city.
Shibam's tourism industry has died, and funding for maintaining buildings has been cut. Now cracks are appearing across the buildings.
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After surviving wars, floods, and a harsh climate for hundreds of years, Shibam, one of the world's most remarkable cities, could soon be in ruins.

Shibam is known as the "Manhattan of the desert," because it's made up of mud brick skyscrapers that shoot up in the middle of the Arabian peninsula's longest valley. It was dubbed that in the 1930s by Freya Stark, an English traveler.

In October 2019, The Guardian's Beth McKernan took a look at the cost Yemen's civil war is having on its ancient cities. Shibam is no longer getting funding to preserve its mud brick buildings, and faces threats from flooding, and potential airstrikes.

Almost all of the houses in the city have eroded, and cracks can be seen across the buildings, Asia Times reported.

Here's what the city is like.

From so high up, it might not look like much, but the Yemen city of Shibam has been around for 1,700 years. Positioned on the crossroads between Europe, Africa, and Asia, it was once an important stop for spice and incense traders.

Shibam is a strategically built city. It sits on the highest point in the green valley of Wadi Hadramaut, the longest fertile valley in the Arabian Peninsula, nestled between two mountains. Shibam is almost completely isolated from other cities.

Named after a Yemen King, it used to be overlooked, and protected, by the fortress city Kawkaban.

But in 2015 Kawkaban was turned to rubble, when American-supported Saudi fighter jets fired missiles at the fortress, destroying 700-year-old houses and the city's ancient gateway.

Amadou-Mahtar M'Bow, former director-general of UNESCO, wrote in favor of Shibam's defense and upkeep: "The traveler who comes unexpectedly upon it, after crossing a vast and level desert, sees a dazzling sight: rising from groves of date palms in the bottom of a luxuriant valley, the city seems to soar gracefully towards the sky."

When English traveler Freya Stark saw it in the 1930s, she deemed it "Manhattan in the desert," because its mud brick towers are set so closely together inside its city walls.

Its tallest building is 98 feet high, so it doesn't measure up to New York or Chicago. But unlike America's modern concrete jungles, these high rises were built from mud brick in the 16th century.

The buildings were built close together to protect owners from clashes with rival families, or thieves, as well as to show off their wealth and power. Since the buildings are so close to each other, residents could even make a quick escape through connecting doors.

Hundreds of years on, Shibam's architecture is still relevant. Foster & Partners studied it. The architecture firm built Masdar, a modern energy-saving city on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi, pictured here.

Norman Foster, one of the firm's partners, looked at how Shibam, and other Arabian cities, were made livable in places where temperatures could get up to 150 degrees Fahrenheit.

For instance, Shibam's streets are too narrow for cars, but because of this they operate as wind tunnels, funneling air through the city, keeping it cool.

The high buildings looming over the narrow streets also create shade. Foster found many of the streets ran at an angle against the sun's trajectory, meaning there was even less direct sun.

Like the city, the buildings are strategically divided. Typically, livestock, tools, and grain were stored on the bottom, windowless floor. The middle floors were for the elderly and for socializing. The highest floors were for young families, and newlyweds were on the roof.

The city has 444 buildings, and some towers have 40 family members living together.

About 3,000 people still live in the city, but 28-year-old resident Ali Abdullah told The Guardian lots of young people had left, because it was difficult to rely on any income, unless the city starts being preserved again.

Those who do still live there can visit cafes. Tom Downey, a travel writer for The New York Times, said he encountered a local cafe as soon as he entered the city.

"Village men slammed down dominoes under the dwindling light of the evening sun and sipped glasses of sweet, scalding tea," Downey wrote.

People can also visit the mosque. While the city was mostly rebuilt after severe flooding in 1532, the city's main mosque was built in 904.

Outside the city, the land is fertile from regular floods. Farmers harness it for growing crops.

Their yields cater for a lot of the remaining population. Once the harvest is over, the focus turns to soil, which is gathered for repairs.

The towers need regular maintenance. Fresh coats of mud are applied to stop cracking and to maintain the walls' strength. The mixture is made from soil, hay, and water, and is left to harden in the sun over a number of days.

Salma Damluji, an expert on Arabia's traditional architecture, told news site City Metric that the use of mud brick was vital in coping with the harsh climate.

Mud brick has a lot going for it — it's cheap, it has a relatively low impact on the environment, it has a higher heat capacity than concrete, and the bricks are reusable, she said.

Mud bricks, also known as adobe, are also fire-proof, water-resistant, and offer relatively good insulation.

It's not just the mud bricks that cater to the climate. Wooden windows reflect the sun's glare, and enable air circulation. Holes in the ceilings also provide ventilation.

Since 1982, Shibam has been a UNESCO heritage site.

In the years after it was made a UNESCO site, tourism picked up for the city. In 2008, more than 6,500 tourists visited Shibam. This might not sound like much, but with a population of 3,000 people, it's quite a number.

In contrast, New York, another skyscraper city, had a record high of 65 million visitors in 2018, while it has nearly 9 million residents. And New York is a lot easier to get to than Shibam.

But Shibam's tourism industry had peaked by 2008. The first blow for the city came that October, when Shibam experienced severe flooding from a massive tropical storm.

The flooding caused damage to several buildings and toppled some of its mud brick towers.

One resident, named Ahmed Salem, told The New York Times that his family screamed while their mud brick house disintegrated as the lower floors flooded. He fled, only to return the following day to pick up valuables. He then watched his home topple down in front of him.

In 2009, things got worse for the city when four South Korean tourists, who were taking in a view of Shibam, were killed in an Al Qaeda bomb attack just outside the city.

Since the Arab Spring swept Yemen in 2011, tourist numbers have plummeted. At the same time, government funding for preserving the city stopped coming in.

In 2015, there was another terrorist attack, when a car filled with explosives drove into a military convoy and exploded. The explosion is said to have shaken the fragile city, and is the most damaging attack to date. The Islamic State claimed responsibility.

In March 2015, Yemen's violent civil war, between the Yemen government and Houthi rebels, began.

It has led to the world's largest humanitarian crisis, with 22 million people needing food, water, shelter or sanitation.

The civil war has not caused outright damage to Shibam. But the threat of the war and airstrikes in the region led UNESCO to add the city to the World Heritage in Danger list in July 2015, alongside the city of Sana'a, which was damaged from the conflict.

Residents fear more of Shibam will crumble. Already, two towers have collapsed in recent years, and 15 more could go the same way if they're not repaired soon.

In February 2019, 13 feet of the city's surrounding wall collapsed. Without the wall, the city has little protection from flooding. But Arfan Faraj, a local builder, told Asia Times the collapse was good for one thing — it brought attention to the state of the crumbling city. If the wall collapses, he said, the houses will follow.

Hassan Aydeed, the local head of a group that preserves Yemen's historic cities, wasn't so positive. He called on his government or the international community to come to Shibam's aid. "If the negligence goes on," he told Asia Times, "we will be forced into leaving the city."

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