ABSTRACT
‘I will keep watering this garden till I leave.’ These were the words of an elderly Emirati woman, who was living in a Sha’bī (national) house in Dubai with her son and his family. They were in a neighbourhood called Sha’bīyat al Shorta, allocated for employees of Dubai’s burgeoning police force in the 1970s. It was slated for demolition and I was there with my trusted research assistant and PhD student Omar Al-Bastaki. I had been commissioned by The Guardian to write a piece on Dubai and as part of that assignment needed to select a location for a 5-minute video which – in my view – would be representative of the city (The Guardian, 2014) The Shorta neighbourhood had always been on my mind as a place that I wanted to visit; it was very close to the posh Jumeirah neighbourhood and overlooked the Burj Khalifa and its surroundings. The apparent juxtaposition seemed fascinating to me; coupled with the imminent demise of the neighbourhood given the encroachment of the massive City Walk project I felt that this would be an outstanding opportunity to highlight some of the city’s inherent contradictions with regard to its urban development. So in May 2014 we set out to visit this place. As we left our cars and walked in its dusty lanes the first impression was that of abandonment; many buildings were empty, covered in Arabic graffiti and wild vegetation. Given the proximity of lavish and luxurious structures this was quite striking.
