8 CEASELESS GROWTH AND THE URBAN TROPHY CASE
A second New York is being built
a little west of the old one
Why another, no one asks
just build it, and they do
—David Berman (Actual Air, 1999)
Just a few years ago, I brought a group of students to Doha for a week. The city was one of two worlding cities in our focus, each of which students would explore during the field-based portion of the course. The opportunity to engage these cities firsthand was, obviously, an integral feature and prime attraction for a course titled Migration and the Global City. In the schedule I established for our week in Doha, I had set aside Wednesday afternoon for an exploration of West Bay, the dense accumulation of skyscrapers perched over the turquoise waters of the sea (see figure 1). Those skyscrapers include several notable structures and awe-inspiring towers, including the French starchitect Jean Nouvel’s stunning and graceful creation, as well as William Pereira’s iconic pyramidical Sheraton Hotel, constructed in 1978. These architectural trophies are gathered around City Center Mall, the beating commercial heart of West Bay. On this afternoon, the mall would serve as our destination—the point at which our class would eventually reconvene. After breaking the students into small groups, their assignment for the afternoon was merely to explore and experience this portion of the city: via a dérive, or an urban drift, students might encounter the unexpected, perhaps see the unforeseen, or maybe meander into some pocket of the urban landscape just off the beaten path. Ideally, such a drift through the forest of skyscrapers might yield some experiential insight into the essence of this city, and perhaps into the lives of those who build and inhabit this urban trophy case. At least that was the idea.
I joined the students in this exercise, as is my custom. My urban drift through West Bay began to coalesce around photographing the adornment of the urban landscape with images of the Emir, a feature of the city that had grown particularly commonplace during the economic and social “blockade” of Qatar instigated by several neighboring states on the Arabian Peninsula. My newfound thematic interest guided me to potentially ideal vantage points for photographs. Clambering about this portion of the city eventually brought me into contact with the security personnel who policed the grounds of one of the many skyscrapers now occupied by government ministries. Photography is not allowed, I was warned, and was then directed to move along. In compliance, I dove back into the forest of skyscrapers. The whole of West Bay seems to be in a perpetual state of construction, and as a result, its streets can be particularly unfriendly to pedestrians. As I would later discover, one of the small groups of students that I had released into the city—a posse of intrepid young women, armored by their American privilege and displaying their typical charisma and politesse—had a much different experience that afternoon. The young women persuaded a migrant security guard to show them the empty floors high in one of the most iconic buildings gathered in this urban trophy case. This building had garnered much attention upon its completion in 2009, and here, a decade later, many of its floors remained unfinished and unoccupied. I was envious of their experience and transfixed by the details they later provided to me and the class.
FIGURE 12. A migrant worker sweeps the central walkway of Souk Waqif early in the morning. Photograph by the author, 2021
What explains the presence of those empty floors in an iconic skyscraper designed by a globally renowned architect? In part, that explanation is the central objective of this chapter. But let me fuel that question with a bit more empirical detail. The security guards that I encountered in my drift through West Bay were present as the direct result of the steady relocation of government ministries to these empty buildings, as those ministries were seemingly the only significant tenants who might occupy portions of the metastasizing surplus of office space in Doha. Consider also that scholar and researcher Steffen Hertog (2019, 293) reported that, as of 2011, only sixty-two apartments of the thousands available in Qatar’s free zones had been sold. Similarly, in a recent conversation I had in Doha, a Qatari friend employed in Msheireb reported that prices for the apartments there had been slashed and leases shortened, seemingly to no avail. The streets of Msheireb remained desolately unpeopled, with public spaces occasionally occupied by a construction worker heading from one place to another, a store clerk on break, or a groundskeeper tending to the urban space itself. Most residents of Doha are familiar with the sight of a forlorn migrant-clerk manning the counter of an empty global franchise, or minding the entrance to some minor spectacle of consumption that lacks any customers at all, or maybe tending to some other urban space of negligible use. All visitors to Doha are accustomed to encountering members of the veritable army of migrant workers who service the city (see figure 12).
In this chapter, I hope to provide an answer to the conundrum buried in the heart of these examples. Why is this city being built? Who is all of this for? How might we describe the engines of urban growth that course beneath the surface of the incessant construction of more and more Doha? Why, with such an evident surplus of commercial office space and a definite surplus of shopping malls in the urban landscape of the city, is more of both under construction? Or think of this conundrum in more precise terms: when The Pearl continues to struggle to find sufficient buyers in an infrastructural setting designed for forty-five thousand inhabitants, why is Qatar nonetheless pushing ahead with the construction of Lusail, the new city-within-the-city designed for four hundred fifty thousand more inhabitants? In summary, the question guiding this chapter is very basic and straightforward: by what logic does the city continue to grow?
In attempting to answer those questions, we might begin with Natasha Iskander’s observation (2021, 84) that “Doha and its opulent satellites grew not in response to the needs of its residents but rather in fulfillment of the modernist dream that the emir and his government had for what the city should become.” Her pithy statement appropriately conveys the central role that those who sit atop the sociopolitical hierarchy of the contemporary Qatari nation-state have played in the growth, development, and form of the city. I will return to the subject of elite agency and the shape of the city in the concluding segments of this chapter; however, I commence with David Harvey’s basic observation that cities have long provided an integral repository for the reservoirs of surplus capital generated by capitalist relations. In this chapter, I explore the relationship between those two explanatory paths and suggest that the social and political hierarchies characteristic of contemporary Qatar have grown in dialectic with the economy of urban growth and development that solidified in the late twentieth century. Indeed, Lewis Mumford (1961, 545), writing in that same era, observed that “once an economy is geared to expansion, the means rapidly turn into an end, and ‘the going becomes the goal.’ ” Along those same lines, I suggest that Doha’s ongoing urban development—or the process of constructing the urban future envisioned by Qatar’s leaders—has emerged as the keystone in social, political, and economic arrangements on the peninsula.
The Configuration of Arabian Modernity
The task of summarizing the essence of Arabian modernity is, of course, a fool’s errand in the grandiosity of its aspirations. But to move a bit closer to some modicum of a holistic understanding of the society responsible for the ongoing production of this city, I point to a set of foundational themes that have long percolated through scholarship concerned with the Arabian Peninsula and the peoples who reside there.
The first of those themes concerns the historical transition away from what Onley and Khalaf termed “shaikhly authority” (Onley and Khalaf 2006). In alignment with the social traditions of the region, authority was traditionally vested in tribal leaders, and was therefore personal, hereditary, and patrimonial in nature. When the wealth from hydrocarbon resources first began to accrue, it was controlled by each country’s singular leader, and by the mostly British and American corporations that had facilitated their rise to power. From that centralized point of a personified state, wealth was distributed through the networks and hierarchies typical of Arabian societies on the peninsula at the beginning of the twentieth century. These relations remained in place as oil wealth slowly began to accrue. As the Saudi anthropologist Madawi al-Rasheed (1997, 81–82) described it, in that era rulers subsidized tribal shaikhs “through the continuous distribution of rice, coffee, sugar, camels, and weapons.” But with the arrival of hydrocarbon wealth, money replaced almost everything on that list. Outsiders’ perceptions of these relations and these arrangements should be understood in the ideological context of the mid-twentieth century. In an era characterized by the paradigmatic and global crescendo of modernity and by the hegemony of modernization theory on the tenor and shape of international relations, the distribution of hydrocarbon wealth through the traditional hierarchies of personal and tribal relations appeared premodern and uncivilized to many. Those critiques might be understood as one facet of the broader Orientalist discourse by which Middle Eastern societies were sometimes framed.
What eventually emerged from that shaikhly system was superficially different from the traditional arrangements typical of Arabian societies. Yet the emergent and modern relations that evolved in the twentieth century, while more closely aligned with international norms, remained structurally akin to the traditional relations that preceded them. In new and modern arrangements, powerful tribes and merchant families positioned themselves not to receive cash infusions via the ancestral calculus of tribal relations but instead to receive contracts to build, manage, or develop some part of the city or some capacity of the state. The budding sense of nationalism in the GCC states congealed around the vision statements and policy frameworks that established growth and development as the twin lodestars by which the nation might navigate its path to a modernist future. In this reconfiguration of Arabian societies around the objectives of growth and development, certain portions of Qatari society prospered and advanced, while others’ power was diminished and marginalized. But the distribution of wealth remained largely guided by relations that were tribal, personal, hereditary, and patrimonial in nature, as it was in the preoil era. And those objectives—growth and development—are nowhere more manifest than the urban landscape itself.
An array of other themes pertinent to the configuration of Arabian modernity orbit around the conceptual gravity of the rentier state. In contemporary academia, rentier state theory seems somewhat embattled.1 In my estimation, the energies of that scholarly consternation might be best recognized as a signal of rentier state theory’s enduring value and utility. In the wake of American academia’s postmodern turn, it’s not misguided ideas or faulty concepts that garner critique from many academics today; rather, ideas and concepts that have explanatory power, proven utility, or a common-sensical appeal seem to attract the most virulent critique.2 Rentier state theory describes the economic arrangements of those states in which the wealth of the nation is derived externally (for example, by the sale of hydrocarbon energy on the global marketplace), in which that wealth is first controlled and managed by the state itself, and in which that wealth is subsequently distributed through the state institutions to the citizenry (Beblawi 1987). This is in stark contrast to state-society arrangements elsewhere, in which wealth flows from the citizenry to the state, typically via taxes. As this summary suggests, rentier state theory points to the exceptional nature of these economic arrangements. Although always grounded in that economic logic, the ensuing scholarly conversations concerning rentier state theory also provide insights into the political, social, and cultural ramifications of these arrangements.
One result of the rentier system is the centralization of the state in these economies and, more broadly, in the societies of the Arabian Peninsula. As discussed in previous chapters, many of the gargantuan urban projects by which the city grows are entirely or partially funded by the state. This basic fact exemplifies the rentier system. At a more microcosmic level, the rentier state offers citizens a comprehensive cradle-to-grave safety net, often including land grants, low-interest loans, free education, free health care, free or subsidized utilities, and quite a bit more. These economic arrangements, and the social and political epiphenomena they produce, simultaneously affirm the tribal form of authoritarian hierarchy found in countries like Qatar. The substantial safety net for citizens is also hypothesized to essentially quell political consternation by establishing the citizenry’s patrimonial dependence on the state.
Another key feature of the rentier system is public sector employment. In Qatar, nearly all employed citizens work in the public sector.3 In financial and economic terms, public sector employment functions as the keystone to contemporary state-citizen relations. As many scholars have noted, employment in the public sector serves as the primary mechanism for the transfer of wealth from the state to the citizenry, and vast portions of the aforementioned safety net are delivered primarily through public sector employment. The social and cultural results of these arrangements will be further explored in the subsequent chapter, but in addition to the enclaving and spatial segregation of citizens from foreigners in the urban landscape, these employment patterns comprise another mechanism for the preservation of Qatari distinction amid the sea of foreigners resident on the small peninsula. Moreover, with nearly all citizens employed directly by the state, scholars have yet to ponder the cultural footprint of these arrangements on the social and political identity of the citizenry. The fact that nearly all citizens are, in some way or another, involved in the incremental management of the state itself seems both exceptional and remarkable in global history.
The rentier system, in tandem with the kafala, also clearly privileges citizenship in exceptional ways, foremost via policies and laws concerning ownership. Owning land and owning businesses, for example, are both delimited partially or entirely to citizens, albeit with notable exceptions consigned to special zones and districts.4 In the ownership of businesses, these rules and regulations not only privilege citizens by ensuring all businesses include a citizen as majority-owned but also establish the viability of sponsorship itself as a financially lucrative vocation. Sporadic scholarly attention has portrayed how foreign entrepreneurship is harnessed (Choudhury 1998; Gardner 2008b; Khalaf 2010). For example, throughout the Arabian Peninsula, the term “sleeping partner” has been used for decades to describe the citizen majority-owner of businesses, large and small. That partner and majority owner is, stereotypically, uninvolved in the day-to-day operations of the business and is oftentimes the business’s primary financier. In the rentier arrangements codified by these policies and laws, that partner derives profit from the migrant-partner’s entrepreneurship and labor. These sorts of arrangements underpin most of the small businesses that energize this worlding city, and can also be framed as a reverberation of the rentier system: Qatari citizens remain deeply reliant on the state and on the external creation of wealth.
This is only a partial glimpse of the structures and relations by which Arabian modernity has been configured in the twentieth century. But this system’s coherence might be better conveyed with an example. In 2008 I began teaching on the women’s campus of Qatar University. Flying back and forth between Seattle and Doha—first for job interviews, and then later for periodic trips to return home, attend international conferences, or pursue various research endeavors—large sums of money flowed from Qatar University to Qatar Airways in my name. My family and I were given an apartment in a compound in the Al Waab neighborhood. Somewhat exorbitant monthly rental payments went from my employer to the owner of the compound, a prominent Qatari citizen. We purchased one car upon arrival, and a second in the following year, with monies again traveling from Qatar University, passing through my accounts, and then on to the car dealerships owned, at least in part, by Qatari citizens. Portions of the school fees paid for my daughter’s preschool similarly circled back to a citizen-sponsor. In addition to these major expenditures, there is the plethora of quotidian expenditures that, in part, all percolated back to sleeping partners and citizen-sponsors: every flat tire fixed by a migrant mechanic, every item purchased at a cold store, the entirety of the furnishings and decorations for our apartment, all of these purchases fall into the logic of the rentier economy. Moreover, migrants and their citizen-sponsors are essential features in the construction of all these places—my compound, the shopping malls, and the university at which I taught. Only select economic activities, such as remittances to migrants’ homes, or perhaps the purchase of materials abroad, escape this gravity. The rest circulates in Qatar through the vast migrant workforce present on the peninsula. By the logic of these arrangements, the foundation of the economy is expenditures by the state. Central to those expenditures is the construction of the city itself.
The Justification of Urban Growth
In the basic outline of Arabian modernity provided in the first portion of this chapter, I have emphasized the political-economic arrangements that evolved in the postoil era. I recognize these material relations as the foundation of contemporary societies on the Arabian Peninsula, and therefore as deeply implicated in the astonishing cities that have also arisen and in the complicated societies that have erected those cities. In passing, I also mentioned the collective ambitions of growth and development, concepts that, in my estimation, function as the motherboard by which these increasingly complex societies—now nations—are coordinated. Later on in this chapter, I turn to the discourses, ideas, and narratives by which these objectives are justified and enabled in the competitive discourse between neighbors on the Arabian Peninsula. First, however, I address how the penchant for ceaseless urban growth is cultivated, framed, and justified within Qatari society and to the various constituencies present there.
Essential to the coordination of these increasingly complex societies are the national vision statements that are periodically crafted by these wealthy states, then broadcasted to the citizenry, to the residential populations in Arabia, and to the global public. As we embark on the third decade of the new millennium, the operative vision statement in Qatar is the document entitled Qatar National Vision 2030, published in 2008 by the General Secretariat for Development Planning. As the document states, “The national vision aims to transform Qatar into an advanced country by 2030, capable of sustaining its own development and providing a high standard of living for its population and future generations.” That transformation can be understood as a top-down mandate for growth and development. That development is further articulated in four domains requiring careful stewardship: the human, social, economic, and environmental realms of development. In articulating these aspirations in more detail, the document also sketches the knowledge-based society that is vaguely discerned as the destination of the growth and development codified in the vision statement. The tidy and coherent document also mentions “world-class infrastructure” several times in explicating a national vision of the future.
The basic premises of this vision statement are noteworthy. Growth and urban development are taken for granted as the obvious objectives of the Qatari state. The role of the nation’s leader is to steward that growth and development with all available wisdom and foresight. The document mentions the careful “balancing” of these various objectives and pressures, and the document stresses the capacities of the nation’s leadership to “choose and manage a pathway that delivers prosperity yet avoids economic imbalances.” In the context of contemporary Qatar, fragments and portions of this vision statement are publicly brandished in the public-facing materials produced by numerous other institutions, ministries, programs, and by corporations with active projects on the peninsula. As an impressive and notably holistic articulation of the future envisioned by the state, the Qatar National Vision 2030 document seems integral to the coordination of so many different institutions and interests. Most significantly for our purposes here, however, the document clearly promotes a vision of the future that will be achieved through urban development. Urban growth is the path to the future envisioned and portrayed here.
Another key ingredient in the recipe for urban growth are mega-events. These events are particularly commonplace in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, and sometimes are hosted elsewhere in the GCC. The 2006 Asian Games, the 2022 FIFA World Cup, and the failed bid for the 2020 Summer Olympics are several of the most notable mega-events pertaining to Qatar. In addition to those veritable mega-events, however, Qatar hosts a steady regimen of tennis tournaments, hydrofoil races, film festivals, expositions, lesser football tournaments, and numerous other gatherings of all sorts. Portions of this list fit into what some economists now refer to as the MICE industry, with the acronym representing meetings, incentives, conferences, and exhibitions. Considered altogether, we might usefully differentiate two aspects of these activities and commitments. In part, these mega-events and the constellation of other activities hosted by the state, including all of what is referred to as the MICE industry, are intended to draw tourists and visitors to the city. This traffic captures neoliberal flows of money and people in the form of tourists, while simultaneously making use of the emergent urban infrastructure called forth by the Qatar National Vision 2030 document. The MICE industry folds neatly into the idea of a transition to a knowledge-based economy and society, which is also briefly articulated in the document. While these activities and commitments may be oriented toward bringing outsiders to the city, there is another aspect to the elements on this list; many of these events also require massive additions to the urban infrastructure of the city. The successful bid for hosting the 2022 FIFA World Cup, for example, required eight gargantuan stadiums, all serviced by the new Metro system tunneled under the city. These mega-events spur urban growth, underpin the economy, and thereby fuel the distributional logic of this rentier system.
An additional aspect by which urban development and growth are enabled is the mirage-like quality of the urban future broadcasted to both Qatari citizens and outsiders. This quality is captured by the transitive nature of the Qatar National Vision 2030 document: the promise of the city always resides in the future. That urban future is perpetually forthcoming. When new hotels or posh new restaurants open in Doha, when new projects near completion and the ribbons welcoming the public are finally cut, when new shopping malls are completed and doors swing open for the first time, or when entire new districts of the city announce themselves as open for visitors and investors, the city’s inhabitants briefly flock to these spaces. In my years of residence there, we, too, were part of this flock. Perhaps these clamorous crowds yearn for the city of the future and all it seems to promise. That same mirage of the forthcoming city is also discernible in the proliferation of computer-generated images, scale models, and dioramas portraying the soon-to-arrive urban future (see figure 11). They are quintessential examples of the domain of the imagined urban future the theorist Edward Soja (1996) called secondspace.5 These images circulate widely, and in the form of billboards and construction blockades in the urban landscape, they even clad the city itself. The vision of the forthcoming urban future presented in this imagery, or encountered firsthand in the new urban spaces to which the city’s elite inhabitants briefly flock, reveals an urban future shorn of the frictions and problems anchored in reality. Absent in those images is the legion of foreign workers who still reside, offstage, in the city; missing is the seemingly endless construction and reconstruction of a churning economy premised upon urban growth and development. Instead, in those images Qatari families mingle with a cosmopolitan stew of foreign professionals and content consumers. How could any commercial image convey the alienation and the ennui that accompanies a visit to yet another new luxury enclave, or to another architecturally stunning and opulently magnificent hotel, or to an even larger shopping mall replete with the same ostentatious commercial junkspace as others? Perhaps this is why Guy Debord (1983, 63) concluded that “the spectacle is nothing more than an image of happy unification surrounded by desolation and fear at the tranquil center of misery.”
Architectural Trophies, Mega-Events, and the Symbolic Economy
The architectural trophies that crowd Doha’s skyline, and the mega-events that call forth even more urban growth, also function in the symbolic vernacular.6 An explanation of the prevalence of trophy architecture and mega-events in Qatar would be incomplete without reference to this global symbolic economy. One might agree with the vociferous urban critics that the burgeoning skylines of the Gulf are simply the result of an astoundingly wealthy people, under the sway of a Western modernity, with an unprecedented surplus of money to spend. That line of thinking affirms Harvey’s contentions (1989, 92) from three decades ago—that the spectacular urban spaces are, foremost, a means of attracting capital and the right sorts of people. While those explanations certainly apply to the city, I instead point to an altogether different logic to this symbolic economy—a logic intricately connected to the political-economic relations I have already described in this chapter.
When thinking about the prevalence of trophy architecture and monumental structures in Doha, I think it is important to detach any analysis of the city from the normative analytic frame derived from scholarship concerning large and heterogeneous nations like the United States. Unlike the developed states of North America and Western Europe, most of the cities in the Gulf states are combined primate/capital cities. In some cases, these cities are the only significant urban agglomerations in small states (Kuwait City, Kuwait; Manama, Bahrain; Muscat, Oman; Doha, Qatar). In other cases, they represent the primate cities of somewhat autonomous emirates (Abu Dhabi, Sharjah, Dubai). As such, the appropriate comparative frame for these cities does not include Los Angeles, Kyoto, Marseilles, or Rio de Janeiro, but rather Washington DC, Tokyo, Paris, and Brasilia, for all these Gulf cities are capital cities. In relation to their context, by design these cities represent a nation to the world. These cities are the nations’ trophy cases, and are so in a sense that is more than figurative.7 These cities are a stage for the nation.
The predominance of cosmopolitan starchitects in Doha’s architectural constructions (with past and ongoing projects from I. M. Pei, Arata Isozaki, Jean Nouvel, Santiago Calatrava, and Zaha Hadid, for example) is also suggestive and yields some clue as to the symbolic register indexed by these projects. Many such constructions—for example, the convention center, the hotels, the Pearl, and the museums—are projects that explicitly cater to a foreign audience: the museums function as locations where Qatari culture is defined and distilled for a predominantly foreign audience; the Pearl is a freeholder zone in which foreigners can (and, from Qatar’s perspective, hopefully will) purchase property, thereby capturing some of the capital flows that now exit the Qatari economy. And many of the events that occurred in Doha—a professional women’s tennis match in which Venus and Serena Williams played in the final match, the Doha Tribeca International Film Festival attended by Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, and Ben Kingsley; the Oryx Cup hydroplane boat races held on Doha Bay; the England/Brazil friendly football match; the 2022 FIFA World Cup—all can be understood by the particularly cosmopolitan brand of cultural capital they exemplify.
In interviews with Qataris I was initially surprised by their evaluations of these monumental projects and events that accompany them. With the Pearl, for example, three young women quickly responded to my inquiries by noting that “Oh, the Pearl isn’t for us. We would never live there. It’s a place for the foreigners, for people like you, Professor.” At the same time, they expressed their pride in that project, noting that it would be one of the most beautiful places in all of the Gulf, a fine place to represent Qatar to the outside world, and an excellent place for them to shop should they ever desire. Or, at the 2010 Qatar ExxonMobil Open in Doha, I was surprised by the extraordinary paucity of Qataris at the final matches: international tennis stars competed in front of an audience largely comprised of foreigners, and in a stadium with a significant number of very expensive empty seats. One way to understand these events is as advertised: with the historically insular nature of Qatari society, there is a general and widespread interest in bringing the outside world to Qatar. To restate that claim in the parlance of Villaggio Mall’s advertising campaign from that same period, “Venice is now in Doha.” Yet these mega-events and architectural trophies are also part of what Michael Rustin (2008) called a symbolic economy. As this conceptualization suggests, these buildings and the events they are constructed to host have meanings that transcend their function and utility.
My understanding of that symbolic economy in Doha is straightforward. Scholars working in the neo-Marxist tradition have long pointed to consumerism as the most observable facet of the culture of capitalism (e.g., Robbins 2005; Broswimmer 2002). According to their analysis, this cultural system has fundamentally reshaped societies and cultures around the world. It strips individuals from other and prior collective forms of meaning and belonging, and it places them in a world in which identity is authored, in part, by the things one chooses to purchase and, in part, by the producers who help invest those commodities with particular meanings. From an anthropological point of view, it is particularly noteworthy that this cultural system highlights the individual and individual choice over other collective social aspects of human existence. Through the grand scale of consumption in the Gulf states, however, we can see how this consumer ethic does something quite different from highlighting the individual and her identity. Once we comprehend Doha’s museums, shopping malls, sporting events, stadia, universities, and trophy skyscrapers for their symbolic value, one can easily perceive how collective notions of belonging, and particularly nationalism, are reinforced by a sort of collective consumption. Much like a young Qatari woman at the mall trying to decide which purse best represents her individuality, style, and taste, the Qatari state purchases items of symbolic importance to project a refined, cosmopolitan, and thoroughly modern national image to a global audience, an ongoing act that simultaneously asserts the benevolent leadership of the ruling family and its cohort, whose role in this system is to choose tastefully and to choose well. The city, as a trophy case to both that leadership and its citizen-subjects, functions as the material form around which nationalism congeals. The city thereby reinforces a unified sense of belonging over the heterogeneity of preexisting interests and diverse social communities among the citizenry. Mega-projects and trophy architecture are the means by which this can be achieved.
Concluding Thoughts
In conclusion, there are a handful of themes that I would like to highlight from this chapter’s explication of the forces underpinning Doha’s urban growth. In the analysis presented here I contend that urban growth and development are instrumental in the distribution of wealth from the state to the citizenry. In building an economy largely centered on the expansion of the city itself, the Qatari people have been able to maintain a set of hierarchical relations and tribal affiliations that, together, preserve significant aspects of traditional social organization. As a product of the preservation of these traditional aspects of Qatari social organization, we can also see how the political legitimacy of monarchical power in Qatar depends on continued and sustained urban growth. The urbanists Harvey Molotch and Davide Ponzini (2019, 5) contend that the monarchical states of the region assert their sovereignty with “colossal structures and symbolic showiness.” In the analysis provided in this chapter, I would concur with the interconnection they establish between the urban landscape and monarchical sovereignty. To that observation, I would add that these states, and the elite members at the apex of those societies, are also politically dependent on the logic of distribution that urban development calls forth.
Another thread in this chapter that might be usefully highlighted here is reflected in the analytic importance of what Steffen Hertog (2019) termed “elite agency.” This elite agency was central to Onley’s portrayal (2007) of the region’s history and interaction with empires of the nineteenth century. Others have added to the small chorus of scholars who point to the primacy of elite agency in shaping khaleeji state, city, and society (Batty 2012; Exell and Rico 2014; Jones 2019; Iskander 2021, 84–85; Rizzo and Mandal 2021, 77). Over several academic generations, led largely by European and American scholars, the historian’s lens has increasingly moved away from its focus on great men, great events, and the narratives constructed around those at the helm of the nation-state. Instead, contemporary scholars and historians seek to redress the omissions and exclusions of these approaches by exploring “other” histories. Although there is much to laud with this enduring corrective, it seems a reflection of academic concerns that were primarily distilled in the democratic context of Western academia, and one tethered to the social and academic relations of the previous century. After decades spent pursuing yet another omission or exclusion in one national narrative or another, contemporary scholars today seem poorly attuned to the power and the agency of the elite themselves. In this chapter, I have consciously sought to explore the connections between the Qatari elite and the urban landscape of the city. The preferences and tastes of that elite have shaped the city itself, and it is that same stratum of the citizenry that benefits the most from the ceaseless urban growth that results.