Always let the road decide: South Asian labourers along the highways of Dubai, UAE: a photographic essay

Abstract

In Dubai, UAE capitalist free-market ideals and publicity techniques are interwoven with autocratic state controls that organise architectural expansion and the spatial flow of migrant workers in the city. Highways dominate the landscape, and within this infrastructure walking is discouraged. Roads become walls, boundaries and lines to be navigated, alienating pedestrians. Always Let the Road Decide explores photographically how South Asian construction workers, who have limited social rights within the city, independently access and appropriate these busy road networks on foot. If, ‘diversions’ in space offer a fresh spatial dynamic to city spaces that have outgrown their original purpose, ‘temporality’ has an important role to play as a structural component of urban development and offers research opportunities to explore how the undocumented and unregulated social activities of underpaid male South Asian expatriates could influence planning and construction procedures within the Gulf region.

Keywords:

• Dubai
• mobility
• migration
• photography
• roads
• territoriality
• walking
• UAE

Acknowledgements

David Kendall would like to thank Professor Alison Blunt, Professor Ellen Braae, Professor Caroline Knowles, Dr Shompa Lahiri, Markus Miessen, Deepa Naik, Abbas Nokhasteh, Trenton Oldfield, Svava Riesto, Ruby Russell and Will Wiles for their editorial and financial support with presentations, exhibitions and related publications.