5     SEGREGATION AND SPACE IN THE MODERNIST CITY

Hierarchy and Difference in Qatar

Orientalist scholars in the twentieth century took note of the profound sense of religious equality expressed by the community of Muslim believers. From their observations and speculations, those scholars envisioned a broad and foundational sort of egalitarianism undergirding Arab societies. That might sound complimentary in the contemporary cultural climate, but in proper academic and historical context, that egalitarian ethos was typically posited as the reason for the developmental stasis with which Middle Eastern societies were continually framed—a stasis that purportedly inhibited progress on the path to a Western-styled model of civilization. As André Raymond notes, mistaking this leveling aspect of Islam for a broader social egalitarianism was one of many flaws in the Orientalist paradigm. Instead, in his assessment of the empirical evidence, Raymond (2008, 67) concludes that “What is so striking when studying the realities of the social life of Muslim societies in the modern age is, on the contrary, the depth of social inequality” woven into so many different social structures in the region.³ In assessing the terrain of that social inequality in Qatar—in explicating the differences it leverages and in portraying the hierarchies that result—I commence with an overview of the forms of hierarchy that we might identify as indigenous to Qatar and to the peoples of the Arabian Peninsula.⁴ Subsequently, I turn to an explanation of how hierarchy and difference play out in the various foreign populations now resident in Qatar.

In her seminal work, the anthropologist Anh Longva argued that the principal threshold of difference in Kuwaiti society lay between citizens and foreigners. Although decades have passed since her book’s publication, those observations seem equally apropos today.⁵ In the social hierarchies characteristic of contemporary Qatar, citizens on the peninsula continue to occupy the apex social position. While we might concur on the positionality of the citizenry as a whole, there is more here than meets the eye: although frequently portrayed as a homogeneous and undifferentiated populace, the citizenry itself is replete with noteworthy differences and fissures. Foremost, the Qatari citizenry remains a population organized principally by tribe. This tribal social form is clearly a vestige of the region’s past, but at the same time, its enduring importance—and even the resurgence of this social form in the waning decades of the twentieth century—owes much to the modern Qatari state (Alshawi and Gardner 2014; cooke 2014). Via the tribal mode of social organization, groups of interrelated families comprise what anthropologists refer to as clans, and sets of those clans make up a tribe. Members of the constituent clans and the households that constitute them genealogically trace their lineage to a single ancestor. From one angle, the resurgence of the tribal form affirms Longva’s assertion about the primacy of the threshold between citizen and foreigner, for this system of social organization establishes an insurmountable sanguineous firewall between citizens and the many foreigners present on the peninsula. The genealogical calculus of tribal belonging, remapped by the state onto citizenship, provides no quarter for outsiders.

The revitalization of the social tradition of tribalism by the modern state is a complicated feature of contemporary Arabia. On its own, its resurgence is the topic of numerous publications and, indeed, entire books (Al-Mohammed 2011; Alshawi and Gardner 2014; cooke 2014; Samin 2015). In Qatar, the ruling family positions itself as a tribe, for example, and various more marginal communities—such as groups of those Qatari citizens of Yemeni heritage—also present themselves in such form. But these tribes, including the extended urban families who now present themselves as tribes, together articulate a form of difference that is merely one vector of stratification among the Qatari citizenry. Different tribes, for example, may also be seen as more bedu or more hadhar. These descriptors point to other lines of differentiation among the citizenry: hadhar identity has, traditionally, connoted a more urbane and civilized ethos than the rural and formerly nomadic bedu. And while some of these vectors of differentiation are ascriptive in nature, other vectors are achieved forms of difference. Education, for example, is another key mechanism by which members of the Qatari citizenry differentiate themselves from one another, and with the unequal distribution of wealth in the rentier system, economic class comprises yet another vector of achieved difference. Altogether, the socioeconomic range of the Qatari citizenry extends from the extraordinary wealth of the ruling family and those other families socially proximate to it all the way to what one might recognize in the global index as a middle-class existence. In the contemporary era, this middle-class position is essentially the socioeconomic floor of the Qatari citizenry: via a robust welfare state and the benefits associated with citizenship, no Qatari citizen would be recognized as belonging to the underclass.

Although citizens occupy the apex of this social hierarchy, they comprise less than 10 percent of the total population on the Qatari Peninsula. At or near the top of the social hierarchy of the foreign communities resident in the GCC are those Arab migrant communities from other nonoil-producing states in the Middle East. The mobilities and migrations that connect Qatar and the other GCC states to these regional neighbors predate most other migratory conduits and, indeed, predate the formation of nation-states altogether. In the twentieth century, this ethnically Arab constituency of foreigners was the primary component of the foreign workforce toiling in Arabia. In the 1970s, Asian workers began to demographically overtake the foreign Arab workforce: in 1975, an estimated 72 percent of the GCC’s expatriate workforce were Arabs; by 2009, that percentage had diminished to 23 percent (Kapiszewski 2006; Babar 2017, 3–4; Norbakk 2020, 56–65). The reasons attributed to this shift vary. Scholars have pointed to the perceived threats due to the cultural and linguistic similitude of this Arab migrant population to the host societies; other analyses point more specifically to the Pan-Arabism of the 1970s and the political threat that movement posed to the monarchical leaderships in the GCC. It has also been suggested that the lower costs of Asian migrants, partially a result of their willingness to leave families at home during their time working abroad, helps explain this demographic shift; still other scholars point to the direct competition between Arab migrants and the citizenries of the GCC states who, as they increasingly enter the workforce, begin to compete with Arab migrants for skilled employment (Babar 2017). In Qatar, the foreign Arab workforce currently makes up an estimated 13 percent of the total workforce, and while those Arab migrants come from twenty different sending states, the majority hail from a smaller set of five migrant-sending states: Egypt, Syria, Sudan, Lebanon, and Jordan (Babar 2017, 29).⁶ Small portions of the Arab migrant workforce occupy unskilled or low-skill positions in Qatar, but the Arab ethnic component of the migrant workforce predominates in several key high-skill sectors: they are disproportionately represented, for example, in the finance and insurance sectors, as well as in various other professional, scientific, and technical fields, including the education sector. In summary, the cultural, linguistic, and ethnic similitude that the expatriate Arab migrant communities share with the citizenry lodges them near the apex of this social hierarchy. Ironically, those similitudes also help explain their diminishing demographic presence in the region, as well as some of the host states’ anxieties around their enduring presence.⁷

Also at or near the top of the social hierarchy of foreign communities resident in Qatar and on the Arabian Peninsula are the foreign professionals and other skilled migrants with passports from the archipelago of developed states mostly found in the planet’s northern hemisphere. This set of migrant-sending states includes both Canada and the United States, all of the European countries, both Australia and New Zealand, and a smattering of other smaller nation-states. Japan, Korea, and Singapore might also be placed in this category, but their contributions to this demographic component of the populace of foreign workers in Qatar remain small (see Jones 2019, 12). Altogether, this segment of the foreign workforce can be usefully referred to as a cosmopolitan professional elite. In the nomenclature commonplace on the Arabian Peninsula, these migrants (as well as the Arab migrants previously discussed) are referred to as expatriates, not migrants, a differentiation in nomenclature which signifies the class positionality of this portion of the foreign population, and thereby distinguishes them from the transnational laboring class. Unlike the various Arab migrant communities who occupy the pinnacle position in the social hierarchy of foreign communities present in Qatar, by definition no members of this cosmopolitan professional elite work in the lower economic sectors of the workforce. However, much like many members of the Arab migrant communities described above, members of the cosmopolitan professional elite typically migrate as a nuclear family unit.

Additionally, in newer scholarship the cosmopolitan professional elite is oftentimes essentialized in racial terms and conflated as white. While that conflation has real meaning and symbolic power in the traffic of stereotypes that characterizes social interactions in superdiverse contexts like those found in the Arab Gulf states, those assertions essentially purvey the very racial stereotypes they utilize. Most of the sending states that contribute migrants to the cosmopolitan professional elite present in Arabia are, unlike Qatar, integrationist states, and therefore contribute professional migrants from diverse ethnic ancestries. There is quite a bit of overlap between this cosmopolitan professional elite and other categories of the foreign population described here, including the Arab migrant communities who share the upper echelons of this social hierarchy.⁸ For example, there are numerous members of this cosmopolitan professional elite who trace their ancestry to neighboring Middle Eastern states but are citizens of these developed and mostly northern states—a diasporic reality expertly explored by both Jaafar Alloul (2020, 2021) and Mari Norbakk (2020). Similarly, at least a dozen of the scholars cited in this book are precisely defined by this juncture: they trace their ancestral roots to sending states in South Asia, the Middle East, or Africa, but are citizens of developed northern states and should be counted as members of this cosmopolitan professional elite. In summary, while the boundaries between these migrant communities can be blurry, and the communities may overlap, both the cosmopolitan professional elite and the ethnically Arab migrant communities occupy a position of relative privilege when compared to the vast transnational laboring class of foreign migrants at work in Arabia.

Below these groups of foreigners at work in Qatar one finds the vast population of middle and working-class migrants who comprise the majority of the foreign population resident on the Qatari Peninsula. Migrants from South Asia predominate here—men (and some women) from India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Pakistan have a long-standing presence in Qatar and in the neighboring GCC states. In addition to the vast population of South Asian migrants, there are increasing numbers of African migrants visible in Arabia, and notable populations of East Asian and Southeast Asian migrants are present as well. Of the latter regional grouping, both the Philippines and Indonesia have been sending migrants to Qatar for many decades. In the hierarchy of foreign communities under construction here, migrants from African and Southeast Asian nations typically jostle with South Asians for positions near the bottom of this hierarchy. In our 2012 survey of low-income migrants in Qatar, our research team’s random sample encountered labor migrants from more than twenty-five different nationalities (Gardner et al. 2013). This number is likely lower than a contemporary assessment of national diversity would find among the resident population in Qatar—first, because new sources of labor are periodically tapped by the migration system described in the previous chapter, and second, because only a subset of the nationalities present in Qatar fall into the low-income category (arbitrarily defined as QAR 2000 for our 2012 survey). Although detailed demographic information about the migrant populations resident in the various Gulf states has long been difficult to access, it is likely that national diversity is even greater among the middle class and professional class of migrants in Arabia.⁹ Regardless, the various national groups present in Arabia fall into an established and calcified hierarchy perceptible to most residents of Qatar.¹⁰

With this broad description of the resident population of Qatar in hand, there are three general points of pertinence here. The first concerns the sexual constitution of these different national communities of migrants. The overall proportion of men to women among the population of foreigners resident in Qatar is highly unequal, as is the case in the neighboring GCC states. In Qatar, there are nearly five men resident on the peninsula for every woman (De Bel-Air 2017, 7). Numerous factors shape this demographic reality, but a migrant’s socioeconomic place in the broad hierarchy established above is a key variable: skilled migrants and professionals further up the socioeconomic ladder can bring an accompanying spouse and family to the peninsula. Nonetheless, a trailing spouse or family members in diaspora come with additional costs—school fees, extra vehicles, larger accommodations with sufficient privacy, periodic air transportation costs, and a host of other expenditures are commonly entailed. As a result, only migrants loftily placed in the socioeconomic hierarchy can afford to bring their families to Qatar. This fact is further reinforced by Qatari policy: family visas are available only to migrants who earn more than QR 10,000 (US$2,747) per month.¹¹ Although many women arrive as trailing spouses, others arrive to work; women are particularly visible elements of the domestic sector, of the commercial service sector, as well as in education, health care, and a handful of other vocations. The overall number of women who reside in labor camps—that is, women employed outside the domestic sector—has been steadily increasing in recent years (De Bel-Air 2017, 8). On occasion, and usually in the wake of a particularly heinous case of exploitation or abuse, migrant-sending states have sought to prohibit women’s outmigration to Arabia. This points to a double standard: in most arenas of this mobility, migrants are moving from patriarchal sending states to patriarchal receiving states, and despite the travails of the sponsorship system, men are frequently—and incorrectly—stereotyped as capable stewards of their own fate.

In addition to the differences in the sexual constitution of the various national migrant communities, those communities also occupy different socioeconomic territory.¹² This variability and these differences constitute the second general point to draw from this description of social hierarchy on the Qatari Peninsula. The Lebanese and the Canadian communities present in Qatar, for example, are almost entirely consolidated in the higher socioeconomic echelons, and one would find no members of these national constituencies working as manual laborers. Conversely, other national constituencies are mostly or entirely consigned to lower socioeconomic echelons: almost all Nepalese migrants occupy these lower socioeconomic realms, for example, and the same was true for the Vietnamese contingent of workers present during our survey in 2012.¹³ Still other national communities of migrants traverse socioeconomic strata. Many Egyptian migrants, for example, can be found near the top of this social hierarchy, while other Egyptian nationals are employed near the bottom of this hierarchy as low-income workers. The Indian community of migrants is perhaps the quintessential example here: while many Indian nationals toil for Qatar’s newly established minimum wage, other members of the Indian diaspora occupy the very highest socioeconomic strata of foreigners in Qatar. The variable socioeconomic footprint of the different migrant communities has a significant impact on their experiences and well-being, for the communities to which migrants in distress often turn have different capacities, different cultural capital, and different visibility in Qatar, all of which impacts members of these communities’ ability to resolve the problems and imbroglios they might face on the peninsula.

The third and final point about this social hierarchy concerns the traffic in stereotypes that results from hierarchies that have calcified over time. As I have noted, my description of hierarchy and difference among the resident population of foreigners in Qatar and the other Gulf states would sometimes truck in the stereotypes and essentializations that one frequently encounters in the social fields of contemporary Arabia. From one angle, replicating those stereotypes is analytically treacherous, as these categorizations and observations are oftentimes only vaguely tethered to any empirical reality, if any at all. At the same time, it should be recognized that these stereotypes, as an ad hoc social prism for organizing and sorting through the array of cultural, national, and ethnic diversity one encounters in Arabia, materialize the social reality they purport to describe: over sustained migration, Filipina women become idealized as domestic workers; Nepalese men are idealized as unskilled laborers; West African men are envisioned as ideal security personnel. These impressions—the “gender and racial discourses” that Iskander (2021, 14) takes note of, although these “discourses” are commonly deployed via a social prism concerned foremost with nationality—are reinforced in Qatar by the reality they construct. Through chain migration and employer preferences, these migrant pathways calcify the stereotypes, bigotries, racisms, and other aspects of the social prism that manifests the reality it purports to represent. Interestingly, the calcification of these communal identities in the division of labor in the Gulf states yields a structure of relations that clearly resembles caste structures in South Asia (Dresch 2006, 208).

This brief and somewhat cursory overview presents the all-encompassing social hierarchy visible in contemporary Qatar. The preservation of cultural differences—resulting in part from the transnational footprint of the foreign population, and also from the spatial politics central to the remainder of this chapter and book—seems to produce a plural society characterized by a form of hierarchical multiculturalism.

Segregation in Urban Space

In 2009, Divendra had only recently arrived in Qatar, and he resided in the partially finished labor camp at the margins of the Industrial Area. Like me, Divendra sought to explore the city on his days off—we were both eager to see the sights, gauge the modernity of this new-to-us city, encounter different people from different backgrounds, and experience as much of this strange and unfamiliar cultural world as possible. He wanted to explore more of the city than the Al Attiya parking lot, which was thick with low-income migrants on a Friday afternoon (see figure 9). Like neighboring cities on the Arabian Peninsula, Doha is a city replete with spectacular architecture and urban designs, and there is much to regard in the urban landscape. Prominent on the list of potential destinations that garnered Divendra’s attention were Doha’s numerous shopping malls. In general terms, shopping malls were—and remain—symbolically and socially vital structures in the urban landscape of the Arabian city; they are spaces of high consumerism, oftentimes architecturally spectacular constructions, and function as vibrant air-conditioned social spaces for the resident population of the city. At that time, there were three shopping malls of note in Doha: Landmark Mall, City Centre Mall, and Villaggio Mall. These three malls rose above the city’s other malls in the economy of public attention, although their position has since been eclipsed by newer, larger, and more ostentatious malls. In my interviews in the labor camps, these consumerist spaces were a commonplace referent in our conversations. Notably, almost all of the men knew these urban spaces only by reputation: most migrant men of the laboring class were prevented from entering these places by the implementation of a “family day” on Fridays.

Family day was designed and implemented to disallow single migrant men—or “bachelors”—from entering the mall, thereby removing them from these spaces of ostentatious consumption and excising them from some of the most electric quasi-public spaces in the sweltering city. In broader conversations, this policy was justified by the intention of ensuring that women and families (and particularly Qatari women and families) might feel comfortable shopping and consuming in these spaces. To implement this policy, other migrants (typically also South Asian) were stationed outside the entrances to the mall and tasked with the challenging assignment of pulling aside any unaccompanied men and disallowing them from entering the mall. At the same time, these guards were either instructed or otherwise intuited that they should not detain single men from the middle class. I myself—not of the bachelor class of labor migrants—passed through this gauntlet unperturbed on multiple occasions when unaccompanied by my young daughter, and I noted that individuals who appeared Qatari, as well as South Asians perceived as belonging to the middle class, also entered shopping malls on Fridays without issue. The previous section of this chapter concluded with a discussion of the traffic in stereotypes that becomes a quotidian feature of life in a demographically superdiverse context. Those skills—the capacity to initiate a conversation with a stranger amid this superdiversity, and to enter that conversation with an estimate of who the other individual might be—rely on the estimations, assumptions, guesses, and stereotypes that foreigners rapidly develop in the city of Doha. For the guards stationed at the entrance of the shopping mall, their occupation hones this skill to perfection. They must be able to differentiate between foreigners of different classes; they must estimate the migrant’s nationality and, if necessary, the language with which to approach him; they must quickly decide which individuals are to be disallowed entrance to the mall; and they must grapple with any consternation or friction that results, particularly in those situations where the individual feels wrongly prohibited from entry.

Divendra was undeterred by these obstacles. A Nepalese friend who worked inside first facilitated Divendra’s exploratory entry to Villaggio Mall. Astonished at the interior’s decoration and the high-end consumer culture he could glimpse therein, he returned to camp with stories of what he had seen and tales of his adventures inside. His fellow workers were captivated. In later conversations, he confided that his feelings were mixed: although the sights were impressive, the inequality was painfully stark, and in his final estimation he regarded the mall as “a heaven for the rich people and really like a hell for us.” Despite these ambivalences, Divendra grew more interested in seeing the other shopping malls in Doha. Compatriots at the camp had suggested that he certainly ought to visit City Center Mall—none of them had ever entered it themselves, but they had all heard that the vertical mall nestled among the skyscrapers of Doha’s West Bay was a particularly impressive and spectacular structure. After gauging the Venetian canal and costumed gondoliers at Villaggio, Divendra was ready to make the comparison himself, and he confidently accepted the challenge of finding a way inside yet another forbidden urban space. As this proletarian boulevardier later recalled:

So I went there on the first of May—I think it was a Friday. I took a bus from the Industrial Area—bus 57—to the city center … It was afternoon, and it was scorching hot, so I waited outside until evening. I was dressed in my smartest clothes, and I wore my new stylish eyeglasses. At the City Center Mall, I don’t have anyone I know, so there were no friends to help get me inside. So I just waited outside. I watched the security guards out there. I saw police vans, also, and I was nervous about trying to enter. What if they catch me and ask me why I am in the mall—don’t you know it’s family day? Why did you come here? And then I will be in trouble. So I waited outside for ten or fifteen minutes. And then suddenly my mind was made up. I just took out my mobile phone, switched it off, held it up to my ear and, as I walked toward the guards, I loudly said, “Oh, hi Jenny, how are you? Just wait inside—I’m at the entrance now.” And then I just went inside—right past the guards. They didn’t even bother me!

In Divendra’s estimation, City Center Mall was a lesser urban spectacle than Villaggio. Musing over the comparison, he was unimpressed with the former mall, but he noted that still, on his more recent adventures there, he could afford nothing; he had explored the first floor a bit, and then had watched the skaters on the ice rink at the center of the mall. One of the thoughts that crossed his mind there, as he recalled, was that “these Qataris have a lot of money, and they are spending the money blindly.” Eventually exiting and returning to camp, the stories of his adventure again captivated his compatriots. And in the coming months, Divendra would continue to explore other parts of the city, including additional areas and urban features where migrants of the laboring class were sometimes prevented from entering. In the months that followed, we would sometimes explore the city together.

But Divendra and the other migrants’ active exclusion from the urban spaces I often frequented sat uneasily with me, and his experiences actively circulated in my mind. Moreover, shopping malls were not the only spaces from which these working-class migrants were segregated. I had witnessed numerous instances of this quotidian segregation at shopping malls some ten years ago during my residence in Doha. More recently, in 2018 and 2019 I witnessed working-class migrants being turned away from Souk Waqif by the police that patrol that space, and I have also witnessed them being prevented from entering the Corniche—the long esplanade on the city center’s waterfront. The same impulse to sift, sort, and segregate the working class of the migrant population returned in March 2020. Facing some of the highest COVID case rates in the GCC, Qatar established a cordon sanitaire—a selective and spatialized quarantine zone—around the Industrial Area: roadblocks, checkpoints, and concrete barriers were the Qatari state’s attempt to stem the ongoing spread of the virus (Chandra and Promodh 2020, Iskander 2020).

It was episodes like these—all facets of the same spatial politics, I suggest—that are core concerns of this book and of my analysis of city and society. In the remainder of this chapter, I want to take holistic stock of migrants’ experiences with segregation in the urban landscape of the city. By broadening the scope of what drives and constitutes this segregation, I reveal that this sifting and sorting of migrants in the urban landscape of the city is a quotidian feature of labor migrants’ experiences in Arabia. There are the notably episodic and occasional forms of active segregation here: preventing these men from entering a shopping mall or being present in various other urban spaces or cordoning off a primary zone of their residence in an attempt to stem the spread of a virus. But these forms of segregation and demographic sorting are, as I hope to demonstrate here, only one manifestation of a broader and more comprehensive spatial politics manifested in the urban landscape of Doha. Building on the empirical foundation of the four migrant synopses presented in an earlier chapter, and drawing more directly from Divendra’s experiences described here, I suggest that the forces impelling this segregation in Doha might be conceptualized in four distinct realms.

First, the kafala and the broader arrangements of the Gulf migration system play a certain and integral role in the segregation of the transnational proletariat in the urban landscape. For a great majority of the foreign workforce, the location of their residence is assigned by their employer, and its provision is framed as both a benefit and, in the longer tradition of the kafala, as an obligation of the sponsor to the foreign worker. Through state-led urban planning efforts, the location of these labor camps has shifted over time; in decades past, the aging and decrepit city center was abandoned to the foreign workforce by a citizenry deeply invested and, suddenly, financially capable of a steady outmigration to the successively new suburban periphery. In the context of this urban history, the location of the Industrial Area at the periphery of the city heralded a reversal; as attention and capital investment began to flow back into the revitalization of the aging urban core, the expansive transnational proletariat long resident there was increasingly relocated to this periphery. First, they were relocated to the Industrial Area, and then subsequently to an array of massive newer developments—like Asian Town and Barwa Al Baraha, also located at the urban fringe. These newer developments gather dormitory-style labor camps and various commercial amenities, all designed to accommodate and service the vast foreign workforce toiling on the peninsula. As these peripheral, planned labor accommodations have proliferated in the urban landscape, the Qatari state has simultaneously implemented a series of prohibitions on the location of labor accommodations (Walker 2015). Altogether, paramount in the causal forces that place foreigners in particular spaces in the urban landscape is the kafala, which establishes the unequal, dyadic relationship between foreign workers and the employer-sponsors who must also accommodate them.

A distinctive and second force that results in the spatial segregation of the transnational proletariat in Doha might be summarized most broadly as the result of market forces. Although most transnational migrants are placed in accommodations by their employers, many others are, instead, provided with a housing stipend by their employer, with which they are to arrange and obtain their own accommodation. It is through these market arrangements, for example, that in decades past citizen families relocating to the suburban fringe began to rent their aging houses left behind in the city center to various resident foreigners; in the city center and now at the periphery, foreign migrants frequently advertise shared spaces for rent; and before the Ministry of Municipality and Urban Planning delineated “no bachelor” zones in the urban landscape, my fieldwork oftentimes carried me to aging villas occupied by dozens of transnational labor migrants in residential neighborhoods still predominantly inhabited by middle-class Qatari citizens (Gardner 2010c). These cases exemplify the fact that the kafala and the determinative role that it plays in establishing the location of residence for many foreign workers coexists with market forces. And those market forces, operating in the domain of real estate, conjure familiar spatial results: more desirable locations and neighborhoods in the urban landscape are more costly, thereby transposing economic inequality onto urban space. Through the “invisible hand” of the market, we can perceive another segregatory force shaping the circumstances and the location of foreign workers in the urban landscape of Doha.

A third segregational force that we might identify in Doha’s urban landscape is the gravity that brings culturally and linguistically similar people together. This gravity is visible at a variety of scales. For example, transnational labor migrants congregate on Friday in the parking lots surrounding Al Attiya Market in the heart of the Industrial Area. In gathering there, workers from the same area of Tamil Nadu commandeer a particular portion of the sidewalk; Nepalis from Chitwan District occupy another. With a few questions to strangers, newly arrived migrants can quickly find their way to familiar compatriots and friends in a faraway land (see figure 9). Similarly, albeit at a different scale, in the dormitory-style labor camps to which many members of the transnational proletariat are assigned, migrant workers typically have the freedom to decide on who will room together in the camp. As a result, Bangladeshi men typically room with other Bangladeshi men; Muslim Indians often room with other Muslim Indians; Sinhalese Sri Lankans seek out other Sinhalese Sri Lankan roommates. This “gravity”—the agentive spatial sorting observable in the labor camps or in the parking lots of Al Attiya—can be extrapolated to the city as a whole: in Doha, and in any city where market forces are at least partially present in the apportionment of real estate, cultures coagulate in the urban landscape.¹⁴ In Temporary Cities, Yasser Elsheshtawy (2019b) ruminates at length on “Little Bangladesh,” an informal social and commercial space discretely tucked in the urban landscape of Abu Dhabi. Similarly, Americans (and others) are familiar with the “Chinatown” model of urban space that resulted from the rebuilding of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake and fire. Indeed, this is the same gravity by which Arab tribes, clans, and families first configured Doha’s urban landscape in a mosaic of firjan. Or consider that Rana AlMutawa (2021, 149) noted that her Emirati interlocutors were drawn to urban spaces that “feature a high proportion of Emiratis relative to other groups.” Drawn together by cultural, linguistic, or ancestral similarities, the humans in these examples describe the gravity by which people congeal in the urban landscape. This gravity is another segregatory force in the urban landscape of Doha.

The final set of forces driving the segregation and spatialization of transnational migrant laborers in the urban landscape are those that first drew my attention, the forces centrally visible in the ethnographic description of Divendra’s experience with which I commenced this section: the volitional and active segregation of the foreign workforce in the urban landscape of Doha. Members of the transnational proletariat—and particularly male migrants—are oftentimes framed as a pollutive threat to the social integrity of the urban landscape. In tandem with this perception, male migrant workers in the lower economic classes are, in various circumstances, actively prevented from accessing various areas of the city, and particularly those areas of the city frequented by the citizenry and the cosmopolitan elite present on the Qatari Peninsula. Although this set of forces driving the segregation of the transnational migrant population has been a lightning rod for sporadic global attention, I have contended here that this active form of segregation is only one facet of the broader spatial politics at work in the city.

Concluding Thoughts

The four different forces delineated here include several that are imposed on migrants as a condition of their existence in a land foreign to them: when accommodation is provided by their employer, they often have no say at all about their placement in the urban landscape, and at certain times and in certain places, their mobility in the urban landscape is actively inhibited. These forces are oftentimes volitional in nature. Other forces identified here stem directly from migrants’ agency: they value and oftentimes need to connect with culturally and linguistically familiar compatriots, and when market forces are at work, their place in the urban landscape is shaped by the economic inequalities that underpin their presence in Qatar. None of these forces typically operates in isolation. Instead, they intersect and overdetermine the resulting spatial segregation and spatial distinction.

In the logic by which these migrants are sorted and segregated in urban space, class seems the most salient variable. By merely presenting himself as a member of the foreign middle class, Divendra passed through the security gauntlet at the entrance of City Center Mall without incident. Other variables and aspects of migrant identity—language, ethnicity, religion, and race—are merely a portion of the lexicon by which the migrant’s class might be estimated. And while intrepid and curious migrants might have the capacity to flaunt these strictures, they do so at the risk of garnering the attention of the state, as Divendra described. Moreover, for Divendra, crossing those thresholds was not just a risk to his tenure in Qatar but also a painful confrontation with the inequalities that typify our world and are so visible in a cosmopolitan entrepôt like Doha. While some labor migrants chafe at these restrictions, in my experience most seem to have accepted the world as-it-is, before them, replete with opportunities and challenges. The constraints on their mobility in the city are seen as part and parcel of work in Qatar. In the Gulf city, the segregation of the transnational working class is a social fact.