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      ‘Globalizing the Local, Localizing the Global’: Writing Space in the Arab Gulf Region

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          Abstract

          The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Qatar are taking the lead in the urbanization boom that is drastically transforming the spatial fabric of the Arab Gulf region. Embedded in the ambitious urban development projects launched by the UAE and Qatar is an endeavour to ‘bring the world to the Arab Gulf region’. To this end, these two states are engaged in a process of collecting and borrowing antique objects and canonized artefacts, as well as reproducing and duplicating some internationally celebrated architectural sites and spaces. While some consider these projects to be ‘part of strategies to prepare for the post-oil era’, others hold that ‘Arab Gulf States aim to strengthen or … creatively (re)construct identitarian patterns’. 1 It can be argued that Arab Gulf cities should be looked at as ‘political actors’ due to ‘the functions they fulfill as spatial command posts for globalized capitalism’. 2 The production and organization of social space, in this sense, cannot be seen as a ‘dead’ or passive category with no influence over various dimensions of lived experience, including thought, politics and economy. Juxtaposing the UAE’s and Qatar’s urbanization projects with the nineteenth-century phenomenon of world exhibitions and fairs, this article takes the Louvre Abu Dhabi and Villaggio Mall as case studies to investigate the modalities of knowledge generated through processes of cultural and spatial (re)production and the impact of the latter on the construction of personhood and lived experience in the Arab Gulf region.

          Most cited references33

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          Seeking Spatial Justice

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            The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change

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              Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Role: Guest Editor
                Journal
                Archit_MPS
                Architecture_MPS
                UCL Press
                2050-9006
                04 May 2021
                : 19
                : 1
                : 5
                Affiliations
                Graduate student, Department of Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University, 3523 DB Utrecht, the Netherlands
                Author notes
                Author information
                https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2568-5558
                https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3123-6027
                Article
                Archit_MPS-19-5
                10.14324/111.444.amps.2021v19i1.005
                33a63abd-4915-4973-ac7b-64a7b3822d8c
                © 2021, El Mehdi Ait Oukhzame.

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC BY) 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited • DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.amps.2021v19i1.005.

                History
                : 30 July 2020
                : 17 September 2020
                Page count
                Pages: 14
                Categories
                Article
                Custom metadata
                Ait Oukhzame, E. M. ‘“Globalizing the Local, Localizing the Global”: Writing Space in the Arab Gulf Region’. Architecture_MPS 19, 1 (2021): 5. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.amps.2021v19i1.005.

                Sociology,Political science,Political & Social philosophy,Urban studies,Architecture,Communication & Media studies
                Villaggio,space,architectural signature,themed shopping mall,Gulf Futurism,spatial knowledge,world-as-exhibition,the UAE,Qatar,Louvre Abu Dhabi

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