This set of images collectively seeks to provide viewers with a window into Doha, Qatar, and into the urban heart of the modern Middle East that’s arisen on the Arabian Peninsula. Designed as an exhibit of photography, the images include overlapping themes that explore particular facets or threads of the urban landscape and life therein. In the final accounting, the collection as a whole is intended as an ode to the city itself

Gardner, Andrew M

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University of Puget Sound Sound Ideas All Faculty Scholarship Faculty Scholarship 12-2020 A Window to Urban Arabia Andrew M. Gardner University of Puget Sound, gardner@pugetsound.edu Follow this and additional works at: https://soundideas.pugetsound.edu/faculty_pubs  Part of the Near and Middle Eastern Studies Commons, Photography Commons, Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons, and the Urban, Community and Regional Planning Commons Citation Gardner, Andrew (2020) A Window to Urban Arabia. Anthropology Now 12(3): 64-73. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Scholarship at Sound Ideas. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of Sound Ideas. For more information, please contact soundideas@pugetsound.edu. 64 anthropology  Volume 12 • Number 3 • December 2020visual essayAnthropology Now, 12:64–73, 2020 • Copyright © 2021 Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 1942-8200 print / 1949-2901 online • https://doi.org/10.1080/19428200.2020.1884477A Window to Urban ArabiaAndrew GardnerThis set of images seeks to provide view-ers with a window into Doha, Qatar, and into the urban heart of the modern Middle East that’s arisen on the Arabian Peninsula. Designed as an exhibit of photography, the images include overlapping themes that ex-plore particular facets or threads of the ur-ban landscape and life therein. In the !nal accounting, the collection as a whole is in-tended as an ode to the city itself.Doha is both an astounding and con-founding city. A century ago, it was a sleepy and sweltering seaside village on the shores of the Persian Gulf. The small port of Doha was a minor regional hub inhabited by a seafaring merchant class connected to the Figure 1. Some migrant workers spend their day off !shing on the Corniche. The skyline of West Bay — the modern city center built atop land “reclaimed” from the sea — provides a stunning and contrasting backdrop. Photograph by Andrew Gardner, 2019.Andrew Gardner A Window to Urban Arabia 65Figure 2. Modernist texture. Photograph by Andrew Gardner, 2018.Figure 3. Modernist texture. Photograph by Andrew Gardner, 2018.66 anthropology  Volume 12 • Number 3 • December 2020Figure 4. Modernist texture. Photograph by Andrew Gardner, 2018.Figure 5. This and the previous three images portray textures of the eroding, mid-century modernism found at the aging core of central Doha. Photographs by Andrew Gardner, 2018. Andrew Gardner A Window to Urban Arabia 67Figure 6. Although most transnational migrants now dwell in camps and enclaves found at the periphery of the city, some migrants still occupy the aging, modernist city center. Photograph by Andrew Gardner, 2019.Figure 7. Portrayed here is one of the new peripheral enclaves where the migrant labor force is housed. In addition to these dormitories, the compound includes a sports !eld and various amenities, and is located next to an indoor shopping mall. Photograph by Andrew Gardner, 2020. 68 anthropology  Volume 12 • Number 3 • December 2020Figure 8. Most labor migrants are free from work Fridays. On that day, impromptu markets and social gatherings congeal at the periphery of the city. Here, thousands of migrants gather just beyond Asian Town, one of the new accommodations for transnational labor migrants. Photograph by Andrew Gardner, 2020.Figure 9. Nepalese migrants put together a cricket match in the interstitial urban space just beyond their labor camps. Photograph by Andrew Gardner, 2018. Andrew Gardner A Window to Urban Arabia 69Figure 10. In the city center, migrants gather on the largely abandoned streets for Friday jumu’ah prayer. Photograph by Andrew Gardner, 2018.Figure 11. Southeast Asian migrants gather for photographs in front of the Catholic Church, located in the Religious Complex, another sort of peripheral urban enclave found in Doha. Photograph by Andrew Gardner, 2018.70 anthropology  Volume 12 • Number 3 • December 2020Figure 12.  For migrants who work six days a week, Friday is special. Here, thousands of migrants congregate in the parking lot at the center of the old Industrial Area. Speci!c regions from South Asia command certain parts of the sidewalk, and new migrant arrivals can !nd a familiar language — and sometimes even friends — by searching the gathering for compatriots from home. Photograph by Andrew Gardner, 2018.Figure 13. Qatar’s new National Library, designed by architect Rem Koolhaas, juts out into the sky. Photograph by Andrew Gardner, 2018.Andrew Gardner A Window to Urban Arabia 71sea, by bedouin pastoral nomads connected to the inland desert, and by a miscellany of others. The discovery of vast reservoirs of natural gas in the 20th century, the sub-sequent development of the technological capacity to condense and liquify that gas for shipment, and the small population of citizens that resided on the Qatari peninsula resulted in one of the wealthiest places in the contemporary world.So very much of that wealth is plowed into the city itself. The city grows ceaselessly by leaps and bounds, by new “zones” and “districts,” and by islands and peninsulas “reclaimed” from the sea. Construction never ends. Fueled by mi-grant labor and by deep reservoirs of capital, the city continually renews itself. The task of build-ing, rebuilding and operating this cosmopolitan urban entrepôt required a pool of labor and ex-pertise not indigenous to the small peninsula. Figure 14. Jean Nouvel’s Doha Tower (or Burj Doha) rises into the sky amidst other attention-grabbing buildings in Doha’s West Bay. The building’s lattice exoskeleton is intended to re"ect ancient Islamic designs, and to insulate the building from the hot sun. Photograph by Andrew Gardner, 2012.72 anthropology  Volume 12 • Number 3 • December 2020As a result, the more than 300,000 citizens have been a minority in their own country for many decades now. Today, nearly nine of every 10 residents in contemporary Doha are temporary migrants.The resulting city is extraordinarily di-verse—diverse in ways that stretch the North American conceptualization of that term. In-equality is stark and visible throughout the city. The city is impressively safe. Altogether, Doha and its neighboring cities present a ver-sion of urban modernity without clear par-allel in North America. It’s this urban mo-dernity that enthralls and attracts millions of migrants from the Indian Ocean world and beyond. I am also trans!xed.One of the threads explored in these im-ages concerns the textures of modernity—a granular and aesthetic exploration of modern-ism in Doha. This subset of images portrays the different textures of the eroding modern-isms found at the aging city center. The build-ings and neighborhoods from which these textures come were once the bright and con-temporary epicenter of the midcentury city: the architecture, the designs, and the textures themselves were emblematic of progress, of growth, of a modernity from elsewhere, and of the reliable uniformity of industrial pro-duction. As it did on other continents, mod-ernism promised a departure from the past. Now the eroding remnants of futures-past, these neighborhoods were !rst abandoned by citizens in their migration to the suburbs and then inhabited by the burgeoning legion of South Asian labor migrants who toil in the city. Although some of these latter inhabitants still reside in these aging structures, bulldoz-ers steadily encroach on the weathered core of the city, and stand poised on the margins of these neighborhoods. The urban core is to be rebuilt—yet again—with steady infusions of capital, and by foreign hands.Another thread explored in these im-ages portrays the peripheral urban enclaves where much of the foreign workforce now dwells—the backstage realm of a city de-signed as a showcase for tourists and visitors. These workers, all transnational migrants and noncitizens, mostly come from South Asia. They both build and service the modern city. Although a few stragglers still dwell in the urban core of Doha, most of these foreign workers now occupy enclaves constructed at the periphery of the city. In the lifeworlds of these men and women, these migrations are, for most, an economic necessity for the households behind them. But these migra-tions also serve as a rite of passage, and they compose a great and dif!cult adventure that is sometimes rewarding. The cities of the Ara-bian Peninsula, such as the one portrayed here, are far from home for the millions of migrant men and women who inhabit them, and are simultaneously the backdrop for the collective social drama of the youthful life-ways in the greater Indian Ocean world.A third and !nal thread that "ickers through these photographs concerns the starchitecture that peppers the city’s skyline and frontstage. Many of these buildings are the visions and creations of the world’s leading superstar ar-chitects and designers—people such as Rem Koolhaas, Arata Isozaki, Jean Nouvel, I. M. Pei and Zaha Hadid. Their attention-grabbing buildings are emblematic of humanity’s most prized and respected constructions, emana-tions from the creative frontiers of design. For those experts, Qatar is an ideal client, with money to spend and little of an urban past to Andrew Gardner A Window to Urban Arabia 73crowd or adjust those architects’ respective vi-sions. Provided for them is the tabula rasa—or blank slate—from which their creations might emerge, undisturbed. In one sense, the result-ing city is like a gargantuan trophy case, a col-lection that speaks to the citizenry and to the leadership who steward a vision of modernity designed mostly by foreigners.Altogether, these images seek to provide a window to urban modernity in Arabia—a vantage point, a glimpse from afar, a frag-mentary grasp of a busy cosmopolitan hub that always spills beyond encapsulation. Proceed thoughtfully.Andrew Gardner is a professor of anthropology at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. These images were !rst exhibited at Bluebeard Coffee Roasters in Tacoma, Washing-ton, in the pandemic summer of 2020.

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