Jordan’s Boomtown : Amman: Fast Growth but a Bleak Image

A Jordanian woman who recently returned to Amman after several years in Washington had to ask an American friend the other day for directions to Abdoun, the Jordanian capital’s version of Beverly Hills.

A favorite enclave of Jordan’s nouveaux riches, Abdoun is a neighborhood in central Amman where stone-faced mansions fill the otherwise barren landscape, the car of choice is a silver-gray Mercedes-Benz 280 SEL and the supermarkets stock Scottish smoked salmon.

Only a few years ago, Abdoun was empty farmland, lacking not only homes but even roads and electricity. A reminder of its recent past lingers in the black Bedouin tents that occasionally spring up next to mansions under construction, their robed owners grazing sheep one last time before urbanization encroaches for good.

Among Fastest-Growing

That the Jordanian woman could lose her way in her own hometown is understandable. Amman is transforming itself from a Middle Eastern backwater into one of the world’s fastest-growing cities. From a population of 6,400 in 1921, Amman has grown to 1.2 million.

On average, 7,000 buildings a year have mushroomed on the dozen hills that make up the city, creating entire new neighborhoods and taxing the ability of municipal authorities to provide such basic services as water, sewers and telephones.

The development was fueled by the enormous wealth sent home by Jordanian workers during the oil boom in the Persian Gulf during the 1970s and sunk into real estate, a traditional haven for investment. The city is so overbuilt now that Abdur-Rauf Rawabdeh, the mayor, said in a recent interview that 5,000 apartments are standing empty.

Few Street Names

The city has grown so fast that most areas have no street names or building numbers, but--in keeping with this committee-obsessed society--a committee has been formed to name them. Businessmen hand out maps to their offices along with their calling cards, and the process of giving directions is a complicated art form that relies on mosques, hotels and restaurants as landmarks.

The construction of hundreds of apartment buildings, which by law must all be covered in the local limestone or painted white, has given the new sections of the city a raw look, as if huge rows of tombstones had sprung up overnight. It is possible to drive for miles in the newer parts of town without seeing a single tree or a blade of grass.

“Amman is still a construction site that has not been finished yet,” said Taleb Rifai, a professor of architecture and urban design at the University of Jordan, whose campus now sits astride the city limits. “The planning authorities are running behind what the people have created as a fact on the land.”

Against this bleak background, owners of houses and apartment buildings have added such decorative detail as huge television antennas in the shape of Eiffel Towers, Moorish arches made of cinder blocks and miniature minarets in an effort to add distinction to their property.

One man has just completed a nearly full-scale model of the White House, but has topped his off with the word Allah across the roof in fine script. The enterprising owner of a hair salon in another of the new suburbs caught the mood of her neighborhood by naming the shop the Bourjois Beauty Parlor.

No Longer a Dirt Road

As recently as 1948, Amman had a population of only 50,000. It had no public high schools, and Zahran Street, the city’s main drag, which now stretches for eight traffic circles, was a dirt road on which travelers at night were advised to carry pistols because of the likelihood of attack by jackals and hyenas.

Now plans are being drawn up to create a Greater Amman metropolitan area of 2 million people. From an area of a few small blocks in the center of town, Amman has grown to occupy 35 square miles.

Although the city’s site was first settled thousands of years ago, and was developed by the Greeks and Romans--it was the original Philadelphia--it dropped out of history around AD 1200 and was uninhabited when the Ottoman Empire settled 2,000 Muslim Circassian refugees from Russia there in 1878. They moved into caves near a well-preserved Roman amphitheater, there being no houses.

The population remained tiny until the British anointed the Emir Abdullah as king of the newly created state of Transjordan in 1921. Abdullah had a falling-out with the city fathers of Salt, which until then was the administrative center of the region, and the emir and his British advisers set up his government in Amman.

Boom Followed War

The real population boom in Amman came about as a result of war: In 1948, thousands of Palestinians flooded into Jordan during the first of the Arab-Israeli wars, tripling the population. Then, in 1967, after the so-called Six-Day War, a huge refugee population ended up in Jordan. Today, Jordan’s population is 60% Palestinian.

At first, the Palestinians were housed in huge refugee camps on the outskirts of the city. Now those camps have become large ghettos in the city center. The wealthier Palestinians started moving toward the suburbs, helping to drive up real estate prices from $60 an acre in 1950 to $300,000 an acre today.

Now Amman looks like two distinct cities. The older, eastern side of the city consists largely of cinder-block houses that seem to tumble down the steep sides of Amman’s central hill, while the western side is affluent and mostly in the style of a modern suburb.

“Before, it was mud huts; now it’s a city of palaces and pools,” said John Halaby, who has been a journalist in Amman since 1947.

Self-Sufficient Suburbs

Like Los Angeles, most of the suburbs of Amman are self-sufficient, and residents can go to work or shop without ever venturing into the congested and poorer downtown areas. Also, it is unusual to find a resident who is a native of Amman.

“Amman is just starting to get the infrastructure of a real town,” said Rami G. Khoury, a senior editor of the English-language Jordan Times. “People are beginning to think in terms of a community for the first time.”

The older part of Amman is distinctly Arab, a labyrinth of narrow streets lined with small shops.

“The statistics indicate that in the poor areas Amman is more densely populated than Cairo,” the director of a Western relief agency said. “A large number of people still sleep on the floor.”

In the downtown quarter, women tend to wear conservative ankle-length dresses and the hijab, a white scarf that covers the head and hair like a nun’s habit. Sidewalk cafes offer schwarma, chunks of beef cooked on a vertical rotisserie, then sliced and served on Arabic bread, like a sandwich; fried balls of ground beans called falafel, and huge trays of the sweet cheese dessert known as knafeh.

King in Many Poses

As in the Western part of the city, every shop, store and office downtown displays a large photograph of King Hussein, Jordan’s 50-year-old monarch, and it is rare to see two that are the same. Auto parts stores, for example, show the king behind the wheel of a car.

Another common denominator between the two halves is religion. Dozens of new mosques are being built in the newer areas. The call to prayer echoes through the city five times a day, beginning at 5 a.m. Amman has a large Christian minority, and church spires dot the more affluent sections, often near the new mosques.

The newer part of the city is more affluent and has a distinctly American flavor, figuratively and literally.

American junk food is so popular that Shariaa Umar bin al Khattab, a thoroughfare in the center of town, has become widely known as “Hamburger Street,” after a 50-yard stretch that includes The Burger King (Abu Shamat), Queen Burger, Mr. Burger (under the Corfu Greek Tavern), French Loaf and Omar Snack, all of which leaves the pervasive odor of French fries hanging over the neighborhood.

Pizzas, Rock Videos

A Pizza Hut has just opened in one suburban shopping center, which also features a drive-in MacBurger. Ata Ali offers 37 flavors of ice cream, and New York, New York, a favorite of the affluent young, dishes up pizzas while rock videos blast from multiple television screens.

This is still a conservative and a tightly knit family society, however, so Amman has no nightclubs, and the only bars and discotheques are in hotels, mainly for foreigners. It is still considered inconceivable for a single woman of 35 years to move out of the family home.

The Western parts of Amman have developed a car culture. Since dating is still largely taboo, young men while away their evenings by cruising shopping malls in Trans Ams and BMWs, with the local FM station blaring (in English) from their car stereos.

For the capital of an impoverished country with no natural resources to speak of, Amman boasts an unexpectedly large number of Mercedes-Benzes, Jaguars and Porsches--even a fire-engine-red Ferrari was seen recently. A recent innovation is the car telephone, and it is a totem of status to be seen doing business while roaring through town.

Traffic Glut Developing

The influx of cars has given Amman the beginnings of a severe traffic problem, especially since builders have usually ignored zoning requirements that they provide on-site parking.

Most of Amman’s aging traffic circles are now being replaced with overpasses and underpasses in an effort to reduce traffic and the hundreds of accidents that are reported every year.

Although wild by California standards, drivers in Amman are the most disciplined in the Middle East, thanks to the vigilance of the Jordanian Highway Patrol, which mans radar traps and hands out thousands of fines to astonished motorists.

Taxi drivers comply with the law by charging the fares shown on their meters, a rarity in the Middle East, but the drivers ruthlessly drum up business with their horns. A favorite form of transportation are the servees, whose drivers manage to squeeze seven or eight passengers into old Mercedeses and charge by the zone, as taxis do in Washington.

Policemen Are Rare

Except for the traffic patrolmen, policemen are a rare sight in Amman, which appears to have a very low crime rate. There is virtually no crime news in the newspapers. Only recently have builders started adding iron bars to windows, although many residents of the capital leave their front doors open day and night.

However, security policemen in dark blue uniforms are frequently present in the center of the city, standing guard with submachine guns in tiny huts made of aluminum siding at government buildings and embassies.

In the aftermath of the U.S. air raid on Libya in April, there was a bizarre scene as soldiers set up anti-aircraft guns in the bleachers at the baseball field of the International School, which is attended by many American students. But the artillery soon disappeared.

Mayor Rawabdeh makes a point of insisting that poor and wealthy neighborhoods get an equal share of city services. Both sections of the city are kept scrupulously clean by the sanitation department.

Rawabdeh, who took office in 1983 with the slogan of making Amman green, notes that the number of parks in the city has risen to 28 from the three that existed when he took office. Another 32 are planned.

The city is planting a million trees a year as part of the drive, “but you won’t notice it until 1990.”

Times office assistant Mona Dib of the Amman bureau contributed to this article.