‘Bachelor’ in the City: Urban Transformation and Matter Out of Place in Dubai

Abstract

This article examines the ‘bachelor’ as a key figure in Dubai's emergent urbanism. The recent surge in Dubai's population has seen the specter of a ‘demographic imbalance’ increasingly invoked in public discourse. Buttressing this discourse was a campaign to tackle ‘overcrowding’ by the municipality, at a time when its authority was being challenged by the so-called master developers planning ‘New Dubai’ in the urban periphery. The ‘bachelor’, I argue, is deployed as an objectified social type manifesting this imbalance and its misplacement in the city. While the ‘bachelor’ has already been noted in previous scholarship, this article focuses on the production of this category as a form of Othering. It examines how the moral threat arising from imbalance is identified with a particular segment of society through this social type, transposed onto their bodily abjection, mapped out in the city, and made available for control through the threat of removal.

Keywords:

• Dubai
• bachelors
• key figure
• Iranian migration
• urban entrepreneurialism
• overcrowding
• demographic imbalance
• eviction
• citizenship
• masculinity

Notes

¹ This was the last of Dubai's ‘mega-projects’ announced before the onset of its real-estate downturn in late 2008.

² All ethnographic interlocutors in this article are represented by pseudonyms.

³ Barker and Lindquist, “Figures of Indonesian Modernity”, Indonesia 87 (2009), pp. 35–72.

⁴ Hacking, “Making Up People”, in Reconstructing Individualism, eds Heller, Sosna, and Wellbery (1986), p. 226.

⁵ The study of social types and typification represents an enduring field of study, and may be traced to such classical sociology as Simmel's treatment of “the stranger” [Simmel, “Social Types”, in On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings, ed. Levine (1971), pp. 143–213].

⁶ Barker; Harms; and Lindquist, “Introduction”, in Figures of Southeast Asian Modernity, eds Barker, Harms, and Lindquist (2013), p. 2.

⁷ Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (1973), pp. 3–30.

⁸ This research draws from fieldwork conducted in Dubai during 2008 (July–Aug.), 2010–11 (Jan.–Jan.), and more recently in 2012 (Aug.–Nov.). My ethnographic focus during this time was the city's Iranian population, with whom I primarily engaged through participant-observation. I was also able to interview government employees and officials from a variety of institutions through my affiliation (as a Visiting Scholar) with the Dubai School of Government (2010). This article draws from twelve such interviews. Owing to the political sensitivity of my inquiries (mostly at a time of economic decline and highly critical foreign publicity of Dubai) all of the interviewees here have requested anonymity; see bibliography.

⁹ Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concept of Pollution and Taboo (1966; reprinted, 2006), pp. 44–50.

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ Gardner, City of Strangers: Gulf Migration and the Indian Community in Bahrain (2010), pp. 1–7.

¹² Khalaf, “The Evolution of the Gulf City Type, Oil and Globalization”, in Globalization and the Gulf, eds Fox, Mourtada-Sabbah, and Al-Mutawa (2006), pp. 252, 258; Nagy, “Making Room for Migrants, Making Sense of Difference: Spatial and Ideological Expressions of Social Diversity in Urban Qatar”, Urban Studies 43 (2006), p. 126; Ali, Dubai: Gilded Cage (2010), pp. 93, 130–2; Elsheshtawy, Dubai: Behind an Urban Spectacle (2010), pp. 214, 233–6; Haines, “Cracks in the Facade: Landscapes of Hope and Desire in Dubai”, in Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, eds Ong and Roy (2011), p. 177; Gardner, “Gulf Migration and the Family”, Journal of Arabian Studies 1 (2011), pp. 7, 11, 17, 19–20; Mohammad and Sidaway, “Spectacular Urbanization Amidst Variegated Geographies of Globalization: Learning from Abu Dhabi's Trajectory Through the Lives of South Asian Men”, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 36 (2012), p. 614

¹³ Ahmed, “Beyond Labor: Foreign Residents in the Persian Gulf States”, in Migrant Labor in the Persian Gulf, eds Babar and Kamrava (2012), p. 40.

¹⁴ Ibid.

¹⁵ Brubaker, Ethnicity Without Borders (2004), pp. 31–3.

¹⁶ For example, Okruhlik, “Excluded Essentials: The Politics of Ethnicity, Oil and Citizenship in Saudi Arabia”, in The Global Color Line: Racial and Ethnic Inequality and Struggle from a Global Perspective, eds Batur-Vanderlippe and Feagin (1999), pp. 215–36; Khalaf and Alkobaisi, “Migrants’ Strategies of Coping and Patterns of Accommodation in the Oil-Rich Gulf Societies: Evidence from the UAE”, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 26 (1999), pp. 271–98; Leonard, “South Asian Women in the Gulf: Families and Futures Reconfigured”, in Trans-Status Subjects: Gender in the Globalization of South and Southeast Asia, eds Niyogi De and Sarker (2002), pp. 213–31; Louër, “The Political Impact of Labor Migration in Bahrain”, City & Society 20 (2008), pp. 32–53; Ali, Dubai, pp. 93, 111, 113, 116, 123; Gardner, “Gulf Migration and the Family”, pp. 3–25.

¹⁷ Dresch, “Foreign Matter: The Place of Strangers in the Gulf”, in Globalization and the Gulf, eds Fox, Mourtada-Sabbah, and Al-Mutawa (2006), pp. 200–22.

¹⁸ Bristol-Rhys, “A Lexicon of Migrants in the United Arab Emirates (UAE)”, Viewpoints: Migration and the Gulf (2010), pp. 25–6.

¹⁹ Ibid., p. 25.

²⁰ Vora, “Producing Diasporas and Globalization: Indian Middle-Class Migrants in Dubai”, Anthropological Quarterly 81 (2008), p. 386.

²¹ For example, Longva, “Keeping Migrant Workers in Check: The Kafāla System in the Gulf”, Middle East Report 211 (1999), pp. 20–1; Leonard, “South Asian Women in the Gulf”, p. 221.

²² Leonard, “South Asian Women in the Gulf”, p. 219; Gardner, “Gulf Migration and the Family”, p. 20.

²³ This class position usually affords these income-earners the ability to sponsor their families, and even seems to be socially valorized according to the presence of family.

²⁴ Haines, “Cracks in the Façade”, p. 180.

²⁵ For the purposes of this paper, I use the terms ‘non-citizen’ and ‘foreigner’ interchangeably.

²⁶ MEED, Dubai Residential Real Estate Report (2007), pp. 1–2. At US$38.18 billion, it represented an annual real GDP growth rate of 13% since 2000 [Oxford Business Group, The Report: Dubai (2007), pp. 8, 30].

²⁷ Dubai Chamber of Commerce and Industry (DCCI), Economic Bulletin 4 (2007), p. 6.

²⁸ Oxford Business Group, Emerging Dubai (2006), p. 157.

²⁹ Department of Tourism and Commerce Marketing (DTCM), Dubai Total Hotel Establishment Guests by Nationality: 2005–2009 (2009), p. 2.

³⁰ Oxford Business Group, The Report: Dubai (2008), p. 137.

³¹ Krane, City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism (2009), p. 119.

³² UAE National Bureau of Statistics, Population Estimates 2006–2010 (2011), p. 10. Statistics indicating the numerical disparity between citizens and non-citizens are notoriously sparse owing to its political sensitivity.

³³ According to official figures, including the Ministry of Economy's last national census in 2005, about 476,000 construction workers, and 140,119 service/retail workers were recorded from a total employed population of 982,296. T.ālib was among the latter category. See MEED, Dubai Residential Real Estate Report, p. 21; UAE Ministry of Economy, Census (2005), Table 5.

³⁴ Khalaf, “The Evolution of the Gulf City Type”, pp. 245, 250.

³⁵ Anon., “A Wake-Up Call”, Khaleej Times, 24 Apr. 2005.

³⁶ Abdullah, “UAE's Demographic Imbalance”, Gulf News, 14 Apr. 2007.

³⁷ Longva, Walls Built on Sand: Migration, Exclusion, and Society in Kuwait (1997), p. 7. An attempt to address these anxieties came with the massive ‘National Identity Conference’ in 2008, and the declaration by Sheikh Khalifa of Abu Dhabi that the same year was officially ‘UAE national identity year’.

³⁸  Interview, Anon. (Real Estate Regulatory Authority), Dubai, Oct. 2010; Interview, Anon. (Real Estate Regulatory Authority), Dubai, Oct. 2010; Interview, Anon. (Sheikh Zayed Housing Programme), Dubai, Sept. 2012; Interview, Anon. (Dubai Municipality), Dubai, Dec. 2010.

³⁹ Interview, Anon. (Dubai Municipality), Dubai, July 2008.

⁴⁰ Elsheshtawy, Dubai, p. 105.

⁴¹ Interview, Anon. (The Dubai Executive Council), Dubai, Sept. 2010; Interview, Anon. (Dubai Culture and Arts Authority), Dubai, Mar. 2010; Interview, Anon. (The Dubai Executive Council), Dubai, Nov. 2010.

⁴² Davidson, The United Arab Emirates: A Study in Survival (2005), p. 73.

⁴³ Interview, Anon. (Abu Dhabi Urban Planning Council), Abu Dhabi, Sept. 2012; Interview, Anon. (Dubai Municipality), Dubai, Dec. 2010.

⁴⁴ I owe this insight to Adina Hempl.

⁴⁵ Khan, “Eviction Notice: Final Countdown”, XPress, 9 Oct. 2008.

⁴⁶ Kanna, Dubai: The City as Corporation (2011), pp. 55–61.

⁴⁷ Peutz, “Embarking on an Anthropology of Removal”, Current Anthropology 47 (2006), pp. 217–41.

⁴⁸ Interview, Anon. (Consultant, Mohammad bin Rashid Housing Establishment), Dubai, Oct. 2012.

⁴⁹ In late 2006, for example, the Dubai-based Mohammad Bin Rashid Housing Establishment was set up with the goal of providing 10,000 villas for citizens, and AED12 billion of funding to this end. This policy has facilitated the gradual movement of many Emiratis away from the inner city in terms that invite comparisons with the phenomenon of ‘white flight’. See Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles (1990; reprinted 2006), pp. 165–9, 185.

⁵⁰ Interview, Anon. (Real Estate Regulatory Authority), Dubai, Sept. 2010.

⁵¹ Where they do not also sponsor these tenants, they provide these spaces to small businesses employing such labor, or individuals delegated the responsibility to seek out their own accommodations.

⁵² In framing citizenship thus, I reiterate recent scholarship on the Gulf highlighting the active participation of citizens in national discourses and state projects. See Kruse, Women in Civil Society: The State, Islamism, and Networks in the UAE (2008), pp. 22–3, 47–90; Gardner, City of Strangers, pp. 136–58; Kanna, Dubai, pp. 135–70.

⁵³ Dresch, “Foreign Matter”, p. 210.

⁵⁴ Gardner, City of Strangers, p. 58.

⁵⁵ Longva, “Neither Autocracy nor Democracy but Ethnocracy: Citizens, Expatriates and the Socio-Political System in Kuwait”, in Monarchies and Nations: Globalization and Identity in the Arab States of the Gulf, eds Dresch and Piscatori (2005), pp. 114–35.

⁵⁶ Sengupta, “Eviction Drive Against Bachelors from February”, Khaleej Times, 1 Jan. 2007.

⁵⁷ Mirza, “Bachelors in Crowded Flats Told to Move Out”, Khaleej Times, 7 Sept. 2004.

⁵⁸ Ahmed, “Civic Body to Scour More Areas for Workers in Villas”, Gulf News, 20 Feb. 2006.

⁵⁹ Shalini, “Going Flat Out to Share Flats”, Khaleej Times, 30 Apr. 2005; Ahmed, “Bachelor Accommodation Hard to Find”, Gulf News, 4 Aug. 2004.

⁶⁰ Ahmed, “Civic Body to Scour More Areas”.

⁶¹ Glass, “Who Would Be a Bachelor Boy?”, Arabian Business, 17 Aug. 2007.

⁶² Khan, “The Dark Side of Life: Villa Clean Up”, Gulf News, 12 Feb. 2009.

⁶³ If landlords failed inspections, they were given notice to evict their tenants.

⁶⁴ WAM, “4,387 Housing Violations in Dubai in 6 Months”, Gulf News, 22 July 2010; Ahmed, “Municipality Blames Woes on Bachelors”, Emirates 24/7, 6 Mar. 2011.

⁶⁵ Khan and Homayun, “Crackdown on Bachelor Homes”, Gulf News, 19 July 2007.

⁶⁶ Ahmed, “The Dubai Bachelor: Is He Responsible for Spike in Crime?”, Emirates 24/7, 22 Mar. 2011.

⁶⁷ Peutz, “Embarking on an Anthropology of Removal”, pp. 222–3; Gardner, City of Strangers, p. 59.

⁶⁸ Dubai Statistics Center, Dubai Population Bulletin (2007), p. 4. Bristol-Rhys has also noted this distinction with regard to Abu Dhabi as well; see Bristol-Rhys, “Socio-Spatial Boundaries in Abu Dhabi”, in Migrant Labor in the Persian Gulf, eds Babar and Kamrava (2012), pp. 59–84.

⁶⁹ Glass, “Who Would Be a Bachelor Boy?”.

⁷⁰ Borneman, “Emigres as Bullets/Immigration as Penetration Perceptions of the Marielitos”, The Journal of Popular Culture 20 (2004), pp. 73–92.

⁷¹ Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (2005), p. 4.

⁷² Lambek, “Towards an Ethics of the Act”, in Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language and Action, ed. Lambek (2008), pp. 42–50.

⁷³ Given its informal nature, numerical data that would capture the prevalence of this practice among this category of Iranians in Dubai does not exist.

⁷⁴ Sufrih is literally the spread upon which meals are set.

⁷⁵ Ahmed, “Beyond Labor”, p. 37.