Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.
To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to upgrade your browser.
2018, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research
In recent years, Persian Gulf cities have become symbols of the most spectacular forms of the ‘globalization of urbanization’. Current scholarship has sought to situate these cities in transnational processes and linkages with conceptualizations of ‘the global city’ and the mechanisms of ‘worlding’. This article builds on but moves beyond this line of analysis by turning to the histories of this region and its built environment to explore the longue‐durée influence of capital and empire operating across multiple scales. From this perspective, the glittering high‐rises and manmade islands are contemporary manifestations of a century of urban forms and logics of social control emanating from company towns, the struggles of state building, and the circulation and fixing of capital. To grasp how the Persian Gulf region has been remade as a frontier for accumulation, the analysis in this article blurs the boundaries between metropole and periphery, reconceptualizing the region not as an eclectic sideshow, but as a central site for global shifts in urbanism, capitalism and architecture in the twentieth century. See early view of essay at: http://www.ijurr.org/article/the-forever-frontier-of-urbanism-historicizing-persian-gulf-cities/
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.
2013, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
2017, Occasional Paper 18
This essay takes as its focus society in the Persian Gulf over the long term, both before and after oil. In order to understand the transitions society has gone through, it is necessary to review the region’s historical evolution and how society in the Gulf today differs from that of the pre-oil era. The Gulf is presented as a distinct historical region, where a tradition of free movement helped account for the success of its port cities, themselves linked more to the Indian Ocean basin than the Middle East. In the twentieth century, the historic ties that connected the people of the Gulf littoral were curtailed as nationalism became the dominant ideology, and borders and passports were imposed. After oil was discovered and exports began following World War II, the small Gulf shaikhdoms, most of which were under British protection until 1971, experienced a surge in revenues that ushered in the modern era. Newly independent states sought to impose a new identity, manipulate history, and exploit sectarian cleavages to solidify the power of ruling dynasties. The historic cosmopolitanism of the Gulf was ignored by states that privileged the tribal, Bedouin heritage of their leaders. Arabs and Persians, both Sunni and Shi‘a, as well as many other groups have lived with each other in the region for many centuries, during which mutual differences occasionally led to conflict. But the current mistrust, tension, and sense of vulnerability felt by all sides is a product of the modern age.
Gateways to the World: Port Cities in the Persian Gulf
Salama, A. M. (2016). The Emerging Urban Landscape in the Southern Persian Gulf. In M. Kamrava (ed.), Gateways to the World: Port Cities in the Persian Gulf. Hurst Publishers: London. ISBN # 9781849045636. ________________________ This chapter examines the state of contemporary urban environments in the Gulf, and aims to explore the phenomenon of global flows and their impact on regional urbanism and architecture. The key characteristics of contemporary urbanism are identified through a critical analysis of three main aspects. These include the development of “bespoke” infrastructure to accommodate “global flows;” the decentralizing of urban governance and decision-making to entice investment in the urban environment; and the resulting chaotic but emotionally detached urban scene characterized by exclusive development projects, high-rise agglomerations, and social segregation. As architectural innovation is an integral component of the urban landscape of emerging cities in the Gulf, I classify contemporary endeavors into two categories: the overt and subliminal agenda to construct an iconic and cultural architectural identity coupled with the resultant evolution of “multiple modernities” as reflected in a strikingly vibrant plurality of trends. Case examples demonstrate the rush to brand art and culture into a comprehensive and admired identity supported by a rigid agenda to encourage and sustain educational and environmental awareness. Based on the results of in-depth discussion and analysis of these issues the chapter concludes with key challenges relevant to the competitive nature of various emerging cities in the Persian Gulf.
Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS), Remah Y . Gharib, Florian Wiedmann, Ashraf M. Salama, Arang Keshavarzian, Mehran Kamrava, Stephen Ramos
2015, Summary Report 13
The CIRS research initiative on “The Evolution of Gulf Global Cities” examines dynamics of urban configurations in the Gulf region (the GCC, Yemen, Iraq, and Iran) in order to understand the city as a cultural and social space. Over the course of two working group meetings, CIRS invited academics from various disciplinary backgrounds as well as architects, urban planners, and designers to discuss their research findings and to present papers linking macro-level knowledge of urbanization and modernization projects in the Gulf with the micro-level understanding of everyday spaces of living and human interaction. The chapters are combined into an edited volume titled, Gateways to the World: Port Cities in the Persian Gulf (link is external) (Oxford University Press, 2016).
2016, Book Teaser
The Persian Gulf region has become home to some of the world’s fastest growing, most impressive cities, many of them with global aspirations. Gateways to the World presents an in-depth, systematic, and multi-disciplinary approach to the study of these cities. It begins with a broader look at how the emergence and significance of cities along the Persian Gulf waterway should be contextualized. It then moves to historical examinations of the emergence of national borders and boundaries, how they became ‘port cities’ of various kinds, what are the semantics of studying them, and what the glittering skylines and cityscapes and their remaining traditional neighborhoods mean for the international political economy and for the identity of their residents. This book presents a comprehensive study of the nature and variety, the importance, and the domestic and international consequences of port cities along the Persian Gulf.
2019, The Journal of Architecture
This paper examines Kuwait’s unfinished modern project, its architectural heritage, the actors that mobilised and decided its trajectory, and some of the factors that interrupted its path to completion. This broad critique, with a special focus on architecture and the city, draws from debates on top-down planning to map the evolution and initial celebration of al- `Imar̄ ah al-Hadıt̄ ha, or modern architecture, followed by its slow erasure through acts of demolition. Focusing on the period from 1950 to 1980, this study provides a critical reading of Kuwaiti modern heritage and suggests a sustainable approach towards its conservation. The paper argues that the destruction of Kuwait’s modern heritage erodes progressive socio-cultural values tied to a mid-twentieth century architectural debate on authenticity, identity and modern self-expression. It also contributes to architectural histories of modernity and bridges the gap between those in the established canon and ones outside its margins.
2015, Landscape Research
This paper is based on research undertaken for the Origins of Doha Project. It is a unique attempt to interrogate the construct of the Arab city against rigorously collected evidence and meticulous analysis of historical urban geography. We have found that Doha in its urban layout, physical development, architecture, and pre-oil demograph-ics, combined its disparate cosmopolitan elements into a blend that probably typified the historic Gulf town, simultaneously encapsulating aspects of the generalised " Arab and Islamic town. " We have found strong structural principles at work in both the traditional and the early modern town, many of which correlate strongly with tribal social organisation, although the historic population of Doha was neither overwhelmingly tribal in character nor entirely Arab in origin. Rather, these constituted prevailing ideologies, social structures, and identities in a diverse and cosmopolitan population
2013, Open House International
in The Arab City: Architecture and Representation, Amale Andraos, Nora Akawi, and Caitlin Blanchfield eds. (New York: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2016), 41-49.
Violence and the City in the Modern Middle East
This chapter challenges simplistic representations of the intercommunal violence that took place during the 1946 oil strike in Abadan, in the Iranian province of Khuzestan, as rooted either in primordial ethnic hatred or in an imperialist plot. The chapter reconstructs in detail several days of tensions and clashes, and places them within a historical context of coercive industrial urban development, labor activism, ethnic mobilization and global politics. Using oil company records, national archives and personal accounts, the focus of the analysis is the socio-spatial unit of the club as a place for socialization, a site of strife in the life of an oil city, and as a key political space with significance in the evolution of the modern Iranian nation state.
Abstract The world city aspirations and spectacular urbanization of Gulf cities such as Abu Dhabi rest on the combination of petrodollars, connections and labour. Drawing on interviews with South Asian men working there, this article reports their lives and labour as a mirror to the development of Abu Dhabi. This requires and invites an investigation of spaces of social reproduction, raising broader theoretical and comparative issues about these in the context of Gulf cities and other sites of rapid urbanization and migration. Transnational categories and connections are thereby opened up in ways that have implications for the study of other cities.
2016, The Emergence of the Gulf States: Studies in Modern History (edited by J.E. Peterson)
This is a comprehensive survey of the traditional economy of the GCC states before oil and the early impact of oil.
2015, Journal of Historical Geography
2019, Modern Asian Studies
This article investigates gold smuggling in the twentieth-century western Indian Ocean. It illustrates how gold, condemned as a 'barbarous relic' by international monetary economists and central banks in the immediate postwar period, created an economy in the intermediate zone between a retreating empire and emerging nation-states in India and the Persian Gulf. Bombay and Dubai-connected by mercantile networks, trading dhows, migrants, and 'smugglers'-were the principal constituencies and key drivers of this trans-regional economy. Partition and the concomitant flight of Indian mercantile capital into Dubai becomes the key to unlocking the many dimensions of smuggling, including its social organization and ethnic constitution. Looked at in such terms, gold smuggling reveals a transnational side to both partition and the post-colonial history of Bombay which has drawn little critical attention from historians. Consequently, it expands the analytic space necessary to explain how Dubai was able to capitalize on the arbitrage possibilities offered by import regulations in India, tap into the global networks of trade and finance, and chart its own course of development as a modern urban space throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. * The archival research for this article was undertaken at the India Office Library, London (IOR); the National Archives of India, New Delhi (NAI); and the Maharashtra State Archives, Bombay (MSA) between and , while ethnographic work was conducted in Dubai, Sharjah, Bombay, and parts of Kerala during the same period. The funds for the fieldwork were covered by the CISA Mellon Doctoral Fellowship at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. I am extremely grateful to the reviewers of this journal and to Engseng Ho, Janice Jeong, Ameem Lutfi, and Serkan Yolacan for their comments on earlier versions of the article. I also wish to thank Dilip Menon and Isabel Hofmeyr for their valuable input. Modern Asian Studies () page of . © Cambridge University Press doi:./SX terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.
2013, Arabian Humanities
2016, City, Territory and Architecture, Volume 3, Article 14, pages 1-15
Remali, A. M., Salama, A. M., Wiedmann, F. and Ibrahim, H. G. (2016). A Chronological Exploration of the Evolution of Housing Typologies in Gulf Cities. City, Territory and Architecture, 3(1):14, 1-15. ISSN # 2195-2701 10.1186/s40410-016-0043-z _____________________________________________________________ This paper traces the evolution of housing typologies in four major cities in the Gulf region, namely Doha, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Manama. The study reviews the formation and historical events in the region, which had a significant impact on new social as well as economic realities and consequently evolving housing types during the last two centuries. The methodological approach is based on reviewing a number of case studies representing local housing typologies throughout distinctive historic periods which were categorized in four periods: the post-nomadic, traditional, modern, and contemporary. The main objective is to identify the process of transformation by applying a comparative assessment of the different periods in order to examine continuities or ruptures between them. Thus, particular layout elements were analysed and compared. Conclusions are drawn to underline contemporary challenges while offering projections for future housing typologies in the selected cities and other similar ones. __________________
2020, Gulf Monographic Series Nº 7, March 2020
Modern understandings of malaria as a mosquito-borne disease embedded in human-environment interactions prompted British officials to intervene in the daily sanitary practices of Gulf populations. But histories of the Gulf have neglected the centrality of disease in shaping local experiences of empire, state-building, and modernization. This article examines urban and agricultural infrastructure, imperial science, and indigenous notions of the relationship between health and environment through the lens of British anti-malaria efforts in Bahrain. Tracing the flow of science and expertise from British India to the Gulf allows for the ground-level reconstruction of imperial interventions and the resulting interactions with local people. The movement of scientific and medical knowledge from British India to Bahrain resulted in a new milieu of state intervention at a micropolitical level, which prompted British officials to elide and delegitimize indigenous disease imaginaries and water use.
2017
Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, I explore the landscapes of Bahrain, where green represents a plethora of implicit human values and exists in dialectical tension with other culturally and environmentally significant colors and hues. Explicit in his book is the argument that concepts of color and object are mutually defining and thus a discussion about green becomes a discussion about the creation of space and place.
Abadan is special. Or at least, it used to be special. Its urban and social fabric stands out from all other Iranians cities. Its inhabitants are unmistakably Abadani. How is that? If oil can create a city, can it also shape an identity? Abadan’s past status as an international city is central to stories of what it means to be an Abadani. Despite the injustice and inequality of the past, and despite Abadan’s rapid decline during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War, Abadanis are still proud of their city and their history. That history is so deeply mired in the story of oil that it is impossible to tell the one without the other.
What if oil is magic? Sure, we are used to think of oil as a curse disguised as a blessing: as oil is extracted and refined, it turns into black gold for the few and misery for the many. Oil reeks of pollution and corrupt autocrats, it smothers democratic forces. Oil makes a nation addicted to non-renewable resources and dependent on a global market out of its control. Oil spoils nature, society and politics. And yet the forgotten story of a city in Iran reminds us that oil can also be the stuff of imagination, bringing life to a place, making people dream and remember. This is the story of a city that was brought into being by oil, almost killed by oil, and yet still understands itself through oil. http://ajammc.com/2015/02/16/abadan-oil-city-dreams/
2018, Planning Perspectives
Between 1954 and 1956, the architect, educator and planner, Max Lock (1909-1988), produced a trilogy of plans to modernise the historical city of Basra and create new areas at Margil and Um Qasr in the south of Iraq. The New Basrah Plan was heavily inspired by the works of Patrick Geddes and aligned with contemporaries such as Lewis Mumford, Lock’s planning was progressive in scope and looked to differ from the planning of post-war principles in Britain through his notions of ‘civic surgery’. Contrary to this, his plans for Um Qasr and Margil focussed on infrastructure and the creation of more industrial areas not prioritising people and place as highly as he did in the New Basrah Plan. Lock’s ‘Civic Surgery’ offered an alternative to mainstream thought by attempting to create usable, humanistic spaces, which hampered by politics and legislation, resulted in the plan’s shelving and were contradicted by his other works’ philosophies. New retrospective analysis of his under appreciated career reveals the complexities of his planning which this article demonstrates through the ‘failure’ of the New Basrah Plan and his plans at Um Qasr and Margil.
2017, Journal of Arabian Studies
This article describes how the idea of the "national" as a spatial category emerged in the United Arab Emirates through integrative and segregative processes exemplified in the experience of suburbanization. While other works have focused on UAE's physical boundaries, 1 this article focuses on "national" circulations of narratives, symbols, and identities rooted in the spatial experience of UAE citizens. These are illustrated with reference to suburban architecture, popular memory, and non-state heritage practices.
This is an abstract of a chapter in a forthcoming volume edited by Profs. Ulrike Freitag and Nelida Fuccaro (to be published 2014). "In December 1942, unrest broke out in Abadan, arguably Iran’s first modern city and home to the world’s biggest oil refinery. Two scuffles in the bazaar provoked Iranians from the Ahmadabad neighbourhood to attack Indian labourers in the so-called ‘Indian Lines’ of the Bahmashir neighbourhood. Although not as bloody or widespread as more well-studied occurrences of unrest in Abadan, I will argue that this ‘Bahmashir Incident’ represents an important case with which to understand the interconnectedness of oil, space and violence. As such, this chapter has two aims. The first is to fill a gap in the existing literature on Abadan and the oil-producing province of Khuzestan in southwest Iran. This literature tends to focus on the struggles of the Iranian labour movement against the Anglo-Persian, later Anglo-Iranian, Oil Company (A.I.O.C., henceforth ‘the Company’), and specifically on the great oil strikes of 1929 and 1946 and the oil nationalisation movement of 1951. In this literature, a very crucial element is normally either mentioned only in passing or simply neglected: imported Indian labour. Through material from, among other places, the underexplored British Petroleum Company archives, I will investigate the context of the event (the Bahmashir Incident) synchronically, and the history of a particular community (the Indians) diachronically. Through these investigations, an alternative labour history of Abadan emerges, which, I will argue, can complement and challenge the existing literature. Key Iranian leftist and nationalist accounts of Abadan’s history tend to cast all violence in the binary terms of a struggle between ‘the oppressor’ and ‘the oppressed’. This chapter will instead propose that since Abadan had multiple subaltern agencies, urban violence operated on several levels. The presence of Indians in Abadan’s labour hierarchy and social fabric challenges the idea of Abadan as a ‘dual city’, and complicates simplistic interpretations of urban violence. Secondly, by disentangling the web of interests spun between the Company, the British military and the diplomatic machinery, this chapter will nuance the notion, so often reiterated uncritically in Middle East Studies, of ‘The British’ as one single, cohesive actor. The Company drew on the colonial legacy of British imperialism, was protected by the British army, and was influenced by its major shareholder, the British government; yet, the Company was nonetheless an autonomous entity with a distinct mode of operation. In order to ‘see like an oil company’, this chapter thus examines how World War II affected the Company in Abadan on the eve of victorious nationalist movements and the dissolution of the British Empire – events that eventually drove companies born in colonial settings into the present globalised world of neo-liberal corporate capitalism."
2014, Transit States: Labour, Migration, and Citizenship in the Gulf
Discussion of migration in the GCC has traditionally exclusively focused on labour. This paper focuses on other dimensions of migration which have started emerging over the first decade of the 21st century in the Gulf Arab States. These other aspects of migration will be highlighted through the lens of “international mega-real estate projects” (IMREPs). I will argue that these newly emergent mega real estate projects highlight a marked shift in citizen-state-expatriates dynamics within the region. Expatriates are no longer only viewed as workers and source of labour power, but increasingly they are also potential consumers, investors, owners of property and users of the urban space, with significant consequences for the "Right to the City".
2015, International Journal of Islamic Architecture, Volume 4, Number 2
This article discusses the contribution of professionals from socialist countries to architecture and urban planning in Kuwait in the final two decades of the Cold War. In so doing, it historicizes the accelerating circulation of labour, building materials, discourses, images, and affects facilitated by world-wide, regional and local networks. By focusing on a group of Polish architects, this article shows how their work in Kuwait in the 1970s and 1980s responded to the disenchantment with architecture and urbanization processes of the preceding two decades, felt as much in the Gulf as in socialist Poland. In Kuwait, this disenchantment was expressed by a turn towards images, ways of use, and patterns of movement referring to ‘traditional’ urbanism, reinforced by Western debates in postmodernism and often at odds with the social realities of Kuwaiti urbanization. Rather than considering this shift as an architectural ‘mediation’ between (global) technology and (local) culture, this article shows how it was facilitated by re-contextualized expert systems, such as construction technologies or Computer Aided Design software (CAD), and also by the specific portable ‘profile’ of experts from socialist countries. By showing the multilateral knowledge flows of the period between Eastern Europe and the Gulf, this article challenges diffusionist notions of architecture’s globalization as ‘Westernization’ and reconceptualizes the genealogy of architectural practices as these became world-wide.
2014, Built Environment
2014, The Persian Gulf in Modern Times: People, Ports, and History (edited by Lawrence Potter)
This chapter offers the first comprehensive demographic survey of Indian merchant communities in Eastern Arabia, Iran, and Iraq during the heyday of Indian commercial and political involvement in the Gulf region, c.1500-1947. It identifies 36 groups in all.
The ceremonial opening of London’s Shard Tower, owned by Qatar Investment Authority, was a prime scene in the unfolding drama of Doha’s endeavor to construct a new urban development brand within the Gulf and the Middle East. Shard Tower was designed by prominent architect Renzo Piano to be the highest building ever built in the capital of conservation, London city. Extending Qatar’s investment arm outside of the Gulf and the Middle East and stretching it towards Europe and UK was part of a well-planned process for building Qatar’s new assembled identity and urban brand. The critical narrative of constructing such a brand is the focus of this paper. During the last decade, Qatar has managed to carve a niche for itself on the global stage. As a result of its position in the global energy market, the country is going through massive expansion and has the resources to support this growth. This paper analyzes the process of constructing such a brand: Dohaization.
2018, Sociology of Islam
Studies of identity and belonging in Gulf monarchies tend to privilege tribal or religious affiliation, if not the protective role of the ruler as paterfamilias. I focus instead on the ubiquitous foreigner and explore ways in which s/he contributes to the definition of national community in contemporary gcc states. Building upon and moving beyond the scholarly literature on imported labor in the Gulf, I suggest that the different 'categories' of foreigners impact identity and the consolidation of a community of privilege, in keeping with the national project of ruling families. Furthermore , I argue that the 'European,' the non-gcc Arab, and the predominantly Asian (and increasingly African) laborer play similar, but also distinct roles in the delinea-tion of national community: while they are differentially incorporated in ways that protect the 'nation' and appease the citizen-subject, varying degrees of marginality reflect Gulf society's perceptions or aspirations of the difference between itself and 'the other(s).'
2005, Transnational connections and the Arab Gulf
Buildings have what materialist Jane Bennett identifies as a thing-power: they can inspire, provoke and generate emotions among attentive audiences who look at or visit them. But can these emotions really be considered a universal (biological) phenomenon that everybody would feel? The short answer is no. In this paper, I shall demonstrate how the early modern Ottoman elite formed a joint emotional community, whose members were encouraged to practice a unique sense of bewilderment at Ottoman architecture. The early modern Ottoman elite translated bewilderment as wonder. A theory dealing with this emotion was first introduced to the elite in different medieval Islamic treatises written on Wonders-of-Creation. These treatises aimed to examine both the mental and physical nature of wonder. Readers were expected to experience this when they were unable to understand the cause of a thing or how it was supposed to influence them when they saw it for the first time. As such, cosmographies encourage their potential readers to turn sights of aesthetics experiences into an insightful experience of bewilderment/wonder. In early modern Ottoman chronicles, treatises on architecture (e.g., Mimar Sinan's autobiographies), and travelogues (e.g., Evliya Çelebi's Book of Travels), this notion of bewilderment is mentioned in the context of imperial Ottoman monuments. Members of the elite were advised to contemplate imperial complexes like the Süleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul for instance, or the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne, and turn their sights into an insightful experience of wonder. However, this kind of wonder cannot be considered a universal phenomenon; not all who visit these imperial buildings are automatically bound to be bewildered in the same way. Rather, the aforementioned emotional experience of wonder is exclusive to the potential readers who shared a joint early modern Ottoman mentality. Furthermore, this mentality did not continue among the Ottoman elite beyond the seventeenth century. At this point in history, with the influence of modern European studies on architecture, members of the elite abandoned the cosmographic theory of wonder and adopted the European perception of the aesthetics of the structures without the need for contemplation.
2017, Essays, Arguments & Interviews on Modern Architecture Kuwait
In the mid-twentieth century, the re-construction of cities through large highway networks and stand-alone buildings was commonly perceived as a way to modernise and renew the post-war enterprise. In joint efforts, governments, contractors, architects, and planners claimed for the rejection of the old town leading to the demolition of large extensions of old towns that were consequently replaced by large-scale building facilities. In the Middle East, following the discovery of oil, the western presence in many territories generated similar urban processes, and was used as tool to legitimate development policies of newly independent nations. Kuwait, as the first and most extreme case of post-oil moderni- sation, contextualises the challenges of a nation-building project that was as much embraced by its ruler as it was imposed by others. Under the Master Plan of 1952 by British planners Minoprio, Spencely, and MacFarlane, road networks and new neighbourhood units were rigidly planned and implemented outside the city wall. The old cohesive settlement was radically abandoned and transformed into a business district. Up until the 1970s, the desired Modern Kuwait failed to integrate the older city, lacking a clear urban identity and a civic sense of belonging. The city rapidly became dominated by an affluent individualism among citizens and city officials, who devoted their efforts to the erection of modern monuments as diverse as their authors, requiring architectural and urban strategies. The idea of self-contained units was encouraged in an attempt to recover a lost city and meet the needs of a new society. The initiative resulted in multiple modern souqs scattered all across Kuwait City. By their size and volume, these exuberant concrete buildings rapidly became a dominant feature of the cityscape, projecting a hegemonic image of modernity. Today, both local and foreign scholars have labelled them brutalist. During recent years, these structures, almost forgotten by the native population, have suffered gradual deterioration and the challenge of conservation. Confronted with the current processes of urban development from Dubai and Qatar’s twinkling trends, these souqs have started to be modified, but face the risk of demolition in the near future if the mass destruction of modernist buildings – taking place since 2003 – do not stop. Within the framework of a localisation policy that has fostered feelings of patriotism and nationalism over the last decade, politicians, scholars, and even architecture and planning practitioners have labelled these structures “foreign” and implicitly distinct from local history and building traditions. Only very recently, under narratives of nation building through memory and identity, has an emerging community of young, well-educated artists and professionals from varied sectors of society started to give these buildings ‘archaeological status’ for preservation. Based on the recognition of Kuwait City as a valid case study in the debate and discussion on the adaptive re-use of modern heritage, this paper aims to re-evaluate the achievements and failures of Kuwait’s modernisation through the rich repository of multi-use, self-contained units, exploring their response to the desired modern city and its implications on the local community.
2018, War and Society
2019, Journal of Urban Geography
In this paper, we outline a framework to study what we have termed " Predatory Cities " , using the artificial offshore island of The Pearl in Qatar as a case study. By focusing on the nexus between urbanisation and resources, we will argue that the master-planning of new cities in the booming global South implies both the access and cheap exploitation of a set of, on the one hand, intangible and, on the other hand, tangible resources that exceed the traditional boundaries. Our point of departure is that the cheap appropriation and exploitation of alien architecture images and resource networks for the making of new, master-planned cities has become a necessary, but highly unsustain-able, strategy to survive an increasingly competitive global offering of new destinations.
2017, Mega-Urbanization in the Global South: Fast Cities and New Urban Utopias of the Postcolonial State
In this chapter, after reviewing the intertwined effects of geopolitical aspirations and the rapid urbanization of Gulf capitals, I will focus on Qatar Foundation’s Education City campus to analyse processes and politics of Knowledge Megaprojects in resource-rich countries of the Arab Gulf Region. I argue that while Education City is a new type of Knowledge Megaproject, in that it aims to be a knowledge hub that is better connected with other urban localities around the world to produce knowledge and innovation (Ascher 1995, Castells 1996), its outcomes are similar to those of other consumption megaprojects in the Gulf, i.e. social displacement, spatial seg- regation, and the privatization of urban space (Graham and Marvin 2001, Gellert and Lynch 2003, Bagaeen 2007).
"Voyage to Tomorrow: Futurism and Science Fiction in Middle Eastern Art & Design", MESA 53rd Annual Meeting, November 14-17, 2019, Sheraton, New Orleans. Organized by Elizabeth Rauh. Sponsored by the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran and Turkey (AMCA). Chair: Elizabeth Rauh, U Michigan. Discussant: Nasser O. Rabbat, MIT American-Qatari artist, writer, and filmmaker Sophia al-Maria coined the term Gulf Futurism together with Kuwaiti artist-musician Fatima al-Qadiri. As they explained in a Dazed Digital magazine interview: Over the last fifty years, the Arabian Gulf has given birth to a very particular brand of futurism. It is a phenomena marked by a deranged optimism about the sustainability of both oil reserves and late capitalism. Similar to early 20th century Euro-Futurism and mid-century American kitch and retro-futurism, Gulf Futurism is evident in a dominant class concerned with master-planning and world-building, while the youth culture preoccupied with fast cars, fast tech and viddying a bit of ultra-violence. (Al-Qadiri and al-Maria, November 2012) Gulf Futurism explains an existing phenomenon both artists have observed in architecture, urban planning, art, aesthetics and popular culture in the post-oil Persian Gulf. It is a premonition of our global future imbued with science fiction views and technological pessimism. In the last two decades, science fictional art productions together with futurist aesthetics have provided new keys to understanding the present, to critically analyze the past, and to open on utopian or dystopian visions of the future. Giving free way to the unthinkable, the unutterable, science fiction constitutes a main avenue in approaching the complex realities of the Arab Geocultural Space. These representations together with the diasporic condition of many artists, have led to a deep reflection on the notion of ‘uruba (Arabness), searching for new narratives of the autochthonous, as ethnic futurist aesthetics did elsewhere: Finno-Ugrian Ethno-futurism appeared in the 1980s; then came Afrofuturism in the 1990s; Sinofuturism, Indofutusism, Desifuturism, Latin@futurism, and, most recently, Gulf Futurism. This presentation will examine the Gulf Futurism movement through art historical perspectives in Sophia al-Maria and Fatima al-Qadiri’s contemporary projects in order to explore insight into their visual apparitions. Then, we will analyze the different definitions and references attributed to Gulf Futurism in order to understand how this phenomenon became a “starkly avant-garde culture of the Middle East” (Al-Qadiri and al-Maria 2012). Altogether, Gulf Futurism should be understood as a tool used to question and criticize past historical narratives and to formulate new ones that allow to open the horizon to more promising times and to go beyond presentism (Hartog 2003) in the post-oil Arabian Gulf.
2014
2004
Has globalization replaced colonization as a threat to the heritage and identity of the Middle East City of the twenty-first century? How did colonial influences change the urban form of the Arab capitals? And is today's hybridization of architectural and urban discourse affecting the development of the cities, their spatial planning and design?
Projections of uncertain futures pervade public and political debates around the world. Spectres of natural disaster, disease outbreak, economic crisis, infrastructural breakdown and violent con ict persistently threaten to disrupt city life. Social, economic and political stability have become central concerns for urban governance, development and planning. With future projections, calculations and imaginings increasingly shaping space, politics and everyday life throughout the contemporary urban world, there is a political imperative to plan for and manage uncertainty. But with what e ects, and for whom?
Studies on urban transformation in the Arab Gulf have thus far predominantly dealt with the city as a space of financial investment. Only recently they began to pay attention to contestations of urban space. Cultural initiatives in Kuwait, as this article argues, present and foster new forms to reclaiming urban space. They not only demand, but also engage in practices according to which citizens have a say in how the space which they inhabit is reformed and reshaped .
2018, Knowledge-Based Urban Development in the Middle East
This chapter illustrates the alternative approach to Knowledge based urban development which Qatar adopted to cope with the challenges of the post-carbon paradigm and to construct a new identity as a knowledge-based model of development within the Middle East. Using the Capital city Doha as the main case study, the chapter provides analysis of the city evolution from the discovery of oil till the contemporary stage where knowledge economy is envisioned as its future and the guiding principle for its urban and architectural projects. The analysis covers the city planning level and how future masterplan is geared towards KBUD and then some influential projects will be assessed. The chapter concludes with a holistic understanding of the case of Doha as a knowledge and creative city that succeeded to craft a new urban brand within the Gulf and Middle Eastern cities.