Tuesday October 25, 2022 – 9am-10am GST

Laure Assaf, Piia Mustamaki, and Samuel M. Anderson will present on “Urban Divisions: (Un)Intended Uses of an Abu Dhabi Park.”

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 (un)intended uses, unexpected connections, and potential serendipities.

Based on data collected in Electra Park—a colloquially named public plaza in Abu Dhabi’s Al Zahiya neighborhood—this essay explores how such spaces lend themselves to a wide variety of encounters: from passersby seeking shortcuts, to picnickers seeking lounge spots, to ad hoc football teams seeking playfields, to on-call delivery drivers seeking shade, to migrants seeking jobs, to employers seeking employees, to lonely singles seeking romance. Indeed, the contrast between the park’s sparse facilities and its eclectic neighborhood location characterized by a dense fabric of small shops, cafeterias, and apartments has allowed a diverse population to inscribe its own uses and meanings onto this landscape. 

We argue that the park, as a “loose space” (Franck and Stevens, 2006), is open to appropriations that evince many of the challenges its users face navigating the city and accessing its resources. Park visitors generate and engage in informal professional, commercial, and romantic networks which they cannot formally access, thus highlighting how spatial practices respond to inequalities of race, gender, nationality, and class. The park’s closure for renovation over the summer 2022 brings into relief the importance of such spaces as such interactions persist, though now re-shaped at, on, and across the temporary construction safety barriers that serve as its boundaries—a testament to the continuity of social practices beyond (and in spite of) official policies of urban renewal.