It makes good scents to preserve our city's past

Deborah Williams asks: As a city grows, whether you call it gentrification or progress, how do you balance old and new?

Should a reminder of Abu Dhabi's early days be kept? Courtesy Al Ittihad

The other day I found myself in the rectangular maze of one of Abu Dhabi’s “superblocks”, looking for a place to get passport photos. Life in the Emirates does seem to require an almost infinite number of those little photos, doesn’t it? Licences, registration cards, ID cards, health cards: entire biographies could be summed up in the plastic cards that modern life insists we all carry around with us.

Outside the shop, on the uneven brick pavement between the stores and the wall of a small mosque, a few men had created a makeshift patio by circling some broken-down office chairs around a plastic table. The men’s floury hands and long aprons marked them as bakers from the bread shop a few doors down. Seeking a respite from the heat of the ovens, they sat outside smoking and chatting, and watching a sporting fixture on the TV inside the shop – probably cricket, judging from their excited voices.

The smell of their cigarettes mixed with the smell of bread and the pungent tang of cardamom wafting from the grocer tucked in between the passport counter and the bakery. That combination – bread, cardamom, tobacco – is for me a particularly “Abu Dhabi” scent, but it is increasingly hard to find, as the little shops get driven out of business by newer, fancier places.

The gradual disappearance of the little shops marks a question almost as eternal as those plastic ID cards: as a city grows, whether you call it gentrification or progress, how do you balance old and new? Does something always get lost in the process? As more and more skyscrapers, malls and hotels go up in Abu Dhabi, what will happen to men like these bakers and their impromptu plaza? What about the bakeries, grocers and passport shops? (Actually, I suppose, the passport shops may well survive us all.)

Recently, in Manhattan, this question has raged around a rather surprising topic: the “painted ladies” of Times Square, long famous as a site for hustlers, performance artists, and oddballs of all sorts. The desnudas, as they are called, walk through the throngs of tourists, offering themselves as human props for photo ops: show your friends in Arkansas how you came to New York and stood next to a pretty girl whose naked torso was painted like the American flag.

New York mayor Bill de Blasio has proposed a ban on these women and, in true New York fashion, his proposal started a storm of criticism. People say that the presence of such flamboyant performances is part of what makes New York unique. As a writer in The New York Times pointed out, why would tourists come to New York if they're going to see the same things they can see everywhere else?

I wonder about that every time I see the Big Bus Tours lumbering through Abu Dhabi’s crowded streets. What do the tourists see from their top-deck vantage point? The beauty of the Grand Mosque, certainly, and then what? From the top of the bus, can the tourists smell the bread or the cardamom? Will they ever know the pleasure of a fresh circle of nan warm from the wall of the tandoor? Do they see a specific city, or just a vista of shiny malls and apartment buildings?

When people come to visit me, they always ask about seeing “old Abu Dhabi”. (It’s the second question, usually. The first is, of course: “It’s a dry heat, right?”) Asking about old Abu Dhabi isn’t really a question about history, though. It’s about wanting to find places in the city that aren’t like everywhere else.

Now, I'm not recommending half-naked dancing girls as a mark of urban flavour, but how do we retain Abu Dhabi's particularity? The National reported a few months ago that bakeries are facing hard times – and while bakeries themselves are not such unique enterprises, they have become floury icons of the city's vanishing past. And, of course, bread tastes far better than either passport photos or plastic ID cards.

Deborah Lindsay Williams is a professor of literature at NYU Abu Dhabi