Islamic cities are sometimes identified as exhibiting an "organic" morphology, or spatial structure. As this man wends his bicycle home down a street in the Atlantic coastal city of Essaouira, we see that streets are narrow and pedestrian oriented. Automobiles and trucks cannot penetrate here. The city's street patterns are representative of a pre-industrial culture. Houses extend back in from the street from behind the doors you see on the left and right of the image. We do not know, just by looking, if these are big houses or small; there is no way of telling from the outside. Wealth, too, is not apparent from the outside.

- What social values are stressed by this kind of spatial organization?

The street and the home are interconnected in ways we would not ordinarily think of; for example, here, the archway over the street is actually an extension of a house, probably a single room, that runs right across the street. It may extend the house from one side of the street to the other, so that a single family's house may be on both sides of the street. We do not know just by looking if that is the case.

- Why would a family extend its house across the street?

- What kind of interaction between family structure and space would that indicate?