ABSTRACT
The city-state of Dubai, a small emirate located on the Arabian Gulf, has been a crossroads for transient residents and travellers since its establishment as a small fi shing village in the nineteenth century. Within the last two decades it has witnessed rapid urban growth due in part from the income generated from oil revenue, but mostly from various economic and industrial developments (fi gure 8.1). Its multi-cultural (hybrid) nature is evident from its unique population
make up: a city of approximately 1 million residents, where locals form a minority (the number varies from 8 per cent to 20 per cent) while the majority are of Arab, Asian and Western nationalities. Given this unique population as well as its location at the tip of the Arabian peninsula, Dubai has become a border region in which one can detect a variety of ‘confl icts’: West/East, modernization/fundamentalism, Arab/Asian and so on. These confl icts are resolved spatially through a policy which on the face of it attempts to reconcile through co-existence, but a closer examination reveals an exclusionary direction through the development of clearly defi ned ‘borders’ i.e. zones or enclaves.
