THE ANTHROPOCENE

Participation in Abu Dhabi’s Public Spaces: Introduction
October 23, 2023
As part of a new series of interdisciplinary initiatives sponsored by New York University Abu Dhabi’s Arts and Humanities Division, we have recently embarked on a research project to explore the experience of public space in the Gulf region. Shaped by expansive, oil revenue-driven infrastructures devised to mitigate its desert environment and improve quality of life, Abu Dhabi’s rapid urbanization since the 1960s has been largely characterized as top-down planning. Yet attention to the capital’s public spaces reveals how city-dwellers appropriate and reinvent the built environment for themselves, diverting planned structures towards unintended uses, unexpected connections, and potential serendipities. Our research employs student ethnographers from a range of academic majors and home countries who observe and interact with the city’s public spaces and their occupants. While our methods are primarily ethnographic, the project embraces multiple disciplines and modes of practice — creative writing, photography, film, drawing, mapping, soundscapes, etc. — as it experiments with ways to collect and share these sensory experiences.
We focus on six super-blocks in the center of town that comprise both Al Zahiyah neighborhood—one of the city’s historic centers formerly known as Tourist Club after an obsolete entertainment complex—and Al Maryah Island—a recently developed “free zone” boasting some of the city’s most luxurious malls and facilities. We seek concrete information on the experiences of diverse communities: How do they define, appropriate, and use city spaces? Which environmental and social factors shape their access and why? How might this intersect with nationality, race, class, and gender? 

We suggest that Abu Dhabi’s arid climate intersects with its political climate in complex ways that condition the possibilities for its communal spaces and forecast transformations of the conception of publicity and privacy in the wider, warming world. To that end, we seek to re-define publicity and privacy in the context of Abu Dhabi, in part by considering hybrid formations such as the public use of private spaces (e.g. malls) and intimate uses of public spaces (e.g. families gathering for a picnic in a park). The problems with Western democratic assumptions of “public space” are many. For one, the collapse of “public” as what-is-common or shared-by-all with “public” as what-is-open or accessible-to-all is not consistent across all cultural contexts. For another, “public” cannot mean “owned by all” in an elective monarchy where all land is donated by the ruling families and at least 80% of the population are expatriate workers with no pathway to citizenship. Yet, such limits do not mean that people do not appropriate and exploit shared surroundings for their own purposes. “Public space” is certainly made. But is public space a built facility provided by architecture and planning design? Or is it an innate element of any urban environment that is claimed by its residents? And does the balance between these two positions shift if and when the climate no longer supports life without technological intervention?

 The project’s blog is meant to explore these questions and report on our ongoing research. Blog posts present ethnographic snapshots of the spaces studied; recount some of the encounters and conversations that took place during fieldwork; and reflect on relevant concepts from the literature.  Written by student and faculty researchers, they offer an exploratory insight into the relationships between urbanism and the environment, through the perspectives of a diversity of city-dwellers.

 

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