Consuming Abu Dhabi

Goods’ consumption plays an outsize role in shaping the urban Gulf. As mainstay of the ‘contract’ between the sheikdom’s inner-circle and its’ other citizens, comes the wherewithal for massive purchase of goods, with houses and cars at the core. Extreme urban sprawl follows on. Building and maintaining the consumption infrastructure requires extensive and ongoing labor, performed by foreigners. Absent democracy, high levels of consumption yield a specific substitute form of political and social stability. Consumption also arguably includes the import of prestige cultural institutions. They are part of the work-arounds that enable modernization, globalization and permissive practices – among certain types of people in demarcated zones – toward sexuality, food, finance, alcohol, and artistic representation. Among the most important tools is separation into special geographic spaces that permit exception for activities like western-style education, tourism, and cross-gender mixing.

Real Estate Speculation and Transnational Development in Dubai

Dubai has managed to roar back from over-extension, severe debt, and some world humiliation. This furthered the zeal for the spectacular and a leadership role in regional construction, transportation, tourism and consumption. All kinds of affluent people, including well-off expats or foreign buyers, have got in on the speculation. A downside of hectic tearing down and building back is the continuous displacement of residents, destruction of ‘traditional’ neighborhoods, and an imposition of a fractured urban form. It also means a loss of history, including the modernist structures, albeit some very ordinary and non-descript, that bespeak actual lives as well as tastes and craft of the prior years. Dubai acts as showcase for the downside of turning urban environments into assets for generating rent.

Planning from Within

One of the NYU campus’s key participant-administrators explains, from first-hand experience, the process of building a new university in the UAE. Through her account, we can witness the coming together of architectural practice with unusual climactic, economic, and social conditions. The challenge was to establish a contemporary and ambitious university in a mixed Arab-US milieu. Financed by the Abu Dhabi government with patronage of the country’s Crown Prince, linkages were carefully tended across multiple fronts, including at the highest levels among NYU administrators and trustees. In both academic and architectural terms, there was effort to enact a synthesis of US and Gulf traditions and aspirations.

Planning for the Hybrid Gulf City

At a concrete level of creating designs and apportioning job roles, Gulf projects amalgamate planners and clients from diverse backgrounds who need to come up with agreements for what is to be built, in quite precise terms. Involved is, in effect, an accomplishment of hybridity as actors negotiate what is or is not appropriate. In this case, the author – a female Italian architect-planner – works with a Saudi client to plan a new urban center. There is transfer of ideas across a gap that is geographic, cultural, and gender-specific. Part of the challenge was the client’s taste for an idealized European piazza in a hostile climate as well as the need to accommodate atypical work relations. Proposals were nevertheless carefully (and arduously) worked out, with professionals making their way toward a ‘deliverable’ and a better understanding of what is transferred attached to urban and architectural projects.

Introduction

The urban Gulf busts up past paradigms for understanding urban development. Markets are only partially operative, democracy is absent and civic engagement is weak. But some of its large and sophisticated cities are now forces in the world. At the concrete level of development, there is less blockage from planners, regulations, or work-place rules. Gulf cities function as ‘test beds’ where designs, structures, and technologies can fast-track. Besides importing world trends, things happening in the Gulf now also move out of the Gulf. Gulf cities, due to their extremes, remain famous in their contradictions and compromises. Parts that would appear inconsistent, even mutually exclusive, are somehow made to cohere.

Mobilities of Urban Spectacle

A global elite of ‘starchitects’ are setting the terms of contemporary urban form, often ebullient and, in the Gulf context, made capable of satisfying superlative claims. Beyond symbolic ambitions, they also share more concrete traits: abundant financial resources, strong and monocratic political backing, and weak planning regulation. Gulf-based real estate operators can make their experiments fats-track and the export them. In this sense, Gulf cities provide “test-beds” for spectacular and mundane projects in Europe, India, and North America.

Giving the Transnational a History

Careful examination of the histories of Gulf urban settlement shows the transnational as having long been in place. This Gulf (and its related waterways), was a sea of combining and recombining the economic, familial, and religious. The fixity of borders and hostilities – e.g. Iran versus Saudi Arabia -- are not ‘ancient’ or essential, but modern constructs. Fluidity and hybridity, in significant part through trade and intermingling of peoples, dominate the actual past.

Conclusion

Gulf urban dynamics challenge analytic paradigms, whether from market analyses, democratic theory, or real politik. Most noticeably for us, land-use and spatial patterning operate in distinctive ways that follow from the region’s particular systems of kinship, wealth extraction and historic conjunctures. Always around in some variant, Gulf city arrangements are in increasing contemporary evidence. New modes of inclusion and exclusion – distinctive assemblages of peoples, capital, and spatial separations – need to be taken on board as their own kind of normal, maybe even of the ordinary. As Gulf cities further evolve with their own sets of mix, they make spectacle, inequality, and authoritarianism all the more available for emulation, export, and disquiet.

Exporting the Spaceship

With an aim for ‘zero-carbon’ output, the Masdar City project aims to create a new mode of urbanization in a region otherwise massively contributing to carbon-rich environmental disaster. Involving an investment estimated at US$16b, ambitions include breakthroughs in solar energy, pollution-free driverless vehicles, and self-sufficient cooling technologies. Numbers of goals have had to be adjusted, including abandonment of the internal transit scheme. One can interpret the project as too much tied into a scenario of technical breakthrough without attending to social, economic or political transformations that might have made innovation more viable.

Problematizing a Regional Context

Careful examination of architecture and building motifs in Arab contexts leads to rejection of nativist doctrine or what is or is not “Arab.” The region’s design traditions are, in fact, a result of continuous interaction with influences from different corners of the Middle East as well as from the West. Part of indigeneity has been enthusiastic uptake of the foreign, including a two-way flow of technologies and aesthetic perspectives of modernism. This is made especially evident for the case of Beirut, where it becomes difficult to describe, much less proscribe, what is an ‘Arab’ motif, or an ‘Arab’ building, or an ‘Arab’ material. As Gulf cities make evident, aiming to recreate some fixed aesthetic of the past risks kitsch and stultifies potential for actual creative evolutions in a problematic contemporary context.