The racial politics of smart urbanism: Dubai and Beirut as two sides of the same coin

ABSTRACT

This article presents a unique transnational perspective on the racial politics of Dubai's smart urbanism to examine how the two oppositional realms of cultural production – racial difference and anti-racist future – facilitate and contest Dubai's growth as a logistical space, which requires attention to its regional dominance. To this end, it compares the profit-driven, high-tech futuristic spectacles of Dubai to Beirut, an example of the war-torn and toxic cities that are spreading in the rest of the region, while focusing on the racial politics of the exploitative Kafala (sponsorship) system in both cities. As a counter-spectacle, it discusses Beirut-based artist Bassem Saad's artistic work, which tackles the unevenly distributed care and waste economies passing through Beirut. Ultimately, the article demonstrates how anti-racist and feminist mobilizations for abolishing the Kafala envision alternatives to the futurity that contemporary Gulf Futurism propels.

KEYWORDS:

• Smart urbanism
• Gulf Futurism
• global supply chain
• the Kafala system
• Dubai
• Beirut

Acknowledgements

The ideas presented in this article draws upon my dissertation research in the Program of Computational Media, Arts and Cultures at Duke University, United States. The earlier version of some ideas was published in my dissertation titled The Geopolitical Aesthetic of Computational Media: Media Arts in the Middle East, and as an article titled “Revisiting Cognitive Mapping: Extractive Capitalism and Media Arts in The Middle East” in A Peer-Reviewed Journal About Research Networks (APRJA) 9 (1), 2020, edited by Christian Ulrik Andersen & Geoff Cox. The Julian Price Graduate Fellowship in Humanities and History (Duke Graduate School) funded my fieldwork in Beirut and Dubai during the academic year 2018–2019. I presented my work in progress at Research Networks/Transmediale, Berlin; Media Infrastructures in the Middle East Conference, American University of Beirut, Beirut; The Limits of Growth of the Smart City Symposium, Paris Est University, Paris; and Recursive Colonialism (online). I am grateful to Bassem Saad for sharing his work and support. I thank ERS anonymous reviewers and the special issue editor Dr. Burcu Özçelik for their careful reading and thought-provoking comments. I thank Kenan Behzat Sharpe for his generous feedback and editing. Finally, I appreciate my intellectual exchange on logistical capitalism with Sudipto Basu and Geoff Myint.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Saad's work was presented at an online residency run by Akademie Schloss Solitude and ZKM, themed “Planetary Glitch” (Spring 2019), and curated by Mary Maggic. Thoom and Pad Fut contributed to sound design, and W. F. Lee wrote the code. It was an early phase of a project Saad developed during his residency at the Ashkal Alwan's Home Workspace Program 2018–2019, Beirut. Saad's films Kink Retrograde (2019) and Congress of Idling Persons (2021) addresses relevant themes with heightened urgency of world-historical events in Beirut and beyond. The artist's website can be found at http://www.bassemsaad.com.

2 The promotional video for the exhibition Climate Change Reimagined (2017), produced by Tellart in collaboration with the Dubai Future Foundation, can be found at: https://museumofthefuture.ae/