World City Aspirations & Urban Spatial Politics: The Case of Dubai

‘The landscape changes at a staggering pace as towers, apartment blocks and streets appear and disappear in the twinkling of an eye, while the most widespread imaginary of the city is not a postcard but a set of computer-graphic rendered and photo-shopped images of what Dubai will be, rather than what it is.’

As a former resident of the United Arab Emirates, what intrigues me most about Dubai is how the cityscape is in a perpetual state of transformation, culminating with the recent unveiling of the Burj Khalifa. While academics have explored the emirate’s claims to global city status, fewer questions are asked about the social implications of such modernisation for Dubai’s transnational workforce. This is especially worrying given talk of the ‘Dubai model’ being exported as a blueprint for other cities both endogenous and exogenous to the region including Doha, Addis Adabba and Shanghai (Stoll, 2010). In this essay, I will investigate how Dubai’s global city aspirations, evident in the construction of such mega-projects as the Jumeirah Palm Islands, have resulted in the transnational character of its working class whilst also institutionalizing their marginalization in the very urban fabric which they help to build. Since the sociology of urban development and the political economy of globalization are closely tied, the break neck speed at which the emirate’s topography is being restructured will be related to the privileging of certain social actors and new modes of differentiation. First, there will be an overview of how Dubai’s particular development trajectory facilitated its dependency upon transnational labour, followed by a brief discussion of where Dubai sits within the global city paradigm. The essay will then proceed to apply Saskia Sassen’s (1991) claims about global city formation to Dubai’s model of urban development so as to critically assess the extent to which inequalities between expatriates are being (re)embedded in the spatial order.

Before discussing whether Dubai’s construction of mega-projects spatially reproduces inequalities, the relationship between the city’s developmental trajectory and the polarization of its labour force requires further clarification. Dubai’s development path can be contextualized within a broader regional modernization that saw the transition of Gulf rentier economies from pre-industrial resource extraction in pearl fisheries to post-industrial service provision following the oil boom of the 1970s (Hvidt 2009, p.400). Under the neo-patrimonial auspices of Sheikh Rashid and the ruling family elite, petrodollars were siphoned into tourist oriented-projects and the construction of free trade zones as means to attract foreign direct investment and highly skilled globe-trotting migrants to the region (Hvidt, 2000). Given its tabula rasa landscape and lack of any strongly preconceived historical image to uphold, Dubai continues to be engaged in this process of urban generation and reinvention with the aim of creating a city of regional significance for the twenty-first century (Pacione, 2005 p.265). Mohammad Alabbar, the chairman of Emaar and one of Dubai’s three real estate titans affirmed the emirate’s global city aspirations when stating that the ultimate goal was to become a ‘New York in the Making.’ (Acuto 2010, p.276) This objective of ‘fast track development’ was reiterated in recent development plans (Vision 2010, published in 2000, and the Dubai Strategic Plan, published in 2007), which also highlighted the Dubai government’s commitment to a supply-generated demand model of growth as a means of transitioning towards a knowledge-based economy (Acuto 2010, p.280). The construction of landmarks like the Palm Islands and infrastructure like Maktoum International Airport are thus indicative of the desire to command both primacy and uniqueness through investment and symbolic capital respectively (Eben Saleh, 2001, p. 328).

Especially noteworthy is how the transnational labour that sustains this supply-generated demand is not derived locally but from an extensive network of expatriate employees who currently comprise 80% of Dubai’s residential population (Al Damarki 2008, p.240). While countries like China struggle to educate their population as it passes through various stages of industrialization, Dubai ‘purchases’ its labour on a contractual basis from the international market to suit current needs (Hvidt 2009, p.403). The way in which the city ‘free-rides’ off the workforce of periphery developing countries has incited criticism of the Dubai model as inherently exploitative (Davis 2007), especially since the simultaneous demand for both skilled and unskilled labour has produced visible labour segmentation and social polarisation across occupational and income structures (Sassen 1991, p.9). A trichotomous social division is now apparent between the Arab nationals who sit at the top of the labour hierarchy, the professionalized business class of Westerners who assume the majority of managerial positions and an army of low-skilled South Asian and Filipino construction and domestic workers (Malecki 2007, p.477). Even within this lowest stratum wage differentials persist, with Indians generally receiving higher wages than Bangladeshis and Sri Lankans (Malecki 2007, p.477). The political marginalization of these lower strata expatriate groups is seen most keenly in the treatment of Asian labourers who are dispossessed of their passports and the few legal rights to which they are entitled once contracts are signed (Brochmann, 1993; Mohammed, 2003: 21). Dubai’s resulting social strata embodies a more kaleidoscopic kind of polarization, rather than clear black-white, rich-poor distinctions, which ultimately coincides with the tumultuous and unpredictable growth path set in place by the oil boom.

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The fact that Dubai’s significance as a nodal city is contingent upon these inflows of migrants rather than advanced producer services is obscured entirely by the emirate’s currently mediocre ranking on league tables of world cities (Genis 2007). Cities of the Gulf region are anomalies in world cities research because they exist as capital-rich centers that lack a defined role in the global economy whilst also possessing unparalleled albeit transnational workforces that allow them to exceed the minimum population required for world city status (Malecki 2007, p.473). With respect to Peter Hall’s (1966) seminal economic conceptualization of world cities as densely populated national centers that retain major financial, political and transportation functions, Dubai only conforms on two fronts as an international airport hub with a comparatively large population. The emirate is neither a national financial center, contributing only 25% of the UAE’s GDP in comparison with 47% provided by the neighbouring capital Abu Dhabi, and its conduciveness to the financial flows has been inhibited by an excessively bureaucratic and federally governed legal process (Parsa et. al 2003, p.10). Yet Hall’s disproportionate emphasis on national and economic power neglects the political and cultural significance of Dubai as a city with an intricate role within the urban network of transnational labour markets and which commands symbolic capital through the development of world-renowned mega projects (Malecki 2007, p.478). The study of Dubai thus mandates a reformulation of the world cities paradigm especially since the city’s symbolic and socio-cultural politics assume greater import than its economic attributes (Samers 2002, p.9). For this reason, Dubai’s urban entrepreneurialism will be evaluated not in rational economic or eulogistic terms, but in recognition of the sociological dimensions of these mega-projects for the city’s pre-existing social divisions (Levi 2009, p.5).

With that in mind, attention should now be turned towards the way sociologists have made linkages between globalization, global cities and the socio-spatial order. Most theorists concur that globalization redefines the relationship between territoriality, economic organization and social processes (Robinson 2009, p.8). There also appears to be consensus that cities and the dynamics of urbanization have been changed by the intensiﬁcation of globalized flows of financial capital (Nijman, 2000; Robinson 2009; Samers, 2002). Divergence occurs when however it comes to determining the spatial and social implications of these processes, with some heralding the end of geography (Castells 1996) whilst others exalt the redundancy of spatial referents in the construction of identities (Appadurai 1996). Two of the most provocative claims regarding the effects of global city formation emerged from Freidman (1995) and Sassen’s (1996) theorizing about the polarization of social class divisions and a dualized labour market as a result of the emerging global city hierarchy. Particularly relevant to this discussion is Sassen’s (1996) argument that large cities are far more concrete places for social struggles than the national political system as the appropriation of urban space is divvied between the corporate complex and the immigrant community. Even though Dubai may not qualify as a global city for Sassen, given her emphasis like Hall’s that global cities function as command centers of the national economy, the conclusions she makes in relation to the new entitlement claims to place and to citizenship are applicable to Dubai and will be used to guide this investigation of the emirate’s global-local dynamics.

According to Sassen (in Robinson 2009, p.17), economic globalization has been reproduced in the social geography of the global city as spatial and class apartheid. Such kind of dual or partitioned city is evident in the sharp increases in spatially concentrated poverty in Dubai, as the older suburbs of Deira and Al Satwah house lower-paid immigrants while the more recently constructed gated-communities of the Arabian Ranches and the Hills attract foreign investors and wealthy European expatriates (Al Damarki 2008, p.209). The most iconic manifestation of this ‘spatial apartheid’ however is the segregation of labourers into worker camps like Sonapur that are located 15 km away from the city as a means to prevent them tarnishing the image of Dubai (Kaye 2010, p.136). To make the claim that that this concept of partitioned cities is unrealistic because it neglects the agency of the city’s mobile inhabitants (Van Kempen 2005), is to ignore how power is manifested in more subtle forms of exclusion. Much of Dubai’s viability is strictly dependent on ‘invisible power’, which can be exercised only with the complicity of those who do not want to know that they are subject to it (Bourdieu 1991, p. 164). Exclusive clubs and lobbies, gated seven-star hotels and jet-set malls example geographic forms of symbolic power as their access is not hindered by force, but by their price and inaccessibility via public transport (Acuto 2010, p.281). Even if the degree of exclusion appears to be minimal (almost anyone could enter the Dubai Mall for example), the form and function of the residences on the Jumeirah Palm Islands and even the developments like the Internet City and the Media City have a preconceived ‘‘in-built user” that is hardly tailored towards the low-income inhabitant (Latour, 1992). The irony that these latter city-within-a-city projects lie on the peripheries of Dubai but function as major facilitators of global flows of information communications technology and capital, is the strongest confirmation of the new geography of marginality and centrality that has emerged as a result of Dubai’s global city aspirations (Sassen 1996, p.207).

As alluded to above, spatial restructuring influences not only the possibilities for movement, but for claims to citizenship and the consciousnesses of those who interact with the urban environment, be they inhabitants or transient ‘guests (Sassen, 1999). Since the emirate’s urbanism project is predicated upon ‘‘demand-oriented planning” (Bagaeen, 2007, p. 175), commissioned mainly to foreign Western architectural firms, hotels and leisure buildings account for 90% of projects under construction and are primarily aimed at creating comfort zones for the short-term visitor (Al Damarki 2008, p.184). The most obvious consequence of building infrastructure for the wealthier margins of the market is the overt alienation of the invisible working class (Davis 2007). The idea that disadvantaged workers in global cities, namely women, immigrants, and people of color, lack a political sense of self and struggle to find their identities embedded in the “nation” (Sassen 1996, p.206) is concurrently reflected in the ambiguity of Dubai’s famous architectural landmarks. Take for example the acclaimed Burj Al Arab hotel, whose dhow shaped façade was instrumentalized by the Maktoum dynasty to showcase to newcomers the city’s original seafaring roots (Al Damarki 2008, p.189). Many Emirati nationals consider the icon to be a gross deformation of tradition, especially since the intersecting mast and cross beam of the hotel appear as the largest cross in Arabia when it is viewed from the Palm island side or offshore (Al Damarki 2008, p.190). Thus, the attempt to ascertain a local identity in relation to a migrant population through the hybridized iconography of structures like the Burj hotel or the Jumeirah Beach Hotel has not translated into either the assimilation of the expats, or the construction of a more multi-ethnic Arab societal basis (Al Damarki 2008, p.190). As the dominant forms of architectural iconicity for the global city become increasingly driven by those who own and control the corporate sector (Sklair 2006, p. 21), Dubai’s urban entrepreneurialism has consequently led to the exclusionary expression of symbolic power over place in a way that privileges a certain kind of elite and transient consumer above all others.

Critics are quick to point out that Sassen neglects to deal with agency adequately as she gives the impression that the polarizing effects of enclave living are absolute, immutable and ultimately irreversible upon a passive underclass (Van Kampen, 2005). While scholars wax lyrical about the potential of these mega projects to contribute to increasing polarization, the methodology used to measure these changes is circumspect (Andersen 2002). An emergent body of research dubbed ‘second wave globalism’ by Michael Peter-Smith (2001, p.236) has begun to respond to this growing criticism by employing the heuristic of ‘transnationalism’ to observe informal relations of dominance, accommodation, resistance as they occur simultaneously in the everyday practices and lives of individuals (e.g. Ley 2005). One such example of ‘transnationalism’ in Dubai is El Sheshtawy’s (2008) discovery of how marginalized low income South-Asian migrants circumvent official policy by ‘occupying’ and ‘taking over’ left-over and forgotten districts of the city in Satwa and Baniyas Square. Construction workers and a few Arab nationals stake their claims to these spaces in a very public way, through graffiti, drug use and loitering, constituting an act of resistance to globalizing inﬂuences in the architecture around them (El Sheshtawy 2008). Yet these acts of agency do not necessarily reverse the polarization of the present and can be acknowledged in tandem with the idea that a sense of deprivation persists amongst the labourer class as the administrative and business sectors reap the benefits of accelerated capital flows. Even if the effects of social upheaval are difficult to identify in a city where political mobilization and trade unions are illegal, Sassen’s (1996) articulation of how global cities privilege the owners of capital has to a large extent materialized in Dubai. Ultimately, the argument that life in the emirate has so far continued very peacefully in spite of the pervasive ethnic division of labour which repeats itself in all aspects of life (Sabban 2005, p.18), does not negate Sassen’s argument about global cities operating as sites of global control but reinforces it.

Cities which operate as sites for transnational labour flows have received scant attention in the political economy of world city formation. Approaching the case study of Dubai from a sociological dimension reveals how there is a genuine avenue for future research about how the desire to be achieve primacy on the global city hierarchy has accelerated not only rapid alterations to the urban form but the extent of inequalities between differing social groups. While it is in vogue to consider the financial and ecological implications of these mega-projects, too few have taken into consideration how pre-existing social polarization has become even more pronounced territorially and symbolically as a result of the Dubai model of urban development.

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