Summary

Dubai is rapidly amassing a reputation as the quintessential example of a hyper-globalized city. With non-citizens comprising 80 per cent of its residents and 30 per cent of its GDP coming from international tourism, it is making its mark as a highly desirable place to both work and play. Moving away from a reliance on fast-depleting oil resources, Dubai’s recent success is built on new economies of international travel, trade and finance. An urban tabula rasa, Dubai is fashioning itself in a manner which follows no precedents. Playful developments such as the “Palm”, “World” and seven-star Burj Al Arab are indicative of a burgeoning infrastructure built for and by an overwhelmingly transnational population. This project interrogates the exclusionary nature of Dubai’s recent development by examining how new industries on which Dubai is built rely not just on the generation of capital by tourists, multinationals and affluent residents, but depend simultaneously on an underclass who create and maintain the material infrastructures necessary for their very sustenance.

Situating the research

Depicted in the popular media as the ultimate modern destination for work and play, Dubai displays all its symbols of progress and development which have caught onto an enthralled public consciousness – especially an Indian one, as evidenced by narratives of Gulf returnees. The economic success that Dubai enjoys speaks of development and progress to the mobile Indian citizen. As a place of work, Dubai is ranked the highest and most prestigious, “the top place in the Gulf for Keralese people and more generally for Indians” (Percot 2006: 58). And as a space for pleasure, it is setting itself up to be unparalleled. One of three palm-shaped megastructures, Dubai’s multi-billion dollar leisure and water-themed resort “The Palm, Jumeirah” is slated to open in 2008. The construction of 300 artificial islands, that will together form a map of the planet when seen from above, “The World” is another ambitious project that seeks to put Dubai on the world map as a premier international tourism destination. This is in addition to the construction of the world’s largest mall, hotel and theme park.

The changing material landscape of the emirate reflects its move away from oil-based economies and towards an increasing investment in its growing cultural economy of tourism. Much of this physical change however is dependent on the mobilization of cheap labour from less developed neighbours such as India. They are largely the workforce of the construction industry, which Dubai depends on not just to build its growing infrastructure, but also to generate economic growth. Dubai’s dependence on cheap labour and tourism for GDP growth is reflected by the sizable proportion of the 90 per cent of Dubai’s population who are temporary guest workers.

While the inflow of migrant labour from the Indian sub-continent has been a constant feature of the economies of most Gulf States since the oil boom of the 1970s, the recent post 9/11 surge of Arab investment in the region has brought in new potential for growth to a state whose oil reserves are slowly drying up. Dubai, because of its political stability and infrastructure, is an attractive safe place for Middle Eastern capital, much of it pumped into the booming tourism industry which aims to draw 15 million tourists a year from 2010. Out of a total of 7 million tourists who visit the Emirate annually, Dubai draws over 200, 000 Indians. This research will go beyond the statistics and explore the everyday lived experiences of these tourists and migrants to gain a better understanding of how elements of citizenship and nationality are played out in a space of transience such as Dubai. Furthermore, by tracing the ways in which Dubai draws peoples and capital internationally, this research also contributes to understanding and exploring Dubai’s increasing role as a central node within the modern Middle East and the greater region.

Review of the literature

Recent academic studies have well documented the flow of IT workers and entrepreneurs from India (Lessinger 1992, 2003, Upadhaya, 2004, van der Veer 2005). However, the steady exodus of low-wage manual and service workers, although formulated in terms of their diasporic relations with home villages/districts, the economic impact of their remittances to India and identity negotiations of returnees, (Osella and Osella 2005; 2000, Gardner 1995) has not been sufficiently theorized in terms of interactions within their adopted lived surroundings (cf. Yeoh and Huang 2003) and negotiations of rights and entitlements in a space where their welcome is ambivalent. Studies on migration broadly linked to national identity, citizenship and multiculturalism need to consider implications for the guest population and the role of destination country in the treatment of the transnational subject (Piper 2006).

The literature on tourism by peoples of Asian origin (Nyíri 2005, Chang and Huang 2005, Junemo 2004, Sum and So 2004, Mullins 1999) has been extremely limited and that on out-bound Indian tourism is largely policy-oriented (Yahya 2003). Mullins’ (1999) identification of urban tourism as providing a cultural imperative for the increased consumption of goods and services provides us with useful starting points to address tourism in cities. This project builds on this to account for India’s move from host destination to one of mobile consumers - the number of Indians travelling abroad is more than twice the number of foreign tourists visiting India. It thus raises questions of new national and post-national identifications of a consumerist citizenship (Urry 2000, Winter 2006).

Conceptual Framework

Drawing on Appadurai’s (1999) articulation of ethnoscapes, this research interrogates the conceptualization of Dubai as a playscape (Sheller and Urry 2004, Junemo 2004). Besides prominent tourist attractions and tax-free zones which characterize them as places for play, their presentation of generic images in defining a national culture creates a sense of openness and easy adaptability which also mark them out as places in play. This project explores the characterization of tourists as “players” and low-wage labour as “non-players” within these spaces and the effects of state as facilitator of legal systems which create and perpetuate these divides. How are the implementation of policies of differential exclusion, regulation of flows and provision of infrastructure negotiated and/or subverted in the everyday experiences of tourists and low-wage labourers? This project transcends the ascribed binaries of producer/consumer however, and examines both tourist and labourer as mobile consumers, exploring implications of a consumerist citizenship for conventional ideas of cosmopolitanism and governance.

This research recognizes the relative ability of the tourist and labourer to be globally mobile as contingent on the seductive potentialities of hypermobile capital. For the labourer, the necessity to accumulate capital, and for the traveller, the seduction of capital expenditure. As agents of economic growth, both their welcomes to the destination country are contingent on their generation of capital for the host state, and their eventual return to the home territory. This project sets out to explore how the variant relationships of tourist and labour to capital mobility mould their everyday practices and interactions as transnational subjects and their relationships with the host state.

Laavanya Kathiravelu

PhD Candidate

Centre for Research on Social Inclusion

Macquarie University

NSW, Australia

Laavanya.Kathiravelu@scmp.mq.edu.au