INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF URBAN AND REGIONAL RESEARCH DOI:10.1111/1468-2427.12664 1 — THE FOREVER FRONTIER OF URBANISM: Historicizing Persian Gulf Cities Alex BoodrookAs And ArAng keshAvArziAn Abstract 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. Introduction Ahmed Kanna opens his groundbreaking work on Dubai with the statement that ‘Today it still seems acceptable to represent the Arab Gulf, in ways no longer so acceptable in the case of other postcolonies, ahistorically and apolitically, as a region somehow exempt from the structural constraints of empire and capital’ (Kanna, 2011: 1). Framed as oil-fueled aberrations that sprung miraculously out of the desert, Persian Gulf cities were long dismissed as serious entities and excised from scholarly narratives of twentieth-century urbanism. At about the same time, Nelida Fuccaro (2009: 5) wrote that even scholars of the Middle East often framed the historical experience of the Gulf as ‘exceptional’, and as detached both from other places and from its own past. Unfavorably contrasted with the ‘historic’ Arab capitals of Cairo, Damascus, Beirut or Baghdad, the Gulf becomes an aberration or accident of history, its lessons inapplicable elsewhere. To this day, popular and journalistic accounts continue to frame Gulf cities as models, lodestars or nightmares of the ‘globalization of urbanization’ (Brenner and Keil, 2006) and capitalist development, while Gulf regimes have expended staggering sums to advance their own preferred narratives of ‘tradition’ and ‘heritage’. In no small part owing to Fuccaro’s work, however, a new cadre of scholars has taken up the project of ‘de-exceptionalizing’ the Gulf. Over the course of the past decade, they have challenged older paradigms and moved the region to the cutting edge of scholarship on urban space. Their work offers a corrective to portrayals that de-historicize––and in so doing, misconstrue––the networks that have produced these urban spaces and their position in global flows. Far from being ‘brand new’ cultural centers ‘filling in the leadership vacuum’ left by the stagnant capitals of Cairo, Beirut and Damascus (Abdulla, 2013), Gulf cities have, in fact, been central to global capitalism, urban planning and architecture since at least the middle of the previous century, while their form is the result of a historical trajectory that long predates hydrocarbon windfalls (Elsheshtawy, 2008). The authors would like to thank Harvey Molotch, Davide Ponzini, Ahmed Kanna and the three anonymous IJURR reviewers for their generous comments and constructive suggestions. This article stems from the Learning from Gulf Cities initiative of NYU Abu Dhabi. A related version of this article will appear in The New Arab Urban: Gulf Cities of Wealth, Ambition, and Distress, edited by Harvey Molotch and Davide Ponzini, NYU Press (forthcoming). © 2018 Urban research PUblications limited BOODROOKAS AND KESHAVARZIAN 2 But while case studies of individual cities have overturned a raft of received narratives, there has been no systematic attempt to synthesize their insights into a regional comparison across the longue durée. Most works sharply divide the twentieth century into two distinct periods––‘before’ and ‘after’ oil (Khalaf, 2006). This periodization flattens historical legacies and juxtaposes two static eras––a ‘pre-oil’ and a ‘post-oil’––rather than tracing the continuities and contingencies of historical change. A number of persistent conceptual choices––methodological nationalism, the contemporary decoupling of the region into northern and southern shores, a focus on glossy hubs such as Dubai and a concomitant neglect of historically or regionally important spaces such as Ras al-Khaimah or Sohar, and the differentiation between small city states (such as Qatar, Kuwait and the UAE) versus larger nation states (for example, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran)––impose blinders and produce overly sharp categories on diverse populations in a fluid imperial context (For one of the few examples of work focusing on a smaller interior town, see Limbert, 2010). Newer works have yet to be addressed in the ever-growing literature on global urbanism and ‘world cities’. When the Gulf is mentioned at all, it is all too often portrayed as a field where the visions of urban planners and architects were executed rather than shaped. In short, new historical scholarship has yet to be fully evaluated, digested and incorporated into contemporary narratives of Gulf urbanism. We seek to illustrate the key historical and translocal processes that manufactured the region’s ‘global’ cities by taking the new Gulf historiography as a starting point, and suggesting how this new generation of academic work can inform urban scholarship on a global scale. We argue that the Gulf cities were not merely frontiers, but laboratories that shaped the field of urban planning itself. By tracing the global history of emergent urban forms such as the suburb and the mall––and particularly the interrelated development of ‘company towns’ and ‘colonial cities’––we reveal how the Gulf was a critical node for the formulation of some of the central urban technologies of the twentieth century well before this current era of globalizing urbanism. Gulf cities provided crucial funding for––and inspiration to––architectural and planning firms with global footprints and enduring legacies, thus playing a central role in shaping the burgeoning urban planning industry. As outlets for investment, Gulf cities linked ebbs and flows of global capitalism with the most intimate spaces of everyday life. Urban planning, and specifically land and property rights, become a means to interlace global capitalism and local state building. The Gulf, therefore, cannot be framed as an undiscovered ‘new world’, removed from the passage of historical time, until confronted by external metanarratives of oil or globalization. Rather, it has long been an ‘integral frontier’ to both global capitalism and urbanism. By weaving together parallel but distinct strands of secondary scholarship, we elaborate a history of urbanism in the Persian Gulf that has been absent in the pages of urban studies journals. In so doing, we hope to suggest how these works inform wider understandings of the urban, and how the Gulf and its people have left their mark on the work of architects and urbanists. Despite the diverse array of local specificities across Gulf cities and the twentieth century, it is possible to draw out a number of central themes. To counter top-down framings of Gulf cities as the product of visionary rulers and starchitects, we highlight how, well before the oil booms, urban space was defined by logics of capitalism, shifting legal regimes, strategies of wealth distribution and categories of differentiation. Urban space shaped personal identities and legal categories, challenging even the most seemingly rigid binaries between citizen and non-citizen, resident and migrant, nomadic and urban. As in other historical moments and places, buildings and infrastructure became the locations for investing surplus capital, but the particular embeddedness of the Gulf in flows of empire and labor shaped how its markets were forged (Harvey, 1982). Our examination of urban space in the region serves as a means for de-exceptionalizing Gulf cities, which are too often framed as illogical, ephemeral THE FOREVER FRONTIER OF URBANISM 3 or unreal. Instead, this article shows how even the most spectacular spaces in Gulf cities are embedded within global patterns, be they flows of capital or sovereign power, manifesting themselves in particular local and historical circumstances. These arguments depart from the received narratives about contemporary Gulf urbanism. Flattening representations of Gulf cities have persisted with remarkable tenacity, in no small part as a result of their value to the Gulf regimes. Often with singular and instrumental purpose, royal families have sought to reify a binary between ‘heritage’ and ‘modernity’, positioning themselves as guardians of the former and vanguards of the latter. They construct narratives of the past that emphasize Bedouin austerity or Arab tribal solidarity, framing dynastic rule as the ‘authentic’ mode of governance of a traditional, patrimonial society (Cooke, 2014). In so doing, they sideline the history of trade and migration that has long connected the Persian Gulf with the port cities of the Indian Ocean and the caravan routes of Asia (Onley, 2005; Bose, 2006). They also conveniently elide the central role of British imperialism in concentrating the fluid sovereignty that characterized the Gulf borderland into unitary sheikhly authority (Said Zahlan, 1989: 12–23; Commins, 2012; Takriti, 2013: 17). Long ruling as firsts among equals and dependent on the capital of powerful and mobile merchant families, most dynasties wrested total control of sovereignty through their role as British intermediaries. Thus the concept of ‘heritage’, bereft of historical contingency and laden with connotations of timeless primordialism, both silences the diversity that has long characterized Gulf cities and naturalizes an ethnocratic monarchy. With modernity and tradition positioned as simultaneous and antagonistic, the ruler becomes the arbiter who is uniquely capable of balancing both. Gulf states have mobilized a remarkable array of resources to buttress their preferred visions of the past. A visitor navigating the standard Orientalist array of falcons, camels and Bedouins is unlikely to suspect that long-distance trade long provided essential staples of everyday life to the region’s inhabitants. When the maritime past emerges, a diverse and fluid history of pearl divers, merchants and date growers is simplified to ‘Arab’ dhows and pioneering crews that supposedly signify precursors to contemporary entrepreneurial spirit. The many Persian speakers, enslaved people, non-Muslim communities and influential merchants from the Indian subcontinent who played a crucial role in the region’s history are subject to erasure. As Neha Vora (2013) shows, ‘foreigners’ are presumed to be a necessary evil that emerged as a result of the oil boom, rather than an integral part of the history of the port cities of the Gulf from their inception. The tropes of heritage, adorning everything from malls to postage stamps, are as ubiquitous as they are flattening (Fuccaro, 2014). Journalists, architectural practitioners and hired ‘urbanists’, in Ahmed Kanna’s terminology, have constructed similarly troubling narratives of Gulf exceptionalism. Critics have represented Gulf cities as extreme cases of neoliberal dystopia or globalization run amok, particularly in the case of Dubai. In a vivid yet representative piece, for example, Mike Davis dismisses Dubai as ‘a hallucinatory pastiche of the big, the bad and the ugly’ that has become ‘a new Mecca of conspicuous consumption and economic crime’ (Davis, 2006: 54). While a number of scholars have critiqued these blatantly exoticizing tropes (Kanna, 2011: 211; Buckley, 2013: 257), they nevertheless persist in the imagination of urban practitioners. For their part, Koolhaas and his AMO colleagues have been at the forefront of somewhat ‘hysterical accounts’ of Gulf cities as a frontier for urban possibility. These high-flying architects, planners and consultants lent their names to the battery of prestigious projects that have transformed the Gulf into a hub for cutting-edge design. The myth of the ‘genius architect’ is complemented by the narrative of the tabula rasa that frames the Gulf as a blank canvas for architectural showpieces. This narrative evacuates the region of both politics and history, and elides the networks of power and privilege that enable––and benefit from––their remarkable creations (Kanna, 2011). Architecture, then, is not merely a pillar of the regional branding BOODROOKAS AND KESHAVARZIAN 4 campaigns that have become key strategies for attracting foreign expertise, tourists and businesses––it also reinforces the image of ruling families as far-sighted, modernizing technocrats, thereby further depoliticizing and naturalizing their rule. Until the new millennium, scholars of urban studies had written very little about Gulf cities. However, the rise of centers such as Dubai, Doha and Abu Dhabi coincided with a renewed interest in understanding urban processes in relation to the internationalization of capital. Scholars have since undertaken a mapping of cities in relationship to multiple scales, networks and urban hierarchies in the context of what is often seen––sometimes with too much emphasis––as an unprecedented wave of globalization (Scott, 2006: 61–78). There has been a wave of indices, rankings and evaluations that have sought to measure the extent to which Gulf cities are ‘global’ or ‘globalizing’, whether they have the urban forms and financial structures needed for flexible accumulation, and how centrally they are positioned in global and regional networks (Parsa and Keivani, 2002; Bassens et al., 2010). Of particular interest has been the question of how Dubai has ‘achieved a presence on the world stage as a global city’ (Haines, 2011: 160), how this process of ‘worlding’ challenges models of development of these global cities and their role in the global economy (Bassens, 2013), or the extent to which a city’s status compares with other cities (Bassens et al., 2010).1 Michele Acuto (2014) reflects on the post-2008 global recession and the much-reported real-estate crisis in Dubai to challenge the very concept of ‘global cities’ and calls for scholarship that simultaneously documents the ‘global’ and the ‘ordinary’ dimensions of urban places. Meanwhile, Haines (2011: 161) reminds us that ‘Brand Dubai is an image that lives beyond and outside Dubai itself’, on billboards in India and Egypt, in financial brochures circulating in London and New York, and in the aspirations and plans of people near and far. Global branding, through everything from landholding to foreign direct investment, shapes the everyday lived experiences of urban space. But while these studies have taken the Gulf cities seriously as ‘world cities’, their wide analytical lens tends to abstract the Gulf away from its historical and regional context (King, 1990; Abu-Lughod, 1999).2 Developed to analyze the ‘command centers’ of late twentieth-century neoliberal capitalism, particularly in the older industrialized world, these studies too often elide extended engagement with ‘empire and capital’ between urban practitioners and the ports, oil fields and towns of the Gulf littoral. The Gulf has been shaped within a regional political economy in which Dubai and Kuwait emerged alongside oft-forgotten competitors such as Lingah and Basra. And even though forms of governance and political economies have shifted, the elites who benefit have remained remarkably stable. For us, ‘Gulf cities’ are not simply defined by an objective position on a Cartesian map, the presence of oil, or membership in the GCC (the Gulf Cooperation Council, established in 1981). Rather, what allows us to consider these uneven urban societies as sharing a genus is their historical place in transnational systems. The movements of capital, particular forms of commodification and value creation, and the remarkable role of non-citizen labor cannot be understood without reference to a particular regional trajectory. By juxtaposing various strands of scholarship that are too rarely placed in conversation and drawing out certain key themes, we try to indicate how a critical historical lens can contribute to wider conceptions of the urban. Uneven urbanism across the longue durée The popular image of Gulf cities is a confused amalgamation of two contradictory tropes: the neoliberal dreamland on a tabula rasa, or ‘Islamic cities’ structured by static notions of tribalism or paternalism. However, it is a mistake to frame a narrative in which 1 2 See the Globalization and World Cities Network (http://www.lboro.ac.uk/gawc/) (accessed 4 June 2017), which has ranked Dubai’s level of connectedness as increasing steadily since 2008. It is striking that in his world systems approach to colonial cities, King makes almost no reference to Middle Eastern, let alone Persian Gulf cities, except for a few passing references to Cairo and Aden. THE FOREVER FRONTIER OF URBANISM 5 ‘globalization’ increasingly impinges on a preexisting ‘Arab’ or ‘native’ city. Instead, contemporary urban forms in the region are built on, and informed by, intertwined legacies of imperial rule and extractive capitalism. Twentieth-century urban experts, drawing on technologies of architecture and city planning, etched colonial and racial hierarchies deep into the structure of Gulf cities, as British officials and transnational corporations used space to divide, control and mobilize populations. In turn, these populations pushed back, challenging or appropriating spaces in new and unexpected ways. Group formation and individual identification has thus shaped, and has been shaped by, the very fabric of urban space in the Gulf. If, as Anthony King has written, ‘All cities today are “world cities”, yet they have not just assumed that role overnight’ (King, 1990: 82), then urban spaces in the Gulf are testament to the long and enduring influence of empire, capitalism and urban differentiation. The region has been an entrepôt for centuries, its residents reliant on trade brought by the annual monsoon winds for basic daily necessities (Fattah, 1997). Port cities emerged around pearls, dates and slaves––the mainstays of the Gulf economy until the early twentieth century––creating a wealthy class of mobile merchants (Fuccaro, 2009: 33). Cross-class, communal and vertical solidarities were crucial, even as they enforced a multitude of hierarchies and exclusions. When conducting fieldwork in the mid-twentieth century, anthropologist Peter Lienhardt recorded nostalgic tales of the pre-oil merchants, who would paternalistically care for their pearl divers in the off-season and pay off the debts of compatriots who faced financial setbacks (Lienhardt, 1993: 99). If political conditions turned unfavorable, merchants reserved the right to move elsewhere, limiting the ability of the political authorities to collect taxes or build strong states (Crystal, 1990). Contemporary distinctions between the ‘Arab’ and ‘Persian’ sides of the Gulf would have made little sense to these multilingual merchants, many of whom used a strategy of scattering family members across the Gulf littoral and Indian Ocean world (Potter, 2009; Keshavarzian, 2016). However, the nostalgia trap can be dangerous. Narratives of a cosmopolitan ‘golden age’ can gloss over the inequalities and hierarchies that underpinned the regional port economy. Indeed, struggle and change have characterized the Gulf cities since their inception. In her remarkable work on Manama, which traces the city’s history from the turn of the nineteenth century through the 1950s, Nelida Fuccaro (2009: 97) notes that ‘family traditions portray the second half of the nineteenth century as a major rupture in the history of Manama’, as emerging global markets and changing fashions in Europe and the United States (US) triggered unprecedented demand for pearls and dates. She traces how the ruling family leveraged its position as an imperial intermediary to consolidate its control over urban marketplaces and pearl banks and, in so doing, positioned itself as the arbiter of the island’s economy. British officials formalized the tribal division of pearl banks, thus establishing offshore property rights and the sovereign control of natural resources before the onset of oil trade (ibid.: 60). Likewise, land emerged as a central generator of value. As regimes sought to diversify their economies with liberalized property laws and ever-larger prestige projects, land and real estate attracted newfound attention by scholars of the region in the past decade (Davidson, 2008: 128; Hvidt, 2009; Buckley and Hanieh, 2014). Yet the property-rights regime, which placed the bulk of land in the control of the ruling families, created early incentives for land reclamation and infrastructural and construction projects as vehicles to raise revenue for the state and accumulate wealth for the ruling families and select allies. By ruthlessly enforcing the payment of shopkeepers’ fees, for instance, the Bahraini ruling family guaranteed itself a steady stream of revenue, while the property market of Manama turned into a hub of speculation that long predated the transformations of the oil years (Fuccaro, 2009: 88). While established urban centers were diverse, they were also divided. Fuccaro describes turn-of-the-century Manama as ‘the archetype of a segmentary urban system’, BOODROOKAS AND KESHAVARZIAN 6 with local institutions divided by class, religion or place of birth (Fuccaro, 2009: 110; on segmentation in Bushehr, see Martin, 2005: 29–30). Gulf urbanism is thus a testament to Janet Abu-Lughod’s statement that cities ‘contain accretions of successive types of settlements that have layered, one upon the other, vastly different patterns of development and reconstruction, until the composite whole becomes difficult to grasp’ (Abu-Lughod, 1999: 3). The segmented boom-and-bust ‘oil cities’ of the Gulf are not merely another byproduct of oil, as the global economic depression––combined with the culturing of pearls in Japan and the growing of dates in California––triggered a regional economic crash in the 1930s (Hopper, 2014). Indeed, as regional products were shipped to markets from Paris to Massachusetts, the Gulf and its residents helped shape the global capitalist system. As pearling, date farming and boat building gave way to hydrocarbon extraction in the early twentieth century, new urban spaces created new strategies for the accumulation of wealth and control of populations. These were exemplified by the segregated enclaves designed and built by oil companies, most notably Abadan, Ahmadi and Awali in present-day Iran, Kuwait and Bahrain, respectively. These took on the form of ‘colonial city’ or ‘garden city’, representing the cutting edge of colonial urbanism (King, 1990). Abadan provides a useful example. Like Ahmadi, its later counterpart in Kuwait, Abadan was designed by James Wilson, who served as assistant to Sir Edwin Lutyens in the planning of colonial New Delhi during the first world war. It was founded and managed by the Iraqi Public Works Department from 1920 to 1926 (Crinson, 1997: 348; Alissa, 2013: 43). Wilson helped transport the urban forms of the Raj into the Gulf, replicating and updating their symbolic hierarchies in a new context. While ‘senior’ employees––meaning, with few exceptions, ‘white’ employees––enjoyed the amenities of lush suburbs and bungalows (King, 1990: 95–129), other workers were housed in a parallel urban form: the labor camp. Some labor camps were unplanned, emerging as shanty towns for workers who were coming to be seen as both foreign and temporary; indeed, their very ramshackle informality reinforced perceptions of their occupants as transient interlopers (Seccombe and Lawless, 1987: 39, 42). Corporations sought to cut costs by framing workers as part of a temporary ‘construction phase’ that would soon be over, thus claiming that the construction of livable housing and the institution of worker training programs would be unnecessary and wasteful (ibid.: 60; see also Ehsani, 2003: 361–99). Urban space and the built environment were thus implicated, from the beginning, in producing migrant workers as temporary and as valuable primarily for their labor, despite their central role in the social and political history of the region (Ahmed, 2012). Projects such as Ahmadi and Abadan were simultaneously ‘colonial cities’ and ‘company towns’, designed to address the specific concern of managing large numbers of workers in a remote region. With roots in corporate paternalism, Fordism and colonial hierarchy, they provided housing, education, recreation and transport facilities for employees. Indeed, genealogically, many were inspired by Jim Crow or plantation systems (Ehsani, 2003; Grandin, 2009; Vitalis, 2009). They were often strategically isolated from preexisting urban areas, which were themselves often labeled ‘native towns’. Most importantly, services and spaces were deeply unequal. The amenities and spaces of company towns blended imperial strategies of governing through difference and corporate techniques of dividing workers, and reflected a strict racial and economic hierarchy (Seccombe and Lawless, 1987; Vitalis, 2009; Alissa, 2013). In Abadan, members of the ‘native’ workforce, consisting of Iranian and South Asian laborers, were located on the opposite side of the mammoth refinery, originally in tents and self-built huts. In Ahmadi, meanwhile, urban space ‘replicated the company’s policy of ethnic segregation’, down to the minutest details (Alissa, 2013: 45). Anthropologist Peter Lienhardt, who visited Ahmadi in the 1950s, noted that even ‘the domestic furniture provided for each family correspond[s] to the householder’s grade of employment in the company. Any wife invited out for a cup of coffee would be reminded by the furniture how much THE FOREVER FRONTIER OF URBANISM 7 higher or lower ... [her] hostess’s husband rated’ (Lienhardt, 1993: 31). Backed by public-relations campaigns, gendered civilizing missions and a rhetoric of corporate paternalism, oil companies embraced the role of urban space as a mechanism of division and differentiation (Alissa, 2013; Damluji, 2013; Fuccaro, 2013). Citino (2005/2006: 44–5) perceptively recounts that the idealized suburban life in Aramco’s compounds represented the ‘abundance of American society brought to the Middle East’ even as their exclusion caused disenchantment among many employees. As these examples clearly show, ‘colonial cities’ and ‘company towns’ were not mutually exclusive; indeed, the forms influenced each other, evolving simultaneously across metropole and colony. This is a key, yet under-appreciated, insight of the new Gulf historiography. As elsewhere, the corporate and imperial production of uneven spaces was instrumentally linked to the production of particular subjects. Fuccaro has written extensively on oil-company public relations in mid-century Bahrain, where technologies of film and advertising were mobilized to shape ‘new urban and suburban lifestyles’ (Fuccaro, 2013: 60). Positioning itself as a vanguard of modernization, the company ‘construed and popularized two contrasting profiles: that of the expatriate housewife of suburban Awali as shopper and the urbanite oil worker as the accomplished company employee’ (ibid.: 70). With regard to Abadan, Mark Crinson (1997: 352) frames Wilson’s urban plan as a mechanism for the production and control of an industrial proletariat. A similar desire for proletarianization drove the creation of the Arab Village near Ahmadi in Kuwait (Alissa, 2013:48). Police forces doubly reified group differences: not only did they enforce policies of urban segmentation, but often preferred to hire officers from minority populations (Crystal, 2005; Eamon, 2015). Although established by foreign firms and under colonial concessions, even after nationalization of the oil industries these firms were focused on producing and disciplining labor power as they processed oil for the world market (Ehsani, 2003: 382). Sometimes, as in the case of Kuwait, spatial arrangements reproduced divisions that are often thought to be far older. Farah al-Nakib (2014) traces how state housing policies from the 1950s reified a divide between Kuwaitis who were formerly ‘nomadic’ or ‘settled’, long after the country had been entirely urbanized. She argues that the process resulted in the political inclusion but social marginalization of Bedouin Kuwaitis, who were instrumentally re-tribalized to create a political support base for the regime. This process was accompanied by schemes that involved providing free land and housing to all Kuwaitis in specially zoned suburbs, which resulted in an additional citizen/non-citizen binary and, as Asseel al-Ragam (2017) notes, led to the neglect of the old city center, clearly bringing the contradictions of state policy into view. Thus, by isolating nuclear families in suburbs consisting of single-family dwellings, physically and morally separating spaces of work and leisure, and reifying categories of identification through careful zoning, states and corporations sought to shape not only urban space, but also the individuals who lived in it (Alissa, 2013: 53). These forms of socio-spatial control did not go unchallenged. Indeed, from the 1920s to the 1950s, successive waves of protest swept across the region, explicitly reshaping the exclusivist paradigms that were shaping urban growth. As John Chalcraft notes, non-citizen residents were crucial actors in this process, often forging coalitions that crossed boundaries of language, citizenship and place of birth (Chalcraft, 2011). In his work on Saudi Arabia, Robert Vitalis reasons that Aramco replicated the Jim Crow segregation of the copper mines in the American southwest and adopted the racially based wage scales that were employed in Mexico and Venezuela in the oil towns of Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province. Its racially segmented wage system and segregated housing policies were only changed as a result of the collective resistance of outraged Saudi and Italian workers in the late 1940s and 1950s, who appropriated the American suburb as a new symbol of Saudi modernity (Vitalis, 2009; Seccombe, 2010). In Abadan, labor protests in the 1920s led to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s management viewing BOODROOKAS AND KESHAVARZIAN 8 ‘the bazaar’ and ‘town’ as threatening and unruly, and hence to the commissioning of a new plan for streets and housing for the emergent local working class (Ehsani, 2003: 371; Cronin, 2010). Meanwhile, in port cities, especially Kuwait, Manama and Dubai, merchants repeatedly mobilized to call for councils and legislative bodies to monitor the expanding budgets of royal families and to regulate spending on public projects such as roads (Tétreault, 2000; Davidson, 2007; Fuccaro, 2009). As struggles over urban space bled over into issues of oil nationalization and antiimperialism, Gulf cities became spaces where wider questions of equality were contested. Ironically, strict regimentation opened unforeseen opportunities for residents of these planned company towns and model homes to make them their own, reconfiguring what companies, urban planners and rulers had imagined. Reem Alissa (2013: 52) documents how Ahmadi’s racially segregated modernity was upended as Kuwaiti employees moved from the Arab Village to the formerly white suburb. With its green spaces, spacious homes and array of domestic amenities, Ahmadi was transformed from a segregated enclave into a nostalgic symbol of oil-driven modernity for Kuwaitis (ibid.: 55). Simultaneously, as Farah al-Nakib (2013: 13) notes, the urban core of Kuwait was emptied of its historic residents and replaced with non-citizen workers. More recently, Yasser Elsheshtawy (2016) showed how the Emirati ‘national house’ (or ‘people’s house’), which was originally commissioned in the early 1970s, has been reconfigured in ways unforeseen and unintended by the Emiratis who had been living in them. In this sense, battles over ‘the right to the city’ were transfigured into wider movements for participation and appropriation in emerging national polities. As these examples clearly show, the Gulf was a node for the production of new urban forms across the twentieth century. Equally important was how its particular historical and spatial context shaped how these forms were imagined and produced, with important implications for urban spaces across the globe. A comparison can be made to the work of Greg Grandin, who uses the case of Fordlandia to follow Fordism into, and then back out of, the Brazilian jungle (Grandin, 2009). A place of both creation and experimentation, the Gulf has been simultaneously subject to––and generative of––new conceptions of space, modernity and urban planning. An ever-modern frontier Gulf cities are often portrayed as youthful debutantes or precocious youngsters, as if they were scrambling to catch up to a global standard of maturity. Anthropomorphism and developmentalism are ubiquitous tropes in the accounts of both optimists and pessimists. Supporters see Gulf cities as glamorous paragons of modernity finally having their ‘moment’ (Abdulla, 2012), while critics disdainfully dismiss their ‘hormonally adolescent urban growth’ (Parker, 2005). Both critiques, however, miss that the Gulf has been the ‘new frontier’ for architects and planners since the early twentieth century. As the architectural historian Tanis Hinchcliffe (2013: 27) has astutely commented in a historical survey of British architects in the mid-century Gulf, ‘at the same time the Middle East was seeking to transform its physical fabric with modern buildings, America––and to a certain extent Europe––were [sic] also changing the face of their own cities’. The Gulf states were not trying to keep up with an already well-established modernism, but were, in fact, an integral part of its emergence. This was reflected in the title of a 1975 feature in the Architectural Record, which asked if the Middle East was indeed the ‘new frontier’ (Hinchcliffe, 2013: 27). According to Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis, the Arabian Peninsula and shores of the Persian Gulf were seen as a wilderness to be penetrated by unrelenting advances of civilization (Turner, 1940). But as critical scholars of capitalism have noted, the frontier had to be continually reproduced as a generator of value, as space was recommodified, revalued and redistributed to the benefit of architectural firms, construction companies and developers (Massey, 1994; Moore, 2015). THE FOREVER FRONTIER OF URBANISM 9 Scholars working on cities and urban planning under colonial rule have acknowledged that conceptions of modernity and the management of space were products of a dialogical exchange between the imperial metropole and the colonized periphery (Rabinow, 1989; King, 1990; Çelik, 1997). In fact, urban planning in the colonies often is coeval with, or even comes prior to, planning in the metropole. As King (1999: 24) observes, ‘Colonial planning affords an example of a comprehensive and positive planning theory put into practice by government many decades before this became feasible in the metropolitan society’. As early as the 1920s, comprehensive urban planning was articulated and implemented in the Persian Gulf region, a move that followed the establishment of municipal government in Manama in 1919 and in Kuwait in 1930 (Fuccaro, 2009: 112; Al-Nakib, 2016: 36). But the role of planning bodies, which had become forums for elite landowners to defend their propertied interest, shifted dramatically as colonial officials and corporations built freestanding enclaves from the ground up. Through these new towns, planners sought to produce modern subjects who could be disciplined by the state and available for labor and consumer markets, simultaneously drawing on and informing similar projects in metropolitan Britain. In his design of Abadan, Wilson was inspired by the ‘garden city’ model, which was simultaneously being developed by social reformers and urban planners in Hampstead and New Delhi as a means to generate social harmony while spatially reifying social distinctions of class and race. Abadan’s bungalows were themselves enmeshed within colonial networks. Originally developed in British India and then adopted in Britain the 1890s ‘as a cultural model of living in non-urban, or ex-urban areas’, the bungalow was adopted in Abadan for the technical and management elite who, at least initially, were exclusively British (Crinson, 1997: 345). Even gardeners were imported to Abadan from New Delhi and Kew (ibid.: 343). Far from being ‘blank slates’ on which European specialists could practice their already tested craft, the Gulf cities shaped the specialists themselves. After the second world war and in tandem with the process of decolonization, the dynamics of this translocal urban design shifted. The British were in a strong position to win commissions in the Gulf. Not only could they build on their existing colonialadministration and personal connections, but British firms had become pioneers in town planning by the 1950s. Thus, in 1951, when the Kuwaiti government commissioned its first comprehensive city plan, it turned a British firm closely associated with the postwar New Town planning movement in England––Minoprio, Spencely and Macfarlane. Kuwait, which would be a protectorate of Britain for another decade, was offered a ‘new vision for Kuwait City ... based on the British New Town precedent, with a comprehensive road network, clear zoning for different uses, and a protective “green belt”’ (Jones, 2013: 41). Minoprio, Spencely and Macfarlane had recently completed the plan for Crawley in West Sussex and would go on to offer plans for Baghdad and Dhaka. Crinson (2016: 221), commenting on two notable practitioners of ‘tropical architecture’, concluded that they ‘were the masters of these new opportunities, equally at home with colonial officials and nationalist leaders, with government departments and large corporations, and with the Modernist establishment as much as with the young Turks of the avant-garde’. Meanwhile, in the context of the emerging cold war, the paradigm of modernization in the US rested on valorizing affluent suburbs and the suburban home in juxtaposition to Soviet communism (Citino, 2005/2006: 42). The colonial city was evolving into the model suburb. John Harris and Jill Harris (née Rowe), are prime examples of this generation of architects who made their careers on the shores of the Gulf.3 In 1952, the husbandand-wife team, both recent graduates of the Architectural Association of London, had 3 Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, the authors of Tropical Architecture in the Humid Zone, published in 1956, were also active in colonial and postcolonial regions, including Kuwait and Iran. BOODROOKAS AND KESHAVARZIAN 10 failed to win the Nairobi Town Hall competition (Morris, 1984: 5). But the pair quickly recovered from this setback by winning the competition for the Doha State Hospital, which ‘ensured that a struggling young practice survived the adverse post-war economic conditions’ (Hinchcliffe, 2013: 27). By the end of the decade, John R. Harris Architects had drafted the first town plan for Dubai, designed six hospitals and opened offices in Kuwait and Tehran, which would serve as the firm’s headquarters as it worked on projects for the National Iranian Oil Company. The firm flourished in the Gulf for several decades, establishing a presence across the Gulf littoral as it deployed contemporary planning practices such as the ring-radial form. The tendency of architectural firms to work simultaneously in the Gulf and the industrialized nations of Euro-America continued, and even accelerated, after the 1960s. Nathan Citino (2005/2006: 39) articulates this dialogical process between the Gulf region and US urbanism as follows: ‘Not only did Middle Eastern oil become indispensable to an automobile-centered mass-consumption society, but the sort of suburban landscape that flourished in the post-war U.S. shaped ideas about modernity that Americans then sought to export to the Arab world’. Pioneering urban and architectural forms sprouted across the Gulf, often prefiguring developments elsewhere. Victor Gruen, the ‘father of the mall’ who would later become a prominent critic of shopping centers, won the contract for the master plan for Tehran in 1966 (Emami, 2014) during the peak of his career as a planner of cities and malls in the US (Wall, 2006). Gruen’s ‘dumbbell plan’ for malls as ‘a pastoral alternative to perceived ills of urbanity’ was subsequently adopted in Dubai and across the region, only to be supplanted by the latest models that simultaneously appeared in London and Dubai in the 2000s (Jewell, 2013: 175–6). Other notable planners and architects of this period that were commissioned to draft urban plans, design palaces and offer models for free trade zones included firms headed by Louis Kahn, Kenzo Tange, Richard Llewelyn Davies and Frank Lloyd Wright (Keshavarzian, 2010; Mohajeri, 2015). These architects and engineers were also learning while they worked in the Gulf region. Concrete provides perhaps the most evocative example. It was soon discovered that a number of ecological factors combined to accelerate the deterioration of concrete in the Gulf. After trial and error in the region and beyond, a number of solutions were devised to increase the longevity of concrete structures, with one study concluding ‘that the experience gained has greatly increased understanding of concrete durability, the benefit of which will be felt worldwide’ (Roberts and Flower, 1995: 68). Other engineering and architectural innovations, including ones that were ‘gambles’ or ‘not the most economic’, were developed in the context of the large-scale and interrelated construction projects built under extreme environmental conditions and subject to stringent timetables (ibid., 1995: 143).4 Thus, the specificities of the Gulf, from the harshness of its ecology to the frenetic pace of its building boom, were literally incorporated into the fabric of the world’s cities. In recent years, it has become increasingly common for commentators to describe contemporary architecture and urban development in Europe and North America as bearing the imprint of the spectacular cities of the Arab Gulf. The Financial Times, for instance, offered its readers a scathing critique of the architecture on the banks of the Thames River, which, alas, ‘closely resembles Dubai’ (Heathcote, 2016). The debates over whether the Dubai model exists, whether it can be replicated, and whether it is normatively attractive have spilled over into academic literature (Hvidt, 2009). It is not commonly acknowledged that many of the construction firms and architectural imaginaries that are now (re)making cities, ports and skylines––that seemingly mimic Dubai and Doha––were involved in fashioning these Gulf cities in the first place. 4 See also Roberts and Flower (1995: 92, 128, 131), Ramos (2010: 111–2) and Maclean (2017). THE FOREVER FRONTIER OF URBANISM 11 Urbanism as capital circulation Over the course of the twentieth century, urban space in the Gulf emerged as a central node for the fixing, circulation and redistribution of capital. The logics of accumulation must be understood as a central structure that shaped the outline of urban spaces across the longue durée. By leveraging their connections to the state, preoil elites were often able to maintain their wealth and influence through construction contracts and land-speculation ventures, while British design and construction firms found a valuable client base during a period of austerity at home. While the oil-fueled boom swept across the Gulf, its effects were anything but uniform. It was shaped by the historical outlines of previous settlements, patterns of land ownership, class coalitions and technological transformations, lavishing fabulous wealth on some cities and individuals while bypassing others (Jones, 2010: 184; Keshavarzian, 2016). While these cities functioned, in the words of Harvey Molotch (1976), as ‘growth machines’, they often did so despite, rather than because of, plans and planners. The unevenness produced by urban space eventually spread across the region, as Gulf elites and state corporations invested surplus capital in urban hubs beyond the immediate locales (Hanieh, 2013: 123–44). A renewed focus on urban space has added valuable nuances to work on the political economy of the Gulf. While it is tempting to see oil as the force that transformed land into a generator of value, it was the imperial imposition of unitary sovereignty that enabled both the creation of a market in land and the dominance of ruling families and their allies. Farah al-Nakib (2016: 38) demonstrates how, at the turn of the twentieth century, Sheikh Mubarak of Kuwait freely distributed land, only to turn around several years later and demand that occupants repurchase their own plots, with prices determined by the ruler’s own appraisers.5 Thus, it was Mubarak’s absolute sovereignty, secured by his compact with British imperialism, which enabled the Kuwaiti ruling family to secure the land that became one of its primary sources of income in the pre-oil era. In Saudi Arabia, the state expropriated and seized massive swaths of land from its nomadic population in a nationalization program that was legitimated by international development consultants and models of urbanization that valorized automobiles (Menoret, 2014: 83). But, as Toby Jones (2010: 81) notes, the state did not ‘follow through on the promise of land ownership’, instead using access to land as another means of exerting control over its population. Finally, in Iran’s province of Khuzestan, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company’s intervention eventually enabled the centralized state to sweep away its local competitors (Cronin, 2004). Thus, while oil certainly raised the stakes in land speculation, the commodification of both land and oil relied on the imposition of totalizing territorial sovereignty across the Gulf, a process that long predated the hydrocarbon age. The building boom, then, was fueled as much by shifting conceptions of property as it was by oil. With their hold on land secure, merchant families and members of ruling families jockeyed to profit through every phase of the development process. This began with planning. Several recent case studies drawing on the archives of planning firms trace how this process worked. As soon as plans were announced in Dubai, Riyadh and Kuwait, speculators with inside information, many of whom were ruling family members, rushed to buy up empty plots to resell to the government. Alternatively, after learning that a planning scheme would increase the value of their land, original owners would hold out until their plots were purchased at astronomical prices. Some of the largest profits were realized before anything had been physically built. In Kuwait, with almost comic repetitiveness, several rounds of planning were rendered financially impracticable as the announcement of new schemes triggered waves of land speculation 5 For a discussion of this process in Dubai, see Ramos (2010: 67–9). Toby Jones (2010) identifies land in rural Saudi Arabia similarly as a method of creating inequalities and political conflicts. BOODROOKAS AND KESHAVARZIAN 12 (Al-Nakib, 2016: 41). In the explosive building boom of the immediate post-oil period, land speculation and construction in Kuwait City (as in Riyadh) became so profitable that these crowded out other investments and de-incentivized economic diversification, compounding the deleterious monetary effects of oil exports (Menoret, 2014: 128). Land purchasing soon became the single largest expenditure in the Kuwaiti budget, as elites with access to municipal bodies and land registration departments leveraged insider information and political influence to seize unheard-of profits (Al-Najjar, 1984). Across the region, real-estate augmented pre-oil channels of rentier wealth, including raiding at sea and on caravan trails, fishing licenses and air landing fees from nascent commercial airlines and the British military air force (Davidson, 2007). Ramos’s study of Dubai (2010) uncovered how planning and land laws that enabled the ruler to grant and reserve land were growth strategies that were schematic, flexible and never fully implemented. New proposals and large infrastructural projects, such as the Jebel Ali manmade port or land reclamation schemes, could thus be proposed and implemented by the monarch, his mercantile allies and cadre of advisors from international firms. Ultimately, Ramos concludes that this pattern of urban development, which was neither hampered by democratic participation nor by technocratic adherence to ‘the plan’, allowed Dubai to be ‘reactive’, ‘swift’ and ‘nimble’––characteristics that were present in other locations in the region too, to some extent or another. Citizens of the Gulf states were not the only beneficiaries of this process. The building boom that started in the late 1940s came as a godsend to British international construction and consulting firms that were struggling to survive in an environment characterized by domestic fiscal austerity in the postwar years. As Egypt, Iraq and Sudan gained full independence in the 1950s, consulting and engineering firms redirected their energies towards the capital-rich Gulf region (Ramos, 2010: 93). One scholar of the construction industry notes that ‘Leafing through the architectural magazines, particularly those of the 1970s, it is not unusual to find articles chronicling the activities of numerous British firms working in the Gulf, and it could be claimed that this work kept the architectural profession in this country afloat, especially during the recurring periods of recession in the post-war era’ (Hinchcliffe, 2013: 23). British firms continue to reminisce about the ease with which projects were managed and the profits accumulated in the early oil years. Sir William Halcrow and Partners, who enjoyed almost a monopoly over construction projects in Dubai, stated in the company brochure celebrating its 125th anniversary: ‘All approval was verbal, a far cry from the cut-throat post-war arena of Europe’ (Roberts and Flower, 1995: 138). As a ‘spatial fix’ for a moment of crisis, the British government was deeply invested in firms winning contracts and projects because its current and former protectorates were the largest holders of sterling. While after the second world war the British government focused on Iran as a source of sterling reserves, attention soon shifted elsewhere (Bostock and Jones, 1989: 55). In 1967, Kuwait, despite gaining independence in 1961, became the single largest foreign holder of sterling (Fain, 2008: 3). This financial incentive for urban development was only enhanced after the 1970s oil shock: ‘In 1976 Edmund Dell, the British Secretary of State for Trade, compared the expansion of the Arab countries as “the nearest modern industrial equivalent to the booming days of the American gold rush”’ (Hinchcliffe, 2013: 31). The concentration of expertise in metropolitan Britain was thus redeployed to combat the sterling crisis. Architect Raglan Squire recounted that in the 1950s, when his practice needed a boost, he read in a paper that ‘there were 22,000 fully qualified architects in England, while in the Commonwealth countries the numbers could still be counted on the fingers of one hand’ (Hinchcliffe, 2013: 24). Squire ended up opening an office in Baghdad and was commissioned to draw the master plan for Mosul, while other British firms received contracts for Baghdad and Basra. While the Iraqi revolution of 1958 overturned the prominent position of British firms, other Western architects, including Constantinos THE FOREVER FRONTIER OF URBANISM 13 Doxiadis, stepped in. As a British engineer and planner commented in 1977, ‘There is a great opportunity which is opening up for a whole range of British expertise to be applied to a large number of building programmes in a way which will ensure that our knowledge and expertise is used to solve the problems of the countries concerned and not to saddle them with inappropriate buildings’ (Hinchcliffe, 2013: 34, emphasis added). Yet, as Hinchcliffe himself comments, this was a prescription for the perpetual British ‘quest to run other peoples’ lives for them’ (ibid.), one that would be appropriated, adapted and reconfigured for subsequent generations of Gulf elites. Conclusion When Jean Nouvel was asked by a reporter for the Financial Times what inspired his design for the Louvre Abu Dhabi building––a vast dome of latticework that was opened in 2017––he is said to have responded as follows: ‘I’m a contextual architect’, he says, ‘and I wanted the building to belong to the culture’. He looks around, as if to indicate there really isn’t very much context here. ‘We had three elements: the sun, the sky and the sea, and we wanted to make it clear that this is a building that belongs to the sea’. He went on to say that ‘the exhibits come from all four corners of the world, but that it should not be only a safe. We have to protect and conserve, but that’s not enough. We need to create a desire to return here, to provoke discussion, to create the beginnings of an agora’ (Heathcote, 2017). Based on Nouvel’s perspective, its French director, Manuel Rabaté, describes the museum as ‘the first universal museum of the Arab world’––notwithstanding its miniscule collection from the Arab world itself (ibid.). The idea that architectural experts from abroad are needed to create ‘the beginnings’ of a public space in the Persian Gulf is, as this article makes clear, a reflection of longstanding tropes. It is also a significant mistake with far-reaching consequences. By recognizing that Persian Gulf cities are not simply of-the-moment, but also of-the-past, it becomes clear that the counterposition of the local and the global is a false one. Despite being remade and even unmade for ‘the future’, these cities retain material traces and organizing conventions from imperial moments, early state-building efforts, and a myriad capitalist projects stretching back to the pearling era. Up to the mid-twentieth century, these towns were critical nodes on maritime and land-based trading routes that circulated goods, pilgrims, ‘forced’ and ‘free’ labor, while cutting across multiple and shifting sovereignties. While these patterns were disrupted by new forms of territoriality and state building under the shadow of British imperialism, new technologies (such as steamships), industries (pearling, boat building), and oil exploration and extraction, these histories were not erased. Similarly, mid-century company towns and ‘growth machines’ were not eradicated by skyscrapers, free trade zones and international branding campaigns at the turn of the current millennium. These layers of urban history must be excavated to understand how these cities have remained an ‘integral frontier’ of urban capitalism––one built in relationship to other places––and to expose the tangled lineages of social segmentation and urban space (Massey, 1994). Yet we envision this article only as the beginning of what must be a much larger process of incorporating the Gulf into studies of global or ‘mobile urbanism’ (McCann and Ward, 2011). It is clear that architects and city planners learnt from their experiences in the Gulf, as individuals, firms and ideas ricocheted around a global marketplace. More detailed primary studies will be needed to draw out exactly how the Gulf left its mark on urban forms elsewhere, and to trace exactly how ideas and capital moved from the Gulf into other centers. The link between land, sovereignty and capital BOODROOKAS AND KESHAVARZIAN 14 remains undertheorized, as does the historical role of migration. Additional studies that bridge the pre- and post-oil eras would help illustrate continuities across the longue durée, while a renewed focus on social history would add texture to a historiography that is still weighted towards political and imperial themes. Less glamorous cities, particularly in Iraq, Iran and Oman, are often bypassed, despite their integral role in regional transformations. Finally, additional comparative or regional studies could help draw out local specificities while painting a broader picture (Keshavarzian, 2010; Commins, 2012; Keshavarzian, 2016). This line of analysis challenges the discursive framework surrounding many of the region’s new prestige projects, by highlighting the dangers of ahistorical or teleological narratives of urbanization. Abu Dhabi’s Masdar Institute, for example, is framed as a universal model for the future, while being physically and institutionally separated from both city and region. Rather than a model, it functions more like an enclosure and, unsurprisingly, has had negligible impact on the massive carbon footprint of most Gulf cities (Günel, 2016). Many discussions also ignore the century-long history of viewing science and technology as a means to exert human mastery over nature in the Arabian Peninsula (Jones, 2010). While the Louvre and Guggenheim projects in Abu Dhabi are framed as opportunities to make art accessible in the Middle East or to refute Eurocentric conceptions of classical art, when placed in the context of the city itself, other purposes become evident. Cloistered on Saadiyat Island, the flagship quasi-state development project of Abu Dhabi Emirate, it is clear that at the local scale the museums are designed to add value to an elite real estate project reserved for those who are recognized as being sufficiently cosmopolitan and global in the right ways. By neglecting their relationship to different places and scales, discussions of flagship projects can reinforce the paradigm of the desert tabula rasa and fail to acknowledge their role in reinforcing preexisting networks of power and capital. 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