Harvey Molotch - The New Arab Urban: Gulf Cities of Wealth, Ambition, and Distress

THE NEW ARAB URBAN

The New Arab Urban

Gulf Cities of Wealth, Ambition, and Distress

Edited by
Harvey Molotch and Davide Ponzini

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

www.nyupress.org

2019 by New York University

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Molotch, Harvey Luskin, editor. | Ponzini, Davide, 1979 editor.

Title: The new Arab urban : Gulf cities of wealth, ambition, and distress / edited by Harvey Molotch and Davide Ponzini.

Description: New York : New York University Press, [2019] | bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018021510| ISBN 9781479880010 (cl : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781479897254 (pb : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: UrbanizationPersian Gulf Region. | Persian RegionSocial conditions. | Persian Gulf RegionEconomic conditions.

Classification: LCC HT147.P35 N47 2019 | DDC 307.7609165/35dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018021510

New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Front cover: Doha, 2017.

Photograph by Michele Nastasi

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Also available as an ebook

In memory of

Hilary Ballon

Scholar, Teacher, Builder

CONTENTS

Harvey Molotch and Davide Ponzini

Alex Boodrookas and Arang Keshavarzian

Amale Andraos

Davide Ponzini

Michele Nastasi

Laura Lieto

Hilary Ballon

Mina Akhavan

Gke Gnel

Sarah Moser

Yasser Elsheshtawy

Harvey Molotch

Steffen Hertog

Harvey Molotch and Davide Ponzini

LIST OF FIGURES

Introduction

Learning from Gulf Cities

HARVEY MOLOTCH AND DAVIDE PONZINI

To learn from the cities of the Arabian Peninsula, particularly the most controversial and dynamic among them (places like Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Doha), does not mean celebrating them or ridiculing them either. Instead, the authors in this book follow the intellectual footprints of the architectural scholars Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, who looked at a city nearer at hand and in their own time. In their now classic Learning from Las Vegas , they went beyond seeing Las Vegas as tasteless, materialistic, or aberrant and insisted that it had important lessons for all places.

Why the Gulf?

In The New Arab Urban , with a group of scholars from across many academic disciplines and diverse parts of the world, we strive to learn from the cities of the Persian Gulfin particular the global showcase cities of Abu Dhabi and Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Doha, the capital of Qatarmore or less adjoining locales at the mouth of the Gulf. Because of practical limitations, we have given shorter shrift to other parts of the urban Gulf, like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Bahrain, which are also part of the interlinked economies of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). We are also spare in our attention to Riyadh, in Saudi Arabiathe largest GCC city but one that, in terms of history, ambitions, and contemporary relations with other parts of the world, is in a class distinct from the others. With its (currently) thin political and economic connections to the rest of the Gulf, Iran only occasionally comes into our purview. Recognizing the variation, we avoid thinking in terms of any single Gulf City model.

To help make the point, we adopt the pluralGulf cities in the books title. We do not want to repeat the historically common essentializing error of treating cities, variously Islamic or Arab or Middle East, as the same, nor to unthinkingly generalize traits observed at one point in time, whether the sixteenth century or 2018, as true of urban histories, full stop. Especially when dealing with large expanses of geography and peoples, where past scholarship has been radically uneven, we need to avoid falling back on stereotypes, including those academically generated.

We might have even called out the cities of focus as our Gulf cities, to further suggest the limits of the books reach. They do have things in common. For example, rather than being the important urban centers of surrounding territories, like Cairo was to Egypt (or Chicago to the U.S. Midwest), their centrality is more cosmopolitan. To an increasing degree, theyve also escaped dependence on the natural resource most prominent in their region (oil), just as they rely little on any surrounding agriculture or manufacturing. These are essentially city-states with the world as their hinterland. What distinguishes them more markedly compared to all other places is that they are rich and in the hands of people with intense ambitions, not just for themselves as individuals and families, but also for their rising cities. Given their wealth and autonomy, they are important as possible harbingersas Las Vegas was in the earlier context in the United States. And also like Las Vegasbut more sotheir modes of development and ways of life can come to influence the urban world farther afield.

While stressing distinctions, we are also following those scholars striving to de-exceptionalize The oil-driven accumulation of capital can be seen in some places in the Gulf, but not in others; and even where oil has been important, it has been important in different ways. Our Gulf cities are, in ways we will be disentangling, following patterns that do not simply recapitulate any single development model of what has come before.

A first declaration and one to which we will eventually return: we are not, in the context of Gulf cities, oblivious to the injustices and dire circumstances that accompany the glamor and fascination of the present day. Indeed, there is a relationship, which is traced in this book, between what appears on the top and what happens lower down, between spectacular wealth and grinding hardship. Appropriately enough, much media and scholarly attention has focused on the social iniquity, as well as the environmental threat, following on from Gulf-style development: surely among the highest levels of world inequality and, as indicated by the best data sources, the highest carbon footprints. As methodological strategy, we sometimes bracket the dystopic as well as the utopian. To build knowledge, we can leverage all the idiosyncrasies, including the distressing features. By restraining judgment (remember Las Vegas), we can come back to the problematics with a greater capacity to understand and strategize. And, at least as aspiration, we can use the Gulf to further think about how the urban works more generally.

Gulf Cities Are Theoretical Puzzlers

Conditions in the Gulf do scramble some of the grand traditions of urban scholarshipindeed of social science in general. They serve notice, in effect, that those traditions may not be sufficient to grasp how societies, cultures, and economies emerge, cohere, and crumblenot just in the Gulf but elsewhere as well. As a first stop, models derived from classical economics do not work. Given the Gulf, it is hard to apply the precepts of classical thinkers like Adam Smith or David Ricardo. Whatever the general propensity to truck, barter, and exchange, in the Gulf, such tendencies are subservient to other forces. Markets are not open and free; information is held close to the vest on vastly unequal playing fields. Crucial principles like comparative advantage as a determinant of price and productivity hardly reign with consistency. The market is not an apparatus to deliver the greatest good for the greatest number. Investments, in real estate or in other sectors, are detached from so-called market discipline.