NEW ARAB URBANISM the Challenge to Sustainability and Culture in the Gulf

Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative NEW ARAB URBANISM The Challenge to Sustainability and Culture in the Gulf Professor Steven Caton, Principal Investigator Professor of Contemporary Arab Studies Department of Anthropology And Nader Ardalan, Project Director Center for Middle East Studies Harvard University FINAL REPORT Prepared for The Kuwait Program Research Fund John F. Kennedy School of Government Harvard University December 2, 2010 NEW ARAB URBANISM The Challenge of Sustainability & Culture in the Gulf Table of Contents Preface Ch. 1 Introduction Part One – Interpretive Essays Ch. 2 Kuwait Ch. 3 Qatar Ch. 4 UAE Part Two – Case Studies Ch. 5 Kuwait Ch. 6 Qatar Ch. 7 UAE Ch. 8 Epilogue Appendices Sustainable Guidelines & Assessment Criteria Focus Group Agendas, Participants and Questions Bibliography 2 Preface This draft of the final report is in fulfillment of a fieldwork project, conducted from January to February, 2010, and sponsored by the Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative, funded by the Kuwait Foundation for Arts and Sciences. We are enormously grateful to our focus-group facilitators and participants in the three countries of the region we visited and to the generosity with which our friends, old and new, welcomed us into their homes and shared with us their deep insights into the challenges facing the region with respect to environmental sustainability and cultural identity, the primary foci of our research. This report contains information that hopefully will be of use to the peoples of the region but also to peoples elsewhere in the world grappling with urban development and sustainability. We also thank our peer-review group for taking the time to read the report and to communicate to us their comments and criticisms. Their views are summarized in the Epilogue. Steven C. Caton Nader Ardalan October 2010 3 Introduction In the last thirty years The Gulf1 has seen a building boom the scale of which is unparalleled in the world today, but whose impact on the surrounding environment and societies remains largely unknown. In recent years there has been a small number of published works by architects and urban planners on the rise of urbanism in the region such as Yasser Elsheshtawy’s two edited volumes, Planning Middle Eastern Cities (2004) and The Evolving Arab City (2008), and his own Dubai: Behind an Urban Spectacle (2009). Among historians of urban planning, Nelida Fuccaro’s Histories of city and state in the Persian Gulf: Manama Since 1800 (2009) is also a significant recent contribution. Anthropologists such as Ahmed Kanna are now beginning to publish their field research on Gulf cities, bringing a badly needed socio-cultural perspective to our understanding of development (Kanna 2006, 2008, 2010). (The Bibliography contains a partial list of other important references to this region and the issues of sustainability and culture.) Through the Regional Organization for the Protection of the Marine Environment (ROPME), Kuwait, there has also been considerable research done on the degradation of the regional marine environment. The difficulty is in assessing the specific impact of urban development on the environment as opposed to human activity more broadly understood. We hope our study, New Arab Urbanism in the Gulf (NAUG), will contribute to this burgeoning research on the development of Gulf cities through its focus on the environment, including the socio-cultural contexts in which this urbanism is taking place. We posed the following research questions: What has been the history of urban planning in the region and to what extent has it taken “green” principles into account? Has development incorporated such environmentally sustainable guidelines as LEED or the World Wildlife Fund “One Planet Living 10 Principles? What have been the impact of this vast building boom on the environment and the socio-cultural contexts of urban spaces and its architecture? What has been done to respond to those environmental impacts by the societies in question? Our efforts built on the findings of the Year One Pilot Studies of the Gulf Research Project (GRP) which concentrated on the United Arab Emirates and was funded by that country, in addition to a seminar Nader Ardalan, Fellow of CMES convened in April 2008 on development in the Gulf, its impacts on the environment and what could be done about them, held under the auspices of the Center for Middle East Studies at Harvard University. Our research represents a departure from that undertaken by our colleagues mentioned above. For one thing, ours was team-based and collaborative rather than conducted by a single investigator, and it was self-consciously inter-disciplinary, involving an architect (Nader Ardalan) with over forty years of experience in the Gulf, an anthropologist (Steven Caton) who had worked extensively in Yemen on water sustainability issues though for whom this was his first research trip to the Gulf, and a recent graduate landscape architect (Gareth Doherty) who had completed a year of field research in Bahrain on the color green in Manama’s urban design. 1 The body of water lying between southwest Iran and the Arabian Peninsula has been called the Persian Gulf while the Arab World has called it the Arabian Gulf. For convenience, it is called The Gulf in this research report. In 1978, the eight countries that border this water body mutually established the Regional Organization for the Protection of the Marine Environment (ROPME) and agreed to refer to it as the ROPME Sea Area (RSA). 4 It was thought necessary to combine the expertise of these three specialists because of the complexity of the research questions being posed. Our research also differed from that of our colleagues by being comparative in scope, entailing fieldwork in three Gulf countries – Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates – and the effort to compare the results obtained in them. Thus, our hosts in each of these places will be able to read what their counterparts are saying in their respective countries and to see what they are doing to meet the challenges of environmental and societal sustainability within their own particular contexts. In turn, we too try to come up with a narrative or interpretation of what they are doing singly and collectively that we hope will be helpful to policy makers and to researchers. The scale of regional development has been such as to pose an immediate logistical challenge, which is how to reasonably narrow or focus on some aspects of the built environment over others in order to make the research project manageable. Another major constraint was time: we had a little less than a month (roughly February 2010) for the fieldwork. For these reasons we decided to concentrate on one particular aspect of the built environment, and our choice eventually fell upon institutions of higher education. This selection was partly guided by our own curiosity as educators about what was happening in the educational field in the Gulf, but also because the scrutiny of the built environment has so far been on shopping malls or other kinds of commercial developments; we wanted to encourage a new direction of inquiry. Educational sites, though they do not escape the pressures of commodity consumption and globalization, have more to do with a nation’s aspirations for its young people (the demographic majority of most countries in the region) than perhaps any other architectural site, and for this reason is extremely important socially and culturally. That said, Qatar and the UAE are self-consciously reconfiguring themselves as “knowledge hubs” in which education plays a central role and which have everything to do with the visions of their futures. We also decided to focus on decision-makers in the fields of environment, development, government planning, and education rather than to sample an array of groups differently positioned in the political and economic spectrums – the single exception being the interactions we had with male and female students at some of the local colleges – and this top-down approach had both its advantages and disadvantages. Two of the countries we visited – Qatar and the UAE -- are in the throes of intense urban planning efforts and as these are directed by the government leaders and the national and international cadre of technocrats hired to implement their visions, it was important to get an “insider” knowledge of what was happening at the highest levels of power. We are enormously grateful to the many well-placed and extremely busy people who took considerable amounts of their time to talk to us, often frankly and in substantive detail, about their thinking around urban development and the challenges they face. The disadvantages of this approach, of course, is that it does not get at the perspectives of the people who are at the receiving end of these high-powered decisions, a drawback we felt acutely throughout our research. We hope that what we learned from the decision- makers will help others who take a more “bottom-up” perspective to frame their research questions with some of our findings in mind. To carry out these research goals, we implemented four fieldwork practices. The first, and arguably the most important, was the focus group, conduced with top decision 5 makers in the arenas of environment, development, government planning and education. In Kuwait, four focus groups were held, in Qatar three, and in the UAE five. (See Appendix B for these focus groups and their participants). We asked more or less the same set of questions across all groups (see Appendix B), with some variance to account for the particular interests of the group (for example, more emphasis on development questions for the development group, on educational questions for the educational group, and so forth). In that way we hoped to get comparative generalizations across all three countries.

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