Introduction

In the summer of 2018, the Municipality of Dubai launched the Modern Heritage Initiative with the intent to preserve a series of buildings from the 1970s, including John Harris’ World Trade Centre and George Rais and Jafar Tukan’s Al-Khuloud Nursery School among others. Modernism, both in the arts and in architecture, has been instrumental in reconsidering and negotiating fluid concepts like tradition, contemporaneity, and identity in relation to social changes and transformations of the built environment. Architecture is meant to perform as a living organism in synergy with the urban environment. The recommendations range from economic diversification to more integrated planning strategies, sustainability, and measures to combat governance flaws, inefficiencies, and the monetization of urban space. The chapter also presents an overview on the key concepts discussed in this book.