As instant boomtowns compete with ancient metropolises, the Middle East debates what makes a true urban center.
By Thanassis Cambanis
Boston Globe | December 01, 2013
BEIRUT, Lebanon — The Palestinian poet and filmmaker Hind Shoufani
moved to Dubai for the same reasons that have attracted millions of
other expatriates to the glitzy emirate. In 2009, after decades in the
storied and mercurial Arab capital cities of Damascus and Beirut and a
sojourn in New York, she wanted to live somewhere stable and
cosmopolitan where she also could earn a living.
Five years later, she’s won a devoted following for the Poeticians,
a Dubai spoken-word literary performance collective she founded. The
group has created a vibrant subculture of writers, all of them expats.
To its critics—and even many of its fans—“culture” and “Dubai” barely
belong in the same sentence. The city is perhaps the world’s most
extreme example of a business-first, built-from-the-sand boomtown. But
Shoufani and her fellow Poeticians have become a prime exhibit in a
debate that has broken out with renewed vigor in the Arab world and
among urban theorists worldwide: whether the gleaming boomtowns of the
Gulf are finally establishing themselves as true cities with a
sustainable economy and an authentic culture, and, in the process,
creating a genuine new path for the Middle East.
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