Building Identity

In sharing news that I had been selected to participate in an architectural delegation to the UAE with my friends and colleagues, I found the responses I received followed along the similar lines of excitement about glistening towers like the incomparable Burj Khalifa and other snippets of ‘starchitecture,’ the phenomenon of a handful of architects rising to stardom and becoming iconic among the public. While I myself had been very much looking forward to this, I noticed my cultural imagination lacked the background to picture public spaces where Emirati people might congregate. My visual predictions all focused on gloss steel, glass, and glamorous feats of contemporary architecture and lacked a sense of quotidian reality. It wasn't until we arrived in the UAE and were taken on a tour of Dubai by Adina Hempel, an architect and urban researcher at Zayed University at the forefront of research on local preservation and development, and in Abu Dhabi hosted by Sultan Al Ramahi, an urban planner exploring the concept of nostalgia in development, that these gaps in the cultural landscape began to fill. 

The sense of hyper-modernity that overshadowed the history and reality of the UAE was pervasive. Dichotomous descriptions of space in the Emirati cities is not uncommon in literature and in pedestrian experience. The use of Emirati vs. non-Emirati, Arab vs. Western, and traditional vs. modern, among others, are common in trying to understand and negotiate spaces in the urban landscapes in the UAE. With the UAE being a relatively new nation-state, established in 1971, global perception tends to spotlight the modern, what is automatically and usually incorrectly stamped as the ‘Western’ elements and icons; however, we forget that each Emirate has its own cultural history, its own rich background. Even as we learned about the design concept of the Burj Khalifa, which takes its shape from a desert flower, the cracks in this dichotomous attitude began to form. These were further shattered by our long walking tours, which gave us the opportunity to experience the cities in a tactile way, unreachable from the top of skyscrapers. 

In Dubai we visited the Dubai Creek area which historically served as the commercial port for the city and center for the pearl diving economy. It was there that we visited the Al Shindagha Museum, located in a traditional port building. The museum guides its visitors through the traditional ways of perfume-making and cultural meanings of specific perfumes through a series of exhibitions, which beautifully utilize cutting-edge technology. It was on this visit that I truly began to understand how anemic it is to view Dubai and the UAE only as hyper-modern. The museum itself is an embodiment of the power of experiencing the true dialectical nature of the country. 

It was on our walk through Abu Dhabi that we heard the stories of an Emirati’s experience living through this time of development and how it has altered public space. We heard about buildings from the 1970s and 1980s which had until their recent demolition served as public meeting spaces and shopping malls. These spaces have been replaced with contemporary versions of their former selves, and the switch has not nurtured the same response in use. Again, these experiences gave us a new lens from which to view the UAE. The dichotomous terms were not just prevalent in outside vocabulary but are still being negotiated through the experience of locals in urban spaces. 

When the Euro-American imagination creates these exoticized versions of Arab spaces like the UAE, there is an expectation for us to gawk at the ‘normalcy’ as we understand it. I hope to complicate this oversimplification, which has razed the enriching nuance. The UAE doesn’t exist solely in these extremes; it is a place of multiplicity. It is a country with an old history that has pushed to become a leader in production, technology, and construction of the future. Looking beyond harsh boundaries at the interplay between ancient and contemporary, Arab and Western, and national and expatriate, there emerges a style that can only be called Emirati. 

Essay and photographs by Leila Wahba