The changing face of a once-retro Ajman neighbourhood

The march of progress threatens to sweep aside one of Ajman's oldest neighbourhoods.

The Al Bustan area in Ajman. Satish Kumar / The National

The march of progress has changed the landscape of most neighbourhoods across the UAE. Al Bustan, one of Ajman’s oldest localities held on to its retro status for years, but now shows signs of giving away.

Sandwiched between high-rise buildings and the walls of the city’s graveyard lies Al Bustan, a shabby neighbourhood in Ajman.

Walking through its dusty roads and small Arabic style houses, some looking more like concrete shacks than houses, is like travelling back in time to the UAE of the early 1970s.

All the hallmarks of that era still exist in this freej, or neighbourhood in Arabic. The palm and nabch trees lending shade to the interiors of the small courtyards, children playing barefoot and unsupervised on the narrow roads, and livestock kept in little pens attached to the houses.

All were distinct features of neighbourhoods in the 1970s.

But now modernity has caught up with Al Bustan, which has become the city centre of the emirate, and is sounding the death knell to its shabby retro-status.

As the smallest emirate, Ajman’s pace of development was much slower than that of the wealthier neighbours who changed dramatically during the past three decades. As a result, Al Bustan, to a large extent, remained untouched.

Things started changing in 2004 with Dubai’s real estate boom. It had a ripple effect on Ajman, which also opened up ownership of land to foreigners and fuelled a parallel growth.

Slowly, high-rise buildings mushroomed in the emirate and old residential neighbourhoods that were part of the city centre started to disappear.

Al Bustan is a reflection of the relentless development that the UAE has witnessed since its inception, says Ali Al Matroushi, a historian.

The formation of the UAE in 1971 brought with it vast changes and one of them of was the urbanisation of the country, he says. Al Bustan freej sprang up in the 1970s after the UAE was formed.

“All the cities in the UAE were established near the khor, the creek, which provided a natural port for the dhows. The sea was their lifeblood and main source of livelihood as all the economic activities were connected to it from pearl diving, to trade and fishing,” he says.

Before the union Ajman had been a small inlet with a population of a few thousand people, most of whom lived on the shores of the khor.

“In the 1960s only three areas, stretching out to only half a kilometre away from the sea, were populated in Ajman. They were Freej Al Gharbi, Freej Mian and Freej Al Sharqi. The rest were inhospitable sabkhas, salt marches, and the desert.”

Farther inland were two Masayef areas, where people moved during the summer to escape the heat of the shore.

These neighbourhoods were very small and the houses made out of palm fronds, barastis, clustered next to each other. Rarely would you find a building that was made out of stone because it was too expensive.

Tribes that had lived in the deserts and mountains moved to urban areas, which offered better opportunities.

“In the early 1970s, Ajman witnessed a migration of large numbers of Shehhi tribes from the northern emirates”, says Mr Al Mastroushi.

“To meet the demand of the burgeoning population, the Government reclaimed the sabkhas and built houses in newly formed neighbourhoods like Al Bustan.”

Many of the neighbourhoods that sprang up during the 1970s shared the same characteristics. They were built with cement, recently introduced in the region, and had only utilitarian purpose in mind.

Despite being constructed in the traditional styles of narrow roads flanked with one-storey, flatroofed houses and with small courtyards in the middle, aesthetics were not major factors.

As a result these neighbourhoods lacked the elegance and beauty of the courtyard houses of old Arabiya, like those in Dubai’s Bastakiya, whose wind towers were built from gypsum and corals.

Later in the 1980s and 1990s, new suburbs, with bigger and better housing, were built by the President for Emiratis outside of the main town centre.

Many moved out to the newer areas leaving their homes to be rented by low-income families. Eventually, some of the neighbourhoods such as Yaafour in Abu Dhabi and more recently Shaabiyat Al Difa, in Dubai, were razed to make way for newer and fancier buildings.

Al Bustan, however, survived to become a gritty home for low- income families from Pakistan.

Seventy-year-old Sher Mohammed and his family have lived in Al Bustan since 1983. Sher Mohammed ekes a meagre income from his small grocery shop attached to the three-bedroom house he lives in with his offspring, and now their children.

Sitting on a wooden bench outside his dilapidated shop, Sher Mohammed keeps himself busy by watching what is going on in the neighbourhood.

Little children play barefoot in the sand under the shade of a dry palm tree. An old woman herding a few goats and some clucking chickens on the dirt road stops by his shop to greet him in Baluchi.

Sher Mohammed says that nearly everybody in their freej knew each other, as most hailed from the same region in Pakistan. “Most of Al Bustan is connected through marriage or blood or the ties of being old neighbours. Even when our children marry, they find a room to live near us,” he says.

Before moving to Al Bustan, Sher Mohammed had been a resident of Dubai since the late 1960s and worked as a “leylam”, or a travelling salesman.

“In those days we moved from one area to another building our homes as we travelled around. The municipality would allocate land for us and we would gather pieces of wood, asbestos or any material available and build our homes.

“They were flimsy and during the rains our homes would be destroyed and we had to rebuild them from scratch.”

In those days he lived in Shaabiyat Karton, a huge shanty town in Deira that took its name from the old packing cartons from which it was built. It had its own mosque.

“The owner of this house had moved to a better place and he rented it to me for Dh200 a month. My landlord is a good man, may Allah bless him. I still pay a very low rent of Dh800 a month. ”

Life may not remain the same for much longer. Change has already started on the western side of the neighbourhood where tall residential towers, touting views of the nearby creek, have been built.

Patrons of the Murjan restaurant, a popular hangout for the neighbourhood’s young men, sit outside its shabby veranda playing a board game.

The noise of the ongoing construction work for yet another residential tower casts an ominous shadow over the restaurant’s future and that of Al Bustan.