ABSTRACT
Chapters 4 to 6 looked at Dubai’s historical origins and developments and discussed the various planning and architectural strategies employed to establish its credentials as a global city. Beginning in Chapter 7 and continuing in this chapter I am setting up a counter narrative by looking at the city’s less spectacular aspects. In Chapter 7 my focus was on the retail environment and in this chapter I look at the city’s urban public spaces – the gathering spaces of the low-income inhabitants, migrants, workers and others. These spaces are hardly discussed in the literature on Dubai which is dominated by writers who have merely experienced the city in passing, leading to all sorts of misrepresentations focusing on extremes: luxurious megaprojects or the abject squalor of desert-based labour camps. Both clearly exist, but within this spectrum is a wide range of settings that defi es easy categorization and seems to escape the gaze of observers – the spaces of everyday life.
