Produced in December 2011, the films were made when Doha’s Olympic coordination committee was just beginning to put together its bid plan; therefore the films are more focused on examining the overall setting in which the Doha bid was coming together than on the bid itself. Qatar’s preparations to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup play a significant role in these videos.

Each of the films pursues a theme: Culture, Infrastructure, Global Reach, Diplomacity. There’s a link to vimeo and then to youtube for each video.

1. Culture

Doha builds with an agenda that struggles to define the city, as both a global actor and a localized identity. Branding represents a deep-seated attempt at global significance. See video HERE or HERE.

2. Infrastructure

Doha exhibits the ability to build, pursuing all the right ideas. And it’s happening, with or without the Olympics. See video HERE or HERE.

3. Global Reach

Doha’s advantage lies between its ability to finance the Olympics and its close ties to parts of the world currently not recognized as the Olympics’ marketing circles. See video HERE or HERE.

4. Diplomacity

Doha might be pursuing a new kind of city, one that doesn’t need to be filled all the time. In fact, by not being filled all the time, it could prove that it’s more globally significant. See video HERE or HERE.

Thank you to: Samar Ali, Nasser Al Amadi, Mishaal Al Gergawi, Joumana al Jabri, Ibrahim Al Jaidah, Mitra Khoubrou, Massimiliano Lodi, Roger Mandle, Issa Al Mohannadi, Craig Plumb, Huda Smitshuizen Abifares, Rami el Samahy, Omnia Shehabbadin, Polona Susin, Huib de Vries, Christian Wacker.

There is no city that has generated such a complex and multi-faceted public campaign for itself. Real-time Doha, however, cannot compete with the city’s media frenzy. That’s a reality one realizes as soon as the sliding doors open at the airport (the gigantic new one is not yet open). Doha still feels small, comfortably quiet, graspable. The splendid, audacious Doha is a concept usually performed on stages elsewhere: Zurich, London, Cairo, Tripoli, Damascus, Khartoum to name the first six that come to mind. In a discussion about the cleft between the two Dohas, the concrete one and the conceptual one, Mishaal Al Gergawi captured for me what Doha is: a colosseum. It’s a place which knows it can host the world, but it is, more often than not, a modest city.

Driving, walking around Doha, one has to become reacquainted with the Doha that is a real city. One discerns evidence of the billions being put into new building and infrastructure, even though the spokespersons say that 2012 will be the year when more construction will be evident. For now, it is easier to find where these big investments aren’t happening. Doha’s agenda is bold, but fortunately not everything about Doha has to be bold. There are parts that, though as characteristically global as bold Doha, remain at a smaller, dustier scale.

A former colleague had asked me to help on an Olympic Games research project by reporting back on a few topics about Doha. In the coming months, I’ll post here my answers to his questions, but for now here are some snapshot sequences from my stay.

..

At work. Construction at the Msheireb project is where one finds the thump of 24-hour construction. With the construction soon to escalate in preparation for the 2022 World Cup, the domain of transformation is spreading beyond Doha and into the smaller towns.

..

West Bay from the base. In the Financial Times, Edwin Heathcote refers to this district when he writes: ‘All that has been learnt from New York or Hong Kong is … the spiky skyline: nothing has been learnt from the successful spaces of everyday urban life….’ Even Doha’s leaders will say they have learned what not to do based on the West Bay experience. Many towers remain unoccupied, but that’s not just through a blunder of urban design.

..

Qatari architecture. Almost everyone in Doha (like Berlin in the 1990s) talks about architecture. A popular topic is what characterizes Qatari architecture. Here are five buildings I liked (or once liked). I’ve only been inside one of them, but I would say they are all Qatari architecture.

..

The horizontal. Qatar calls for the wide-angle. Though few cities in the world are pursuing pedestrian projects like the one in Doha, the city and its surrounding towns are still to be experienced from the car. Landscapes to be read at 120km or more.

..

Soft Qatar. There are moments when tactile surfaces offer respite in Doha. Materials can seem to know their existence is resistance, even if they will eventually succumb to harsh climate.

..

Frontage. Some of the ways Qatar welcomes its visitors.

..

The Italianate. It is difficult to avoid using this elusive term in Qatar. The suffix -ate is used to form an adjective from a noun. In this case, it is used to make an adjective of a word, Italian,  that is already an adjective. An intensified adjective, I guess.

….

Leaving my house earlier than normal this morning, I found the nearby shopping street eerily quiet. Amsterdam’s center wakes up late because it’s more about entertainment than general commerce. Opposite Rembrandt’s house were three Latin American men occupying sidewalk benches usually claimed by tourists. Each had an overpacked duffle bag and work boots. The men were apparently waiting for a pick-up, and, to my eye, they might have been people whose daily wages are deemed illegal. Or maybe theirs were legal. In either case the question was playing out in the light of day, but a light that most people of central Amsterdam sleep through.

Discussions about the globalization of labor often distinguish between a here and a there. When it is about home, the conversation is framed as ‘labor issues’, and when it is about somewhere far away, it more quickly employs disquieting terms like ‘human trafficking.’

Around another corner from my house is Amsterdam’s red light district. Municipal leaders want to clean the neighborhood up. It can get rowdy there: soft (and hard) drugs easily bought; sex even more easily bought; and then the rowdiness and messiness that traveling mischievousness can provide. Change, the politicians say, is needed: fewer prostitution windows, less hash smoke, more boutiques. In addition, they assert, there is a graver, moral issue at hand, namely that there is a good deal of human trafficking going on in the district. The thought of such a thing happening in Amsterdam is powerful enough to silence even the staunchest critics of gentrification. Whenever the term is used, however, details remain vague. Listeners are left to fill in with their own imagination. That’s easy to do.

To mention human trafficking conjures up graphic images of abuse, suffering, torture and other marks of evil. But while the accusations remain obscure along Amsterdam’s canals, there are those who do not hesitate to incriminate, with a glaring certainty, goings-on in a city like Dubai. These are the kinds of contradictions and disconnects that crossed my mind reading Pardis Mahdavi’s recent book Gridlock (linked here), which takes on the issues of migrant labor and human trafficking in Dubai.

Mahdavi, at times, seems like another academic interloper in Dubai, but she has written a thoughtful book about the city at a moment when several other American university professors have issued their own. She makes a few wince-causing mistakes (like getting Dubai’s weekend wrong and confusing Sheikh Rashid al Maktoum with Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan), but these can be put aside for what she achieves.

One historical matter that Mahdavi doesn’t consider is the fact that Dubai’s growth was defined by migrant populations before anyone talked about a ‘globalized economy.’ The city’s mid-20th-Century modernization is largely a result of its migrant population, from the builders of its first bridge to the investors who bankrolled that bridge. Most of those people never expected to stay in Dubai long, and many did not. Dubai was one of the first cities to show us that assumptions about citizenship, about belonging, about home were to be turned on their heads.

Mahdavi does not dwell on questioning this increasingly accepted global condition, but she rightly calls on us to be aware of oversimplifying what is happening. Like many before her, she acknowledges and presents explicit examples of where things go wrong. Some of her portrayals of people she interviewed are harrowing, but what seems to anchor her descriptions in reality is her balanced understanding of the situation and, daresay, appreciation for what Dubai has afforded many migrants. She is not presenting people whose dreams have been shattered, but people who have made difficult, yet calculated, decisions to improve their situations:

Discussions about trafficking also reveal a xenophobic dimension; namely, that women from the Third World make the ‘irrational’ choice to migrate and are duped or tricked into sex work. In my experience, the migrant women I met in Dubai were neither stupid nor duped. Instead, they had made a difficult but rational choice to leave family and loved ones behind in search of wage-earning possibilities, adventure, or stability.

News accounts from places around the world have offered us images of humans living, and dying, traveling in packed containers or under duress. The accounts on their own are heart-wrenching, but in a way they also provide us a deplorable comfort. We are able to separate ourselves from the story. We can develop parallel worlds: a here and a there. Plenty of correspondents are willing to report to us from places where we don’t dare to tread: an underground, a dark side, a secret.* But what is more terrifying is that it is all within our reach. In Amsterdam and in Dubai. There is no divide. It is unfurling on my shopping street; it is the person beside me on my next flight.

As an anthropologist, Mahdavi relies on her urban fieldwork — interviews with over a hundred men and women. Whether via an anthropologist, a Human Rights Watch report or a global-trotting journalist, Dubai’s condition has been told many times through the voices that some interests might prefer we didn’t hear. But Mahdavi’s interviews are convincing. She follows up with her subjects; often even after they have left Dubai. One of her findings is not surprising: that every story is different. It might seem cliché to claim this, but it reveals there is not just one problem and certainly not a blanket solution.

Mahdavi clarifies ‘where the heart is’ for many expatriates in Dubai. A common criticism, especially from American observers, is directed toward the inaccessibility of citizenship for foreign workers.** Mahdavi’s interviews expose this as a minor issue. Almost all of her interviewees have a plan to leave Dubai eventually; they are putting their money aside to help loved ones abroad and then to go home without debt; it is true as much for a British worker as for a Bangladeshi. The book’s findings provide nuance for gauging why Dubai functions as it does. That nuance can also generate a more likely means to improving people’s lives than tolerating the heavy-footed judgments usually projected toward Dubai.

Any new policies or oversight will inevitably have to simplify things, reduce people to numbers. But that doesn’t reduce the danger in thinking that way. Men and women taking on work, whether as domestic workers, construction laborers, or turning toward ‘informal’ markets, are making decisions with their direct personal interests in mind. That being said, Mahdavi visits a Kerala neighborhood in Dubai; she finds a community that could provide the support to get people through tough situations. My own experience in Kerala, historically a significant source of skilled and unskilled labor in the Gulf, is that there was once a strong support network for workers in Dubai: family and friends. Family members made sure a job was legitimate; recommended fair employers; helped each other out. Mahdavi’s findings are looking for solutions that would replace this vanishing support system. She tells us that regulation could help, but such efforts in the Philippines and Ethiopia have mixed results. The answers won’t be easy, but thinking more like Mahdavi, in Dubai and Amsterdam, might just get us closer.

* For a striking account of trickery, read Sarah Stillman’s New Yorker article (here) about two Fijian women tricked into working for the US military in Iraq.

** Several writers have bungled the fact that Dubai does not grant citizenship, but the UAE does. The question is not whether you become a Dubai citizen, but an Emirati citizen. This is important in measuring the relationship people have with a city versus a nation.

This article, a book review of Living in the Endless City (Phaidon, 2011), was originally published at the Huffington Post. You can read it HERE with images.

The London School of Economics’ Urban Age Project has published its second and just as heavy volume about the planet’s most favorite subject: its cities. The first was called The Endless City, and the second is about living in it. But not really; rather it is evidence that the Urban Age Project has spread its wings to incorporate even more cities into its purview.

Big tends to be the preferred format for books on cities, perhaps evidence that the topic makes us lose our editorial minds. Big also references this project’s self-induced Herculean task: to make some kind of sense of the city as a phenomenon. Just about every writer in this installment makes it clear: each city is unique. But that doesn’t settle our craving to look for what makes a city a city. There must be some kind of infectious fantasy which makes us think: if we could just get to their DNA, we could understand and therefore change cities.

One of the first efforts to acknowledge that cities might share some characteristics and that the world was facing a potential urban-generated disaster was Planning of Metropolitan Areas and New Towns, a report issued by the United Nations in 1967. Like the Urban Age Project, the report put ‘developed’ cities in the same petri dish as ‘developing’ cities. The UN report includes some shocking moments of dramatic irony — like when the panel of experts still wonders whether the automobile will be an adopted means of transportation in African and Asian cities. Comparing the UN report to where we are today in understanding cities is heartening in some regards. Back then, cities were being taken on by planning to denude them; the British new town strategy was almost always the preferred one. The solution for the city was essentially to destroy it.

Fast-forward to 2011 and the new town hardly plays a role. Urban planning has taken a back seat to economic planning, if, as some of these writers suggest, there’s any planning at all. The world’s largest cities have become even greater behemoths, but no one in this book dares to suggest turning our backs on them. There’s now little belief in our ability to design them; but can we at least come to terms with them?

Deyan Sudjic plays the book’s inter-urban itinerant who gives a brief introduction to the three inaugurated cities: São Paulo, Mumbai and Istanbul. Before embarking, he dares to consider whether the architect might still have a say in all of this density. The bold metropolis — and these three cities are some of the boldest — have brought about the crippling of the architect’s role in shaping them. Sudjic’s catalogue of suggestions for reinvigorating the architect’s role, however, is a let-down, if not a string of non sequiturs. For one, Leon Krier inexplicably gets more than just a mention. Zaha Hadid’s coppertone skyline for Istanbul is reviewed for all the wrong reasons (it’s the evidence of the problem, not the solution). And then there’s the suggestion that one ultra-rich man’s vertical villa in Mumbai has given us a new building type: who cares. If this essay is any forecast of the architect’s fate, then it is still dim.

Cities have become an approachable topic in popular media. That is a good thing and, if not burdened by its own weight, this publication might be reaching out to broader audiences. Sometimes, however, the popularity of the topic has led to grave misunderstandings of what cities are. This book usually acknowledges what some, mostly American, authors and groups often overlook, namely that when we talk about half the world living in cities, we’re mostly not referring to Toledos and San Franciscos. We’re talking (mostly) about conditions experienced by people who do not likely read this book or gawk at its pictures. And their cities are in focus here.

The book calls upon some of urbanism’s celebrities. Sociologist Richard Sennett has two essays. One is an unexpectedly naive call for what he considers a new kind of urban design. Just one example of the naivete is that Sennett blames planners for doing things they never had the power to do in the first place. His other essay, in the Istanbul section, brings up a nice, explorable thesis: the Hinge City. This kind of city exists and thrives because it connects distant, disparate places. Comparing ancient Venice to current day Istanbul, Sennett captures how cities can capture the impermanent and ephemeral. Then Hashim Sarkis puts some meat on Sennett’s abstraction with a thoughtful article on Istanbul’s relationship with the Arab world. Once again, it is demonstrated that some cities have no boundaries.

Sennett’s hinge idea functions as a foil to one that Saskia Sassen touches upon in her introductory essay, but leaves frustratingly unexplored: that a city’s physicality, its buildings, are its attempt at permanence. Unfortunately the idea gets muddled with other topics. Two of those are: her criticism of the ‘creative class’ movement and her questioning the assumption that every city should be phasing out its manufacturing industries. The two are related in some ways, but the former has little function in this book. I am always curious to read criticism of the creative class propaganda, but it is misplaced in this book. Sassen’s essay might include the book’s gravest example of mixing apples with oranges, or Toledos with Istanbuls. In fact, Toledo is one of her examples. Mentioning Toledo in a book like this is on par with mentioning Leon Krier. Istanbul confronts a Hadid skyline not because it wants to attract a ‘creative class’; yes, it pursues a knowledge-based economy, but at what expense? The Hadid skyline is for investors, and Sassen has written about speculative markets before. She misses her chance to develop that idea. Appreciating the role of manufacturing is also a necessary topic, but this essay comes off disjointed.

One of the best guiding articles is written by a Harvard law professor, Gerald Frug. Clear and concise, Frug reveals the complexity that most of these writers, many of whom have written about it before, fail to consider. When others artlessly proclaim what cities should be doing to improve their streets and buildings, Frug reminds us it is not necessarily people living in the cities who determine the urban conditions. He makes a quick case that each of these cities is not a self-serving engine; rather each is the cash cow for the country it inhabits. The argument calls out the absurdity in an earlier statement in the book: ‘…since the birth of the nation-state [cities] have been a cosmopolitan alternative, offering tolerance and freedom.’

This second publication is a laudable distillation, if not maturation, of tactics and language that architects, planners, etc., have been building up over the last decade or two. Some of these tools: the ambition, the fixation on data, the subsequent doubt about what to do with that data (taken on dexterously by Justin McGuirk), and the photographs. Oh, the photographs. This last aspect is where I would challenge the group. To warn of the dread which cities might bring upon our planet and then to seduce us with these kinds of images is double talk. Photographs like these have been described before as a kind of pornography. That’s because they generate a feeling in us perhaps we don’t like to admit, at least in public. Taken from the safe distance of a helicopter, or maybe the fifteenth floor of a Sheraton, the shots are of a tantalizing tactility. But those of us who can afford to buy this book are struck with shame for wanting the experience because we know we couldn’t handle it. Jacob Riis created a movement. These just create secret desires that make us insidious voyeurs.

Photography, the medium that could most quickly draw us in to the turmoils of these megalopolises, is therefore the most guilty for keeping us from them. Beyond just in the photographs, these cities often come off too clean. The slums (rarely mentioned more than as an aside), the political criminality, the paradoxes, the stench of these places are somehow rubbed out. Their uncanny absence in this tome reminds me of how Mike Davis plunged us into these predicaments in Planet of Slums, and without a photograph.

In a commendable piece on Mumbai, the journalist Suketu Mehta delivers one of the book’s best anecdotes. He recounts an award ceremony for ‘a group of local residents’ in Mumbai. They had a designed toilet. The German Chancellor Angela Merkel makes a cameo:

The prizewinners came in a bus to the grand hall, dressed in ill-fitting suits that they had rented for the occasion. When Frau Merkel gave them the cheque, they accepted it with grace and shook her hand, but when they encountered the municipal bureaucrat who was in charge of their [residential] area, they knelt down as one and touched his feet in reverence. They knew who had the power….

These microscopic kinds of mismatches reveal the scale-blowing complications at hand.

The London School of Economics’ Urban Age Project has published its second and just as heavy volume about the planet’s most favorite subject: its cities. The first was called The Endless City, and the second is about living in it. But not really; rather it is evidence that the Urban Age Project has spread its wings to incorporate even more cities into its purview.

Big tends to be the preferred format for books on cities, perhaps evidence that the topic makes us lose our editorial minds. Big also references this project’s self-induced Herculean task: to make some kind of sense of the city as a phenomenon. Just about every writer in this installment makes it clear: each city is unique. But that doesn’t settle our craving to look for what makes a city a city. There must be some kind of infectious fantasy which makes us think: if we could just get to their DNA, we could understand and therefore change cities.

One of the first efforts to acknowledge that cities might share some characteristics and that the world was facing a potential urban-generated disaster was Planning of Metropolitan Areas and New Towns, a report issued by the United Nations in 1967. Like the Urban Age Project, the report put ‘developed’ cities in the same petri dish as ‘developing’ cities. The UN report includes some shocking moments of dramatic irony — like when the panel of experts still wonders whether the automobile will be an adopted means of transportation in African and Asian cities. Comparing the UN report to where we are today in understanding cities is heartening in some regards. Back then, cities were being taken on by planning to denude them; the British new town strategy was almost always the preferred one. The solution for the city was essentially to destroy it.

Fast-forward to 2011 and the new town hardly plays a role. Urban planning has taken a back seat to economic planning, if, as some of these writers suggest, there’s any planning at all. The world’s largest cities have become even greater behemoths, but no one in this book dares to suggest turning our backs on them. There’s now little belief in our ability to design them; but can we at least come to terms with them?

Deyan Sudjic plays the book’s inter-urban itinerant who gives a brief introduction to the three inaugurated cities: São Paulo, Mumbai and Istanbul. Before embarking, he dares to consider whether the architect might still have a say in all of this density. The bold metropolis — and these three cities are some of the boldest — have brought about the crippling of the architect’s role in shaping them. Sudjic’s catalogue of suggestions for reinvigorating the architect’s role, however, is a let-down, if not a string of non sequiturs. For one, Leon Krier inexplicably gets more than just a mention. Zaha Hadid’s coppertone skyline for Istanbul is reviewed for all the wrong reasons (it’s the evidence of the problem, not the solution). And then there’s the suggestion that one ultra-rich man’s vertical villa in Mumbai has given us a new building type: who cares. If this essay is any forecast of the architect’s fate, then it is still dim.

Cities have become an approachable topic in popular media. That is a good thing and, if not burdened by its own weight, this publication might be reaching out to broader audiences. Sometimes, however, the popularity of the topic has led to grave misunderstandings of what cities are. This book usually acknowledges what some, mostly American, authors and groups often overlook, namely that when we talk about half the world living in cities, we’re mostly not referring to Toledos and San Franciscos. We’re talking (mostly) about conditions experienced by people who do not likely read this book or gawk at its pictures. And their cities are in focus here.

The book calls upon some of urbanism’s celebrities. Sociologist Richard Sennett has two essays. One is an unexpectedly naive call for what he considers a new kind of urban design. Just one example of the naivete is that Sennett blames planners for doing things they never had the power to do in the first place. His other essay, in the Istanbul section, brings up a nice, explorable thesis: the Hinge City. This kind of city exists and thrives because it connects distant, disparate places. Comparing ancient Venice to current day Istanbul, Sennett captures how cities can capture the impermanent and ephemeral. Then Hashim Sarkis puts some meat on Sennett’s abstraction with a thoughtful article on Istanbul’s relationship with the Arab world. Once again, it is demonstrated that some cities have no boundaries.

Sennett’s hinge idea functions as a foil to one that Saskia Sassen touches upon in her introductory essay, but leaves frustratingly unexplored: that a city’s physicality, its buildings, are its attempt at permanence. Unfortunately the idea gets muddled with other topics. Two of those are: her criticism of the ‘creative class’ movement and her questioning the assumption that every city should be phasing out its manufacturing industries. The two are related in some ways, but the former has little function in this book. I am always curious to read criticism of the creative class propaganda, but it is misplaced in this book. Sassen’s essay might include the book’s gravest example of mixing apples with oranges, or Toledos with Istanbuls. In fact, Toledo is one of her examples. Mentioning Toledo in a book like this is on par with mentioning Leon Krier. Istanbul confronts a Hadid skyline not because it wants to attract a ‘creative class’; yes, it pursues a knowledge-based economy, but at what expense? The Hadid skyline is for investors, and Sassen has written about speculative markets before. She misses her chance to develop that idea. Appreciating the role of manufacturing is also a necessary topic, but this essay comes off disjointed.

One of the best guiding articles is written by a Harvard law professor, Gerald Frug. Clear and concise, Frug reveals the complexity that most of these writers, many of whom have written about it before, fail to consider. When others artlessly proclaim what cities should be doing to improve their streets and buildings, Frug reminds us it is not necessarily people living in the cities who determine the urban conditions. He makes a quick case that each of these cities is not a self-serving engine; rather each is the cash cow for the country it inhabits. The argument calls out the absurdity in an earlier statement in the book: ‘…since the birth of the nation-state [cities] have been a cosmopolitan alternative, offering tolerance and freedom.’

This second publication is a laudable distillation, if not maturation, of tactics and language that architects, planners, etc., have been building up over the last decade or two. Some of these tools: the ambition, the fixation on data, the subsequent doubt about what to do with that data (taken on dexterously by Justin McGuirk), and the photographs. Oh, the photographs. This last aspect is where I would challenge the group. To warn of the dread which cities might bring upon our planet and then to seduce us with these kinds of images is double talk. Photographs like these have been described before as a kind of pornography. That’s because they generate a feeling in us perhaps we don’t like to admit, at least in public. Taken from the safe distance of a helicopter, or maybe the fifteenth floor of a Sheraton, the shots are of a tantalizing tactility. But those of us who can afford to buy this book are struck with shame for wanting the experience because we know we couldn’t handle it. Jacob Riis created a movement. These just create secret desires that make us insidious voyeurs.

Photography, the medium that could most quickly draw us in to the turmoils of these megalopolises, is therefore the most guilty for keeping us from them. Beyond just in the photographs, these cities often come off too clean. The slums (rarely mentioned more than as an aside), the political criminality, the paradoxes, the stench of these places are somehow rubbed out. Their uncanny absence in this tome reminds me of how Mike Davis plunged us into these predicaments in Planet of Slums, and without a photograph.

In a commendable piece on Mumbai, the journalist Suketu Mehta delivers one of the book’s best anecdotes. He recounts an award ceremony for ‘a group of local residents’ in Mumbai. They had a designed toilet. The German Chancellor Angela Merkel makes a cameo:

The prizewinners came in a bus to the grand hall, dressed in ill-fitting suits that they had rented for the occasion. When Frau Merkel gave them the cheque, they accepted it with grace and shook her hand, but when they encountered the municipal bureaucrat who was in charge of their [residential] area, they knelt down as one and touched his feet in reverence. They knew who had the power….

These microscopic kinds of mismatches reveal the scale-blowing complications at hand.

“Symbolism means nothing.” - Bahraini man in the street, The Guardian, March 18, 2011

Last week the New York Times ran an article with a headline more obvious than insightful: “Bahrain losing its edge as finance hub.” Even before Shia demonstrations started to rock Bahrain in February, the island country had already lost its financial primacy. The article, however, revisits a formula that has driven the Gulf through the last century: the deferral of political interests to the economy. Gulf countries try to function as apolitical financial forces for the sake of peace. Whether or not this attempt can ever work, ongoing turmoil in Bahrain has shown political mishandling can certainly hurt the economy.

On March 18, the Bahraini government demolished the Pearl Monument at the Pearl Roundabout, where the past month’s demonstrations had taken place. Even the roundabout itself was scheduled for removal. Within an afternoon, a political place and symbol of the uprising were removed.

The Guardian‘s man-in-the-street (quotation above) refers to the fact that the Shia uprising continues despite the loss of a symbol. What’s more, a symbol of unrest might be gone, but Bahrain is far from being stable again. There are continuing reports of arrests, disappearances and quelled demonstrations.

But is symbolism really worth nothing?

The roundabout, or traffic circle, has several meanings for Bahrain. It represents the strides of modernization that the British presence unfurled in Bahrain in the 1960s. Though it is not a British invention, the roundabout represented British development, principally of towns outside British cities. Not suitable for cities, roundabouts were for secondary economies; importing them to Bahrain said what British engineers thought of Bahrain’s future. Though a master plan did not exist during Bahrain’s modernization, British planners and engineers prescribed a regimen of traffic circles as a means to maintain smooth but controllable development. By the 1970s, Bahrain had about forty roundabouts and since then the number has not exceeded much beyond fifty.

Roundabouts also offered Bahrain another advantage: open space without extending those spaces for human use. An expanse of green parkland is isolated by an undying stream of traffic. Landscaped with follies and plantings, roundabout circles are not places; they are voids. In other words, Bahrain might have green spaces, but there are few public spaces needing to be monitored (see this previous article).

Unlike Cairo’s Tahrir Square, the Pearl Roundabout held little significance for Bahrain before 2011. There are no significant landmarks on its circumference. It is a place marker without a place. It is only a marker of time between places: “I’m now driving past the Pearl Roundabout, so I should be there in 15 minutes.” Since there was no significant public space in Bahrain, the demonstrators created one. The Pearl Void became Pearl Square.

In the process, the ‘Pearl Monument’ became the unwitting anchor of the movement. Before that, it too was an empty symbol, erected in 1982 to commemorate Bahrain’s hosting a summit of the six Gulf countries. The event is as much forgotten as the sculpture’s simplistic symbolism: six curved columns (the sails of ships), represent the six Gulf countries and support a sphere (a pearl), representing the region’s ancient sea-faring economy. Sails and pearls have shifted from being regional symbols to overlooked clichés. Symbolism, in this case, did mean nothing. Instead of sails and a pearl, people perceived an odd icon in a city without many icons. By appropriating the ‘Pearl Monument,’ occupants demonstrated something else: how quickly an empty symbol can take on real meaning.

The only video footage (view it here) of the Friday demolition seems to be from a Bahraini state-run television channel. A motorcade of extra-large dump trucks encircles the vacated roundabout. These are the kinds of dump trucks one associates with land reclamation in the Gulf. But another kind of reclamation was scheduled. Mechanical diggers chomp at the feet of two of the columns until their instability pushes the other columns toward collapse in helix formation. As the ‘pearl’ on top begins to teeter, preparing for its pulverizing fall, the footage cuts to moments later when the pieces have fallen to the ground. The video pans a still image of the collapsed monument which looks like what remains when the trunks of date palms have been burned and reduced to white ashes. The still image is a new symbol for Bahrain.

It is an image of destruction. By no means an auspicious symbol for the Bahraini government, but it does work to the authority’s advantage. It suggests an ending, when things are hardly over. The conflict continues, but dissipated, unlocalized, untelevised.

Without missing a beat, the government provided an explanation for the destruction of the roundabout: a need to ease traffic problems. The roundabout is to be replaced by traffic lights, a modern upgrade from a dated roundabout. City planners have demonstrated before that traffic jams can be measured in lost profits. By tearing down a roundabout, Bahrain tries to say it is just being a Gulf state, preferring the economy over politics. This action won’t save Bahrain’s economy though. Symbolism means nothing, but it can be so powerful that it needs to be taken down.

Speakers (order of appearance): Mark Wigley, Todd Reisz, Rem Koolhaas.

September 24, 2010

During a trip to Oman I learned something about the consequences of Dubai’s development appetite, namely that it extends beyond the city’s own borders. My traveling partner and I had been enjoying the drive-and-camp-where-you-may freedom Oman provides. Our guidebook described a beach and lagoon in a town named Yiti, about an hour’s drive outside Muscat. Darkness had long since fallen, and we inched our way into the town in search of the open beach.

Just outside the town where you could smell the fading scents of dinner and hear the last fits of children’s laughter before bedtime, we found where the horizon opened to the sea. The beach showed no sign of inhabitation, none of the usual late night strollers, fishing boats and shacks. The ground felt harder than a beach should, but still we were happy enough to stop, eat something and pull out the sleeping bags.

The next morning we awoke to find we were somewhere quite different than we’d expected. The beach and lagoon no longer existed. The ground had been packed hard, and the water’s edge had been crafted into a solidified, flamboyantly curvaceous form. Rocks, presumably from the overlooking mountains, had been gathered and fitted together to define a hard edge, making it impossible for us to touch the water.

We finally found some explanation: a sun-bleached, dust-ridden billboard at the main road off of which we had turned the night before (and a ‘Do Not Enter’ sign we had missed). We were standing on abandonment.

The sign announced a huge project by Sama Dubai, a Dubai-based developer that had been folded into extinction. Before its demise, Sama Dubai had acquired this town’s natural shoreline and the sloping valley that connected the beach to the inland mountains. Until the global financial crisis, the company had begun rearranging the place into its own Yiti, this one a second-home/resort city. By the time we arrived, the security booms had been lifted, the laborers had left, and so had all the heavy construction machinery. Excavation pits were filled in.

The natural cannot return, but people will. Residents stare now at a strangely shaped coastline and try to figure out how to reclaim reclaimed land. No longer reigning over a marshy lagoon, fishermen have retaken an edge and remain hidden from sight by the high walls of the botched marina. The grounds above the hidden boats are as flat as a soccer field.

And that is what they’ve become. Teams from nearby towns have come together to build two soccer goals and have even chalked field lines. This is Sama Dubai’s greatest gift to the local male youth. Beyond the playing fields, the flat grounds are places of departure. Useless space on the margin becomes useful for marginal pursuits: a silent walk alone, easy park-and-fish spots (a boat is no longer necessary to reach deep waters), and then the usual teen escape projects — ranging from listening to loud music in a 4×4 to things less legal.

We stayed on the site for two nights. Heading out on our last day, I came across a man from town who spoke some English. We talked next to the developer’s looming reserve of quarried rock that won’t be redelivered to the mountains. He was walking home in a bright soccer jersey, his socks caked in the mud-sand from the development site’s surface. He told me that the sheikh of Dubai was giving Oman a new development, but, as I probably knew, Dubai was having troubles. I asked, “And so they just packed their things up and left?” He smiled, “Yes, but they will be back.” Willful optimism, I supposed. It is difficult to tell if anyone will be back to finish Sama Dubai’s project. The soccer player was not ready to say old Yiti faced a great loss, but until somebody comes back to finish off the curvy marina and the condominiums, the people of Yiti find uses for what was once theirs.

For more on Al Manakh’s coverage of the Gulf’s reach beyond its borders please read this.

This piece is a modified excerpt for an article in the Khatt Foundation’s publication Typographic Matchmaking in the City.

by Aziz Ali

[Interview originally published by PSFK.com. Click here for original]

Todd Reisz is a member of the Al Manakh team focused on urban development in the Gulf region. Their publication Al Manakh 2 Gulf Continued aims to look beyond the easy cliches of cities like Dubai to reveal how they are confronting the shifting global economic landscape. As editor of the recently released book, Todd is an architect and writer focusing on cities in the Gulf region and his publication.

What is Al Manakh? What is your project dealing with?

Al Manakh is a project as well as a series of books that focus on the ongoing changes facing the cities of the Gulf, namely Dubai, Doha, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait, Manama and Riyadh. The books are scheduled on a two-to-three-year schedule. So we likely won’t have a publication before 2012. However, the project is still alive. We are working to organize a conference in Saudi Arabia, in Jeddah and Riyadh, in 2011 about continuing the work we’ve started in Saudi cities. We’ve of course also been keeping our website active. Rory Hyde, a contributor to Al Manakh 2, and I have been maintaining a blog on the Huffington Post, which has increased our readership, especially in the United States. The Al Manakh project has captured more attention in Europe and the Middle East, and the Huffington Post has allowed us to introduce issues confronting cities in the Gulf region to a new audience.

What measures are being taken to revitalize cultural heritage amidst all the urban developments taking place?

It’s not about revitalization; that suggests that something died and it has to be brought back to life; Al Manakh 2 covers this question in detail. Cultural heritage is something cities in the Gulf have had since their inception. If you want to get a sense of what different cities have been confronting over the last few years, Al Manakh 2 has an index of them. Of course, there are the museums and new cultural programs in Abu Dhabi, but those need little coverage at this point. An interview with Mohammed Ali in Doha about his work on the Souk Waqif provides an alternative to how preservation / reconstruction happens. The project has been nominated for the Aga Khan Award for Architecture and deserves the attention. It is a clear example of how government can pursue a cultural project.

Culture isn’t just a governmental oversight. In her article for Al Manakh 2, Antonia Carver gives some terrific insight in the development of a ‘laissez-faire’ arts scene in Dubai. The accounts of recent history suggest not only ways forward for Dubai, but also remind us that culture cannot be a top-down project. Ingenuity and creativity from an individual basis are as much required as multi-million dollar art spaces.

What role does political and economic power play today in shaping the urban fabric of the gulf region? The cities are devoid of residents and then government is planning to attract people to occupy these cities.

It seems that that manner of building is coming to a slow-down at least. It characterized Dubai’s development over the last ten years and it seemed like other cities, Doha and Abu Dhabi, for example, were continuing to take that road. But now there are signs that there is a general sense of caution in building more housing.

There are places that are needing housing. Bahrain has calculated it needs more ‘affordable housing’ for lower- and middle-income Bahrain families. And then at a scale more than ten times that of Bahrain’s shortage, Saudi Arabia faces shortages that would required building about 300,000 new units of housing every year for the next five years. If that need could be met, such a development speed would dwarf that of Dubai’s in the last several years.

If the question is addressing Dubai — the unlit windows one sees in new buildings in the Jumeriah Beach Residence, for instance — yes, it all seems rushed. The financial crisis has suddenly given developers an opportunity to claim the criticism of Dubai’s harshest critics: that cities don’t happen over time. So it follows, these places just need time to become activated. To damn Dubai now for building too much too quickly, would be too short-sighted. It’s a question we’ll have to answer in years to come.

In a recent Huffington Post article, we discussed what kind of outward policy Dubai should provide: how should Dubai sustain itself. Dubai’s advancement in the last decade leant heavily on images provided by architecture. There are dozens of projects one might label “crazy” or “whacky” but for every one of those drawings there are dozens of real built projects. Architecture worked for Dubai, but the question is: by what means will Dubai sell itself next?

There are voices within Dubai, primarily Emiratis, who are saying Dubai needs to amp up its image as a place of entrepreneurship. Make it a place where you can easily set up shop as a business owner. I find this fascinating because it has a ring of Dubai’s yesteryears, when traders and businesses set up shop along the Creek. That’s what created Dubai in the first place. Of course supporting entrepreneurship can’t be the only goal, but it suggests a general direction. More broadly, it suggests a focus on people.

How can pedestrian culture be developed and encouraged in GCC cities, and what’s being done about it?

This is one of the touchiest topics facing Gulf urbanism. And it’s one that will require a new method of approaching problems. In many ways, however, these cities already have a ‘pedestrian culture’. Each of these cities has a part of town where walking is the preferred mode of transportation. Commerce in Dubai’s Deira neighborhood still relies on men pushing carts. How do workers get around the Port Rashid area? Bicycles. There’s an ad hoc bike lane painted onto the outer roads’ sidewalks. I would hope that places like these might provide hints of potentially successful systems.

Each city has some kind of master plan for addressing the issue, whether its Dubai’s metro system, Abu Dhabi’s ‘liveability’ vision, or Doha’s redevelopment plans for the city center. But these plans will only go so far. Building details, landscaping and streetscaping will eventually have to come into play (Abu Dhabi is trying to regulate this on an urban scale as well). The irony is that it can seem so simple. Walking from a metro stop to an office building, one can start to imagine what kinds of trees or overhead screens could make the walk bearable. It doesn’t have to be interiorized, air-conditioned walkways.

There are 120-130,000 people who take the Dubai metro daily. A rush hour ride is packed. People are starting to discover the city in a new way, to stick the foot out and find a sidewalk. I would also like to think that progress in this area might be attached to my answer in the previous question; in other words, that the future doesn’t lie in grand architecture or infrastructure, but rather in addressing how, and why, people come to live in theses cities.

What makes you optimistic about the future?

People taking on tough issues facing these cities. That’s what was so humbling about making Al Manakh 2. We worked with over 140 people to make this book; the majority of these people are living and working in the region. It’s very easy to find coverage on these cities provided by outsiders, but we are now beginning to hear from people who know these cities well. I can name two recent examples that post-date Al Manakh 2 of people working with a long-standing relationship with these cities: Bahrain’s pavilion at the Venice Biennale and the #iamhere phenomenon in Dubai. At this point efforts like Al Manakh are mere words, but a founding belief of the Al Manakh project is in the need to broadcast ideas and to have them debated.

Deira was Dubai’s most modern quarter. It still is, though it’s often referred to as “Old Dubai,” a generalization that only describes a stop on the Dubai visitor’s course. To see a gold souk, a fish market. To take an abra for no reason other than to take an abra.

The charm of the antiquated is an applied layer. Deira survives this nostalgia by ignoring it.

In contrast to the towers of Sheikh Zayed Road, Deira might seem static and quaint, poor and outdated. This couldn’t be further from the truth. How could Deira be irrelevant when everyone complains that Deira is too crowded? It’s crowded because Deira is true urbanism; it’s more city than elsewhere in Dubai.

When Dubai’s residents started to build more than two-story buildings and use more than earth and coral to make them, the boom centered around Deira. The New Dubai was today’s Old Dubai. Deira transformed and then transformed again. It is still a task not yet completed.

Today’s Deira operates not much differently than that of the 1970s when reclaimed land began to make Dubai a real estate success. The new shore separated the merchants from the ships. They were reconnected with dollies and Japanese pick-up trucks outfitted with wrought iron fencing that could weave through auto and foot traffic to deliver goods. It’s still done the same way today. Tourists snap pictures of a world that seems so much of yesterday: Pakistani men in ‘traditional’ dress wielding worn carts stacked with supplies. These men running carts from creek to shop are more essential to Dubai’s longevity than the latest office tower in Media City.

In photographs, streets look so clean that they could be stage sets. But then there are moments when the stage set fails, when Deira reveals its roots in the desert. A cleared building site reveals the desert that once was.

If one wanted to locate a local approach to modernism in the Gulf region, one should start in the parts of cities like Deira. Shading built into building facades provides interaction with the street but also privacy from the street. These buildings should be inspiration for what could work in Dubai and in other cities, but tastes and preferences preclude that. These parts are written off as old, dirty, rat-infested. They are often all of these things. Most people living in the buildings would move out if they could .

But the struggle, the need to stay vs the desire to leave, once defined cities. Cities were never places of comfort; they were where we once encountered the human soul.

Many thanks to Al Manakh contributors for inspiration, research and help: Ziad Aazam, Joyce Hsiang, Joumana al Jabri, Mashary Al Naim, and Reda Sijiny. The presentation was given at the International New Town Institute’s conference in November, 2010

Go here to watch video.

Other presentations from INTI’s conference here.