While Dubai's urban scene is dominated by planned and pre-designed developments, grassroots initiatives have always been present and have helped shape the trajectory of the city's evolution. In one case, an industrial area, Al Quoz, has seen the clustering of art businesses over a relatively
short period turning it into a cultural destination. Accounting for most of such clustering, Alserkal Avenue became Dubai's art hot-spot that changed the cultural map of the city. This article describes the rise of Alserkal Avenue, not only as the result of the entrepreneurial action of the
proprietors but also as a product of a complex melange of economic, cultural, and urban evolutionary processes that intertwine with the rise of the city itself.
perspective: Why biogeography matters: historical biogeography vs. phylogeography and community phylogenetics for inferring ecological and evolutionary processes