Urban development in the region must be viewed objectively, says expert

Anthropologist Prof Ahmed Kanna at NYU Abu Dhabi, where he delivered a lecture on urban development last night. Lee Hoagland / The National

ABU DHABI // Scholars should avoid making value judgments about urban development in the Arabian Gulf because they are not helpful, an audience was told on Sunday.

“Why are we importing value judgments into the way we interact and think about everything?” said Ahmed Kanna, an anthropology professor at the University of the Pacific in the US.

He was speaking at New York University Abu Dhabi’s downtown campus as part of a lecture series.

A lot of people talk about cities in the region by labelling them as “unique”, “exotic”, “authentic”, “weird” or “stupid”, he said. But experts and scholars in particular should be wary of making such value judgments when describing these cities.

This way of talking about cities in the region “reinforces inequality” and “tends to obscure the history of how it came about”, said Mr Kanna.

the migrant workers who live in Arabian Gulf cities and help to build them, for example, seem to be told the cities are not theirs.

While he didn’t think cities in the region were necessarily good models for urbanism, he said the ways in which scholars, particularly Western ones, often talk about the Gulf can be unhelpful.

“I think the Gulf makes Westerners very uncomfortable in some ways,” he said. “I think the Gulf is seen by people in other parts of the Middle East and in the West as being fake, as being not serious.”

This is particularly true for many Western scholars, who view Gulf urban spaces through the “legacy” of Orientalism and tend to see non-Western people as less serious, Mr Kanna said.

Khudooma Said Al Naimi, a forensic anthropologist at the Ministry of Interior, was at the lecture and said that while he disagreed with some aspects of Prof Kanna’s approach, he appreciated the analysis and believed that discussing urban development was important for the nation.

“I think it is useful because the city is quickly growing,” Mr Al Naimi said. “It is good to open discussion about how the city developed and how we can make it better.

“We are better than cities in the US, which have high rates of crime. It’s not perfect but we hope we are going to have a good image.”

Justin Stearns, assistant professor of Arab Crossroads Studies at NYU Abu Dhabi, said the discussion Mr Kanna had provoked was positive for the local community.

“I think it’s vital to have scholars who work on the United Arab Emirates to be heard in the United Arab Emirates, and for people here to be able to engage with them, as we saw this evening,” he said.

About 80 people attended the lecture, titled “Gulf Urbanism: The Semantic Field of the Category of Space”. It was the second in a series of three lectures about new topics in Arab studies.