On not being Dubai: infrastructures of urban cultural policy in Istanbul & Beirut

ABSTRACT

This paper compares how Istanbul and Beirut both attempt to underline their cultural and developmental uniqueness today in contrast to a metonymic menace – Dubai, standing in for spectacular yet supposedly cultureless Gulf cities. Even amid their own speculative construction frenzies that threaten local heritage, Turkish and Lebanese city-shapers assert theirs are ‘real’ cities because they have ‘civilization’ and ‘history.’ By addressing their own efforts to build, defend, or oppose physical infrastructures related to local urban culture, Istanbullus and Beirutis rely on and reassert strategic, phatic discourses that frequently reference Gulf cities as counterpoint. Analysis focuses on how each city crafts a distinctive urban profile via civilizational appeals to historic senses of culture, inflecting infrastructural developments related to bridging (Istanbul) and bordering (Beirut). Historical truisms are deployed with marked flexibility to showcase these cities as ‘not Dubai.’ This study offers lessons on the particular worlding of Middle Eastern cities and the role of discourses in the material-symbolic infrastructure of implicit urban cultural policy.

KEYWORDS:

• Istanbul
• Beirut
• infrastructure
• discourse
• heritage
• development

Acknowledgement

This article was completed two months before the horrific blast in Beirut’s port district that destroyed much of the city center in August 2020. Although the article cannot address this latest disaster, it is dedicated to the invincibility of the city and its residents. I owe my thanks to Peggy Levitt, Jérémie Molho, Nick Dines, Ana Triandafyllidou, Xiangming Chen, Özlem Ünsal, Hiba Bou Akar, Gökçe Günel, Laavanya Kathiravelu, Ramzi Babouder-Matta, Fran Tonkiss, Ananya Roy, Cihan Tuğal, Ozzy Gündüz, Kasia Paprocki, and Troy Forslund for inspirations, supports, and criticisms that improved this work. Thanks also to the three cities of focus in these pages, as well as to another motley post-imperial urban troika where I wrote and re-wrote this article: London, UK; Nairobi, Kenya; and Victoria, Canada. All faults here are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I use the generic term ‘the Gulf’ in this article to refer to what English speakers usually label with greater geographical specificity as ‘the Persian Gulf,’ although there is controversy – at diplomatic levels (Levinson 2011) – over whether it should instead be called ‘the Arabian Gulf’ (الخليج العربي) in English as it is in Arabic. I refer to it simply as ‘the Gulf’ because it was denominated variously by my interlocutors: in Lebanon, most often it was mentioned as just ‘the Gulf’ (or ‘le Golfe’ among Francophones). ‘The Gulf’ was also often used by English speakers in Turkey, but when speaking in Turkish the dilemma was obviated with either the Ottoman-era name of ‘Basra Körfezi’ (Gulf of Basra), or simply discussing ‘Araplar’ (Arabs) in reference to the countries on the eastern coast of the Arabian Peninsula – especially the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait.

2. In total, I made 11 research trips to Istanbul (2008–2020), and three to Beirut (2010–2015), where I also employed a Lebanese research assistant for 3 months in the summer of 2012. I conducted open-ended interviews (in English or Turkish, or a blend of these, in Istanbul; in English or French in Beirut) with local ‘users’ of different ages (n = 30), as well as semi-structured interviews with city-shapers (see definition above) based in each city (n = 25). In order to protect research participants in the rapidly shifting and politically charged setting of each city, all names are kept confidential – as was originally guaranteed for quotidian city users, but also as decided retrospectively even for experts and public figures who agreed at the time to speak on the record, in recognition of emergent potential threats they may now face.

3. Population figures for metropolitan Istanbul and Beirut are from the United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, and Population Division (2019, 70–77). For Beirut, this is an estimation only, as Lebanon has had no official census since 1932, due to a national political system organized around sectarian divisions with allocations of power distributed in line with the relative population sizes of different sects as of that last census count – and out of concern that any new enumeration would lead to violent wrangling over procedure and power redistribution.

4. Hvidt (2009, 401) lays out nine ‘parameters of Dubai’s development path’: (1) ‘government-led development’; (2) ‘fast decision-making and “fast-track” development’; (3) ‘flexible labor force’; (4) ‘bypass of industrialization,’ favoring ‘creation of a service economy’; (5) ‘internationalization of service provision’; (6) ‘creation of investment opportunities’; (7) ‘supply-generated demand’; (8) ‘market positioning via branding’; and (9) ‘development in cooperation with international partners.’

5. All interviewees’ names are pseudonyms.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the London School of Economics [Research Infrastructure and Investment Fund]; Social Science Research Council [Inter-Asian Connections]; Tufts University [Field Experience for International Relations Students].

Notes on contributors

Ryan Centner

Ryan Centner is Assistant Professor of Urban Geography at the London School of Economics, and Chair of the Urban Geography Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society. He researches and teaches about urban change and infrastructural development as they intersect with culture, politics, and economic restructuring in the Americas, Africa, and the Middle East.