The smart city and the containment of informality: The case of Dubai

Abstract

Chinese

I argue that Dubai’s smart city project, ‘Smart Dubai’, is a response to the following priorities: (i) the furtherance of the city’s scale-making project and worlding strategies, through the propagation of the smart city imaginary and the buildout of a smart city infrastructure modelled after those in the global north and west and used to compete for members of the creative class and other high-value residents; (ii) a project to enlarge the scope of Dubai’s economy of flow. Dubai in particular, and the UAE in general, have long articulated a political economic project based on the creation of a political economy that positions the country as a regional hub within the global political economy of flow; and (iii) the containment of urban informality, which in Dubai is understood as both a disciplinary problem and an existential challenge to what is still, at heart, a rentier economy.

Keywords

flow Smart Dubai urban informality worlding practices

Introduction: At DXB

Passengers landing at Dubai International Airport (DXB) in late January 2018 and deplaning via Terminal 1 would have come upon a billboard advertising SAP – a multinational software conglomerate specialising in enterprise-level management software – and its smart city management services, prior to entering passport control. The billboard depicted a Sim City-like vision of a smart city, presumably Buenos Aires, resplendent in its modernist perfection. The depiction was almost perfectly rectilinear in its ground plan of wide boulevards lined with large office blocks, trees, small parks and idealised residential neighbourhoods consisting of modernist apartment buildings. A large volume of traffic efficiently moves through all of this – presumably governed by a smart traffic management system.

I want to think of this billboard as a portrayal of the smart city imaginary (Cugurullo, 2019a), a vision of the smart city as perfect in its function as its form and, as such, the height of urban formalism. In this article, I argue that the various initiatives that are articulated to Smart Dubai – the political economic and spatial economies of flow; the management of a diverse and highly mobile population; the restructuring of urban space, mixed-use real estate megaprojects and spectacular decontextualised architecture; and the global competition for the creative class (Florida, 2014) and other high-value residents – are rooted in the politics of urban informality and the quest to create a perfectly knowable, formal and manageable city.

Conducting research on Smart Dubai, or any other aspect of Dubai’s buildout for that matter, is not an easy undertaking. Molotch and Ponzini (2019: 8) have discussed the difficulties in conducting research in the Gulf, writing that, ‘Autocratic governance limits access to officials, statistical data, and fieldwork sites. Standard methods like survey, interview, or ethnography are typically not easy or possible at all.’ This has been no less true of my own work on this article: official records and statistics have been unavailable and potential interview subjects unwilling to go on the record, even when guaranteed anonymity. Thus, in much the same way that Molotch and Ponzini (2019: 10) have described, I have attempted to reverse engineer Smart Dubai and its relationship to urban informality in Dubai by triangulating a semi-structured interview with five weeks of field observation of an extremely formal urban environment (the Dubai Marina complex), an examination of Smart Dubai and its affiliated organisations’ online public relations efforts (which should be viewed as contributions to the city’s scale-making project), the published rules and regulations that Smart Dubai and its affiliated organisations must make available for their existing and future stakeholders and partners, along with news reports and other information that can be found online. Once assembled, these pieces of the puzzle that is Smart Dubai form a picture of a city that is ill at ease with informality and the uninhibited movement and behaviour of its residents and visitors.

Informal Dubai

The formalism of the SAP billboard couldn’t be more different from the districts that comprise old Dubai, which runs roughly east to west along either side of Dubai Creek and was the city’s original political, economic and sociocultural centre of gravity. Originally built in the 1960s to be sensitive to what were at the time understood to be locally vernacular urban spaces and architectural forms (Elsheshtawy, 2010), the districts that comprise the oldest parts of the city – including Bastakiy’ya, Deira, Bur Dubai, Karama and Satwa – are very dense, interlocking and overlapping enclosures that are difficult to navigate and visually opaque.

The districts that comprise old Dubai may be understood as the city’s locus of urban informality, and in three ways. First, informality varies from city to city (Pratt, 2019) and, given the very unique demographic conditions of the UAE (Breslow and Allagui, 2012), informality in Dubai should be understood in a somewhat singular fashion that does not simply oscillate between the structuralist perspective, which views any political economy as a source of inequality, thus requiring state intervention, and the legalist viewpoint, which sees informality as a consequence of the actions of the state, thereby requiring deregulation and the withdrawal of the state from the market (Acuto et al., 2019). In a country where expatriates are subject to deportation after 90 days of unemployment, and those whose income ranges from the extremely low wages of labourers¹ to the salaries of lower-middle-class clerks and others often reside in labour camps, informal settlements do not exist. They are spatially contained and managed (Buckley, 2013, 2014) within what Andraos (2019: 70) has referred to as the ‘invisible camps.’

Second, following Roy (2005), I contend that urban informality exists as a contested spatial process of differentiation that embodies varying degrees of power and exclusion that function as ‘a logic through which differential spatial value is produced and managed’ (Roy, 2011b: 233), and within which the state plays an active role. In Dubai, the production of differential spatial value is articulated to problems of discipline and governance regarding the containment of socioeconomic difference (Buckley, 2013). The old city is the place one lives when one is not a high-value resident of Dubai, but rather one of the many residents who serve this population segment and who are not housed in a labour camp. The closer one is to the old city, the more likely it is that one will hear a South Asian language, Arabic or Tagalog (Kanna, 2014; see also Coles and Walsh, 2010), and the less likely one is to hear a language from the global north.

Third, in Dubai, where the politics of informal settlements do not exist, the contested process of differentiation manifests itself in what De Certeau (1984) described as the dialectical interplay between strategies that delimit movement and behaviour in the production of place – which I contend is a function of Dubai’s formalism – and the motive tactics of resistance and contestation that are productive of space. Informality in Dubai thus exists in alternative spatial practices shaped by the unconventional and informal navigation and use (Ascensão, 2016; Elsheshtawy, 2011a, 2011b) of what is increasingly a formal urban environment. These alternative spatial practices are, in turn, articulated to three disciplinary problems primarily associated with the old city and addressed by the ongoing deployment of Smart Dubai: the limits to knowledge of and within the old city, the disciplinary problems posed by the free and spontaneous movement and behaviour of subjects and the political economic problems posed by informal rents.

A problem of surveillance and knowledge

Roy (2011b: 231) has described subaltern urbanism as a spatial-epistemological category, a space of difference that cannot be spoken for, and that serves as the demarcation of ‘the limits of archival and ethnographic recognition.’ This is reproduced in the spatial fabric of the informal, a continually shifting, multivalent and multivariate series of sociospatial relationships that occur in the interplay between the formal and the informal (Roy, 2011b: 233). In the dense opacity of the old city, these continually shifting relationships and epistemic limits not only delimit the production of knowledge about the informal, they also problematise the establishment and maintenance of its disciplinary surveillance and control (Follmann, 2015; Harris, 2018). This is particularly relevant in Dubai, where the old city has been a site of political volatility, ranging from merchant reformism in the late 1920s and early 1930s to pan-Arab nationalism in the 1950s and 1960s (Boodrookas and Keshavarzian, 2019; Chalcraft, 2011; Kanna, 2011).

A problem of movement: Informality and kinetic urbanism

Mehrotra (2008) describes the relationship between formal and informal urbanism as a dynamic tension between stasis and movement (read: as a tension between place and space, between prescribed and wilful movement). Governing this phenomenon is an underlying purpose of Smart Dubai, where informality exists spatially as a form of kinesis among the city’s formal, permanent structures and infrastructures, thus enabling their alternative, informal use. In Dubai, the kinesis found in the old city is treated as a phenomenon requiring containment, which is achieved by channelling any potential kinesis into political economically disciplined and productive movement within architectonically formal environments, and subsequently maintained by the buildout of Smart Dubai.

A political economic problem: Informal rents in a rentier economy

In many ways, the UAE still functions as a rentier economy (Coates Ulrichsen, 2011) upon which have been grafted a set of neoliberal market policies and practices. Here I am interested in informal residential rents – rental contracts that have not been registered with the Dubai Land Department (DLD) and are thus in violation of Dubai’s strict residential and commercial real estate regulations. Informal rents are typically advertised by photocopied notices posted on lampposts, utility boxes, walls and shop windows that Elsheshtawy (2010) highlighted in his discussion of the city’s Satwa district. In a rentier economy that lacks substantial tax revenues,² and in which the majority of the city’s real estate developments are the product of parastatal corporations (Elsheshtawy, 2019), informal rents not only denote the loss of income, they also represent an existential threat to Dubai’s political economic structure.

Worlding Dubai: City of flows

Dubai’s centre of gravity shifted alongside and as part of the adoption of a neoliberal market economy and a cultural ethos articulated to the free market and a lifestyle of conspicuous consumption that was designed as a strategy to depoliticise a politically restive population (Kanna, 2011). This shift was realised in the development of the Sheikh Zayed Road (SZR) corridor in the 1990s (Elsheshtawy, 2019), centred around the 12-lane Sheikh Zayed Road, running south from the old city and parallel to the Arabian Gulf. The SZR corridor is home to the decontextualised vernacular spaces and spectacular architecture (Nastasi, 2019; Nastasi and Ponzini, 2019; Ponzini, 2011, 2019) which house the privileged lifestyle of conspicuous consumption that Dubai is known for, and images of which circulate around the world.

The global circulation of images that portray Dubai’s spectacular and decontextualised vernacular architecture and its lifestyle of luxurious consumption and entertainment has been used to construct an ongoing scale-making project (Sindelar, 2016). Scale-making projects are ‘projects that make us imagine locality, or the space of regions or nations’ (Tsing, 2005: 57; quoted in Sindelar, 2016), as ‘coherent bundles of ideas and practices as realized in particular times and places’ (Tsing, 2000: 347; quoted in Sindelar, 2016). Dubai’s scale-making project consists of the ongoing production and circulation of spatial imaginaries of its architecture, lifestyle spaces, cultural events and examples of overwhelmingly conspicuous consumption that circulate outwardly across the globe as ‘Brand Dubai’ (Haines, 2011). This scale-making project, designed to attract members of the creative class (Florida, 2014) and other globally mobile high-value tourists and residents that cities increasingly compete to attract and retain, is one of two simultaneous worlding strategies that Dubai has undertaken in order to position itself as a hub within the global political economy of flows (Castells, 2010).

The city’s second worlding strategy is its infrastructural integration within the global political economy of flows (Akhavan, 2019). Dubai has simultaneously pursued two infrastructural strategies with respect to flow; one of extensification and one of intensification. Dubai’s strategy of extensification, one of inter-referencing (Ong, 2011; Roy, 2011a, 2011c) modelled on Singapore and Hong Kong, has resulted in the city’s regional domination of economies of exchange, retransmission and transshipment (see Akhavan, 2019). DXB is the busiest airport in the world in terms of international passengers, at over 88 million per year, and is surpassed overall only by Hartsfield-Jackson, in Atlanta (Saadi, 2018). Jebel Ali is the largest container port between Rotterdam and Singapore (DWC, 2018b). The UAE is a regional leader in information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure buildout, and ranks first in the International Telecommunications Union’s most recent rankings of ICT use, mobile network coverage and the percentage of the population covered (ITU, 2016). Dubai’s media city is the region’s hub for the (re)transmission of digital information and entertainment. The Dubai International Financial Centre is the region’s most important regional institution for the exchange of financial instruments.

Dubai’s strategy of intensification has been undertaken to physically integrate the city’s transportation infrastructure into the global network of flows through the construction of the Dubai Logistics Corridor, which is designed to integrate and accelerate the movement of human and material flows – as well as to accommodate projected future volumes – moving between the various ports and transshipment facilities that exist throughout the city (Akhavan, 2019). An example of this is the construction of the E-11, E-311 and E-611 traffic corridors that provide a total of 36 highway traffic lanes traversing Dubai. Two of these three corridors, E-311 and E-611, flank Dubai World Central (DWC), a massive mixed-use business project that integrates Jebel Ali with Al-Maktoum International, Dubai’s second airport, with a planned capacity of 160 million annual passengers, approximately 50% greater than Hartsfield-Jackson. Al-Maktoum International will also have an annual cargo capacity of 16 million tonnes, triple the annual capacity of Memphis, currently the world’s largest cargo aviation hub (DWC, 2018a). Moreover, DWC’s fully automated container handling and sea–air integration between Jebel Ali and Al-Maktoum has enabled intermodal transshipment times to be reduced from 2.5 days to four hours (DWC, 2018a, 2018b).

The buildout of the logistics corridor has also enabled the city’s engineering of formality, the creation of ‘carefully engineered structures … [that] promise a more knowable form of urban density’ (Harris, 2018: 300) by displacing the former centrality of old Dubai and containing its informality, thereby perpetuating ‘the splintered and inequitable landscape of the existing city that smart technologies were ostensibly intended to overcome’ (Wiig, 2019: 66–67). This has occurred in three ways. First, components of the logistics corridor have been located so that they also border the old city, the locus of Dubai’s existing informality. The limits to the old city are thus defined and contained by D-89 (Airport Road) and DXB to the north, E-11 (SZR) to the east, D-71 (Financial Centre Road) to the south and D-92 (Al Wasl Road) in the west.

Second, the logistics corridor is used to facilitate the relocation of socioeconomic difference, and thus any potential informality, at the limits of what has become a multicentric city. This produces what I want to describe as differentiated residency, a local variation of differentiated citizenship (Harris, 2018). Within differentiated residency, there is a distribution of the expatriate population among spaces of disciplinary subjection, ‘where low-skilled and migrant populations are governed through disciplining techniques … and surveillance … intended to instil both productivity and political stability …’, and spaces of pastoral subjectivity, where high-value subjects are governed by ‘techniques that stress nurturing and special care …’ (Ong, 2006: 79). Dubai’s disciplinary spaces consist of isolated, gridded, low-cost and easily surveilled workers’ housing, located at the limits of, and bounded by, the logistics corridor’s transportation grid, thus spatially segregated from the rest of the city as much as possible. The city’s pastoral spaces are located within the SZR corridor, and are equally formal in nature, but are architecturally varied, and either part of a mixed-use development or located in close proximity to one. Dubai enforces the socioeconomic exclusivity of its pastoral spaces through a combination of sociospatial technologies – including the legal designation of some areas as ‘family areas’, thus excluding the single men who comprise the large population of labourers in the emirate (Buckley, 2014) – socioeconomic exclusivity, limited means of ingress and egress typically requiring automobility and the use of private security guards and gates (Kanna, 2014).

Third, by designing spaces, both disciplinary and pastoral, so that they are as formal as possible, any potential informality or alternative spatial practices are minimised, if not completely eliminated (Harris, 2018). One such pastoral space is the Dubai Marina, a mixed-use residential, commercial and tourism complex that runs alongside SZR and is located immediately to the south and west of the Palm Jumeirah. The Dubai Marina is an adaptation of the business model and marketing strategy of Vancouver’s Concord Pacific Place, and even borrows design details such as the railings and curves along the Marina’s seawall (Lowry and McCann, 2011). The Dubai Marina is also an example of inter-referencing, as the complex competes with Concord Pacific Place and similar real estate developments around the world for globally mobile, high-value occupants and tourists (Lowry and McCann, 2011). In some respects, the Dubai development has surpassed Concord Pacific Place: the ‘walkway is wider, more socially diverse, more commercial and in certain spots more lively ….’ This is a result of the ‘“festival” setting’, which creates ‘new consumers for this mobile urban dream, buyers conversant with a new hybrid language of urban leisure and unfettered enjoyment’ (Lowry and McCann, 2011: 190–191), and who are drawn to Dubai by its ongoing scale-making project.

The Dubai Marina is also a node in the new, multicentric Dubai, and an example of engineered formality. Unlike Pacific Place, which is integrated into the existing street grid and an easy walk to any number of commercial outlets, there are very limited means of ingress or egress to the Dubai Marina as it is separated from the rest of Dubai by SZR, and the Al Nassem and Garn Al Sabkha interchanges to the north and south of the Marina, respectively, the only two means of vehicular access. Pedestrian access to the Marina complex is via two footbridges that cross over SZR at the DAMAC Properties metro station at the north end of the Marina and the Jumeirah Lake Towers metro station at the south end. The walk from either metro station to the eastern walkway along the seawall is fairly long and very unpleasant: including the footbridge, it is approximately 500 m from the DAMAC station to the eastern seawall and 750 m from the Jumeirah station. In either case, one faces a very loud walk alongside highspeed access roads, where traffic kicks up dust and emits exhaust fumes. On any given evening very few, if any, people make this walk. In contrast, the parking structure under the Dubai Marina Mall is always close to capacity (field notes, Dubai Marina, 15 August to 21 September 2019).

While the Dubai Marina attracts an ethnically and racially diverse crowd, it is a socioeconomically exclusive place. It obviously caters to upscale residents, tourists and visitors from around the UAE, and those are who one encounters in the mall and the shops, cafes and restaurants along the seawall. The only residents of the city who represent socioeconomic difference are those either serving the upscale residents, tourists and local visitors or involved in the Marina’s upkeep and maintenance (field notes, Dubai Marina, 15 August to 21 September 2019).

Ponzini (2019: 87) notes that one key difference between Pacific Place and the Dubai Marina is the diminished emphasis on ‘public space, green areas and social inclusion. Such features fell to the developer’s financial priorities and, on the design front, favour for high-rise and iconicity.’ I contend that these budgetary decisions were also designed to limit the possibility of alternative, informal uses of the Marina, which would disrupt the Marina’s festival setting of unfettered consumption and enjoyment on the part of its residents and visitors. The omnipresent surveillance cameras and private security guards along the seawall, at the entrance to and inside every building and throughout the mall, reinforce the Marina’s architectonic formality and discourage any form of behaviour that even remotely resembles an alternative spatial practice. The guards are pleasant, are knowledgeable about locations in the complex and give excellent directions. They are also well-trained in discouraging anything but momentary loitering along the seawall. Individuals, for example, who pause their walks for more than a few moments will be asked if they need directions, and subtly encouraged to move along by the guards, who will remain discretely close at hand until one continues on one’s way (field notes, Dubai Marina, 15 August to 21 September 2019).

Smart Dubai

The always already variegated smart city

Recent scholarship makes clear that the concept of the smart city defies any simple, stable definition as it is always already a response to complex local conditions, and thus varies from one urban context to the next (Carvalho, 2015; Grossi and Pianezzi, 2017; Karvonen et al., 2019; Krivy, 2018; Shelton et al., 2015). Moreover, it is the existence of complex local conditions that prevents any smart city project from being built out tout court, requiring instead what Shelton et al. (2015) have referred to as a piecemeal approach to its construction, which results in ‘a patchwork of different incompatible elements due to the fragmentation of the politics of the city’ (Cugurullo, 2019b: 34; see also Cugurullo, 2018). Although the smart city may be a variegated phenomenon, this does not mean that it is always already a victim of local circumstance. The discussion of the piecemeal approach to the construction of a smart city tends to reflect the experience of western cities and urban polities, where various civil society actors function, in Habermas’s (1991) terms, as a rational-critical public that complicates the buildout of the smart city. Many of the factors that are responsible for the piecemeal approach to the smart city, in particular the politics of urban administration, political oversight, public opinion, etc., do not exist in Dubai in the manner that they exist in cities of the global north and west.

Clearly there are limits to the ability of civil society actors and a rational-critical public to constrain or complicate the buildout of smart city projects, and it would be naïve to argue that the buildout of the smart city is always already rendered piecemeal. Similarly, while it would also be naïve to argue that governments in the UAE do not have to contend with a variety of local internal and external competing interests – see, for example, Ballon’s (2019) discussion of the development and construction of NYU Abu Dhabi, Cugurullo’s (2016, 2018) and Cugurullo and Ponzini’s (2019) discussions of Masdar City – it would be equally naïve to assume that the authoritarian structure of governance in the UAE would permit the articulation of political economic contestation through the formation of a rational-critical public. The particular political economic formation found in Dubai – an authoritarian government whose political economic interests are represented by parastatal corporations acting as government proxies and driving the design and buildout of Smart Dubai, the lack of a public sphere, the crucial role played by expatriate labour (both high and low value) with few if any rights as residents – represents a model of smart city adoption that does not match the assumptions held by writers examining the buildout of smart cities in the global north and west. Moreover, the buildout of Smart Dubai has been focused on the city’s existing service units and is, at least initially, more focused and limited than Abu Dhabi’s smart city project (De Jong et al., 2019). The actually existing smart city is thus something that must always be understood as provincial in nature (Leitner and Sheppard, 2016).

Worlding Smart Dubai

One aspect of Smart Dubai’s existence as a worlding strategy is as what Cugurullo (2019a) has referred to as the smart city imaginary; the promise that Smart Dubai, through the integration of ICTs with the city’s various existing infrastructure technologies, can create a better, more sustainable and enjoyable environment for its residents. In this respect, Smart Dubai is a component of the city’s ongoing scale-making project, enhancing the city’s drive to attract members of the creative class and other high-value residents from the global north by delivering an ever-expanding suite of smart city services modelled on the social, cultural, ecological and political economic objectives of other smart city projects (Angelidou, 2017; Hollands, 2015; Kitchin, 2014) via a set of smartphone applications. Smart Dubai is also intended to foster start-up support services that include the Dubai Smart City Accelerator and Dubai Future Accelerators, thus facilitating Dubai’s plans to become a regional technology start-up incubator (Smart Dubai, 2018c), thereby attracting more and typically younger high-value residents to the city.

A second aspect of Smart Dubai’s integral position in the city’s worlding strategy is its key role in the city’s inter-referencing strategy. This is accomplished through the integration of smart city services with the city’s infrastructural strategies of extensification and intensification. I want to discuss three examples of this strategy – the Digital Silk Road, Dubai Blink and the Real Estate Self Transaction platform (REST) – all of which are built upon the city’s blockchain initiative. My discussion of these initiatives is based on a semi-structured interview conducted on 12 October 2019 with Ali Khawaja, a founding member of and strategic adviser to the Dubai Blockchain Center (DBC). Khawaja described the purpose of DBC as ‘essentially to push two things. They’re trying to push transparency … which provides a lot of advantages and along with transparency they’re trying to optimise processes.’ Facilitating transparency and optimising processes creates key strategic advantages for DWC, ‘so now were talking about shipping ordinarily with paperwork, which would take X number of days. With blockchain applied to the process the number of days gets reduced. The process is end-to-end.’ Khawaja also noted that this optimisation not only facilitates a strategic advantage with respect to end-to-end shipping times, but also enables significant cost savings: ‘There’s a huge amount of reduction in labour costs. It essentially automates a ridiculous amount of the processes that are used.’

The Digital Silk Road is a blockchain-based project that will facilitate secure, automated and paperless tracking of shipping transactions and is designed to be integrated with and enhance the competitive advantage of DWC’s intermodal shipping system on a global level (Sutton, 2018b). As Khawaja explains:

So, getting rid of the documentation cleared up a lot of the problems that are inherent with any physical documentation process … Because it is a permission based system, let’s say you’re dealing with a specific shipping agent … a specific customs clearance in another country and they have their own system, so building the bridging software that enables you as the Silk Road to connect to whatever their system is, is relatively easy … Initially the Silk Road becomes a hub and then becomes a standard. At some point it will be like, why reinvent the wheel? We have a perfectly good solution with these guys, let’s roll it out everywhere.

The Digital Silk Road supports Dubai Blink, a global trading platform based on virtual business licences to enable business-to-business (B2B) trading between businesses located anywhere in the world, via Dubai. According to Khawaja, ‘[T]hey are launching in the first quarter of 2020, they will be announcing their virtual licence … which enables you to create a business licence in the UAE without ever having to step foot in it.’ Dubai Blink is designed to circumvent national and international regulatory regimes, customs fees and other hinderances to unfettered global B2B commerce (Sutton, 2018a). This leverages DWC’s geographic location and intermodal infrastructure, stated Khawaja, by:

taking the free zone and making it global. You essentially have a business licence that’s UAE-based, and you can trade within the UAE, you can trade through the UAE, import/export, import and sell here, export and sell outside, all of the options.

Finally, the Dubai Land Department’s REST will enable real estate transactions in Dubai – both purchases and rents – among parties located anywhere in the world, in real time. Scheduled to be operational by 2020, the platform will centralise all data collection and eliminate all paper-based transactions while also reducing the need for brokerage participation. REST will also enable the remote payment of all utility fees and enable users to access mortgage services and make mortgage and rent payments through its planned smartphone application. This will not only increase the amount of global investment in real estate located in Dubai, it will also, according to Khawaja, ‘completely, functionally get rid of every real estate agent’ and thus the arbitrage outcomes effected by these agents, and the fees associated with their involvement in real estate transactions.

Smart surveillance and the containment of informality in Dubai

A pillar of Smart Dubai’s delivery of smart city services is the smartphone, which has 96% market penetration in the UAE (ITU, 2016). I want to think of the smartphone in combination with the Emirates Identity Card (EID), a biometric card incorporating both a smart chip and an RFID chip that is proof of one’s legal residency in the UAE and which all residents are legally required to have in their possession at all times (Government of the United Arab Emirates, 2019). Together, the smartphone and the EID are part of an edifice of smart surveillance that manifests itself in the surveillance of the city’s residents, both Emirati and expatriate alike, as they move throughout the diffuse, multicentric city. This edifice of smart surveillance is also used to curtail the existing informality within the old city while minimising its propagation in the SZR corridor.

Dubai’s edifice of smart surveillance is constructed along two dimensions. First, it is constructed materially in the creation of a massive web of data collection points, which Coletta et al. (2018: 7) refer to as proxies, ‘points of connection that facilitate flows of data …’ (see also Kitchin, 2014). Dubai’s web of proxies, an integrated, city-wide deployment of active and passive sensors, has been built out by a series of public-parastatal-private data collection partnerships. These sensors are used in the harvesting of residents’ capta, the term that Kitchin and Dodge (2011) have coined to describe information that has been selectively, involuntarily and unknowingly captured, prioritised and measured. Dubai’s existing web of proxies is currently being upgraded with both stationary and mobile AI-equipped cameras. Stationary cameras outfitted with AI-driven, real-time APNR and facial recognition capability have been deployed throughout the city’s traffic camera network. These cameras have been deployed so as to track the city’s residents as they drive throughout the multicentric city. The city’s authorities have hailed this initiative as a great success, claiming that the traffic camera system has been responsible for the apprehension of 550 individuals either wanted for or suspected of crimes (Debusmann, 2018).

Each of the city’s 10,000 licensed taxis will eventually be equipped with mobile surveillance cameras on the front and rear of the car, each with a 180-degree field of view. The mobile smart camera initiative is currently on trial with 10 taxis, but in time the mobile cameras’ real-time, AI-driven APNR, facial recognition and gait analysis systems will continuously surveil the city’s streets, monitoring the behaviour of the city’s residents (Shahbandari, 2018) and subjecting everyone, on any street in the city, to real-time AI-based surveillance and analysis as the taxis pass by. This will save the cost of having to retrofit the old city with the web of proxies embedded in the infrastructure of the SZR corridor (Shahbandari, 2018). More importantly, the taxi-based mobile cameras will solve the disciplinary problem posed by the lack of surveillance and knowledge caused by the informal, continuously shifting, multivalent and multivariant relationships that occur within the interlocking and dense opacity of the old city. Disciplinary knowledge of the old city will be generated as the taxis move through it and produce real-time surveillance and AI-driven analysis of the movement and behaviour of subjects on the streets in the old city.

Appended to the capta is volunteered data – data that has been harvested from residents’ use of geospatially aware smartphone applications (Ashton et al., 2017; Shelton, 2017; Zook, 2017), and in this case including Dubai’s smart city applications on residents’ phones. Together, capta and volunteered data are initially cross-referenced against locational data harvested from residents’ smartphones and the RFID chip in residents’ EIDs as they move through the SZR corridor. This information is subsequently cross-referenced across government, parastatal and private databases (Saseendran, 2015) in order to produce an extremely detailed and regularly updated data profile of each of the city’s residents. Dodge and Kitchin (2016a, 2016b) have described this data profile as a life-log: life-logs are productive of capta shadows, the data that follows one’s existence and provides the basis for social sorting and fine-grained social differentiation. The life-log and capta shadow for each of Dubai’s residents is becoming increasingly detailed; one’s EID and smartphone are now required in order to access each of the city’s 37 service units as they operationalise their smart service delivery plans in conjunction with the city’s parastatal partners, which include ICT providers, banks, hospitals and real estate firms (Smart Dubai, 2018a, 2018b).

The second dimension in the construction of Smart Dubai’s edifice of surveillance is virtual and exists in the development and deployment of the UAE Pass. According to Ali Khawaja, the UAE Pass is ‘a blockchain-based virtual identification platform. It’s already launched, it’s already functional, it’s only a matter of time where it will be a single login into every single government entity through UAE Pass.’ The UAE Pass is the virtual and commercial counterpart to the EID and is intended to be used in the immediate future across the Digital Silk Road, Blink and REST platforms and subsequently in all transactions that are directly regulated by the government – for example, in renewing one’s car registration or driver’s licence. The UAE Pass, according to Khawaja, was developed to solve a key problem in the system, that of secure identification:

So, you have validated your identification [for UAE residents via the EID] and gotten a UAE Pass and now through that app you can log into all the other systems that identify you … So, for example, if I rent a property, I need to sign it and I need to have this. I won’t need to sign a single piece of paper; I will log in with the UAE Pass that I will have authenticated as me and I’ll sign off on it. If I go to DEWA [Dubai Electricity and Water Authority] and I want to register for my utilities, I don’t need to fill out any paperwork, I just go to the DEWA app, log in with my UAE pass and they know that this is me … Similarly, they are planning to integrate this in the future for the banking infrastructure also … digital identification is a critical component to making all of it work.

It is the fact that the UAE Pass provides secure identification that also enables its use in the curtailment of informality. All residential real estate units – whether for rent or for sale, apartments or houses, or condominium units – are required to be registered with DLD, where they are given a unique identification number and the unit’s housing capacity is determined (Dubailand, 2019). Housing capacity regulations exist for the stated reasons of health, safety and security, but the enforcement of capacity limits, however, also enables Dubai to maximise rents by limiting the number of renters who may occupy any single unit. Capacity limits have, until now, been very difficult to enforce, as the system has been paper-based, subject to a variety of inefficiencies and to fraud and generally difficult to manage. These problems, noted Ali Khawaja, are in the process of being eliminated:

So, there’s Dubai Land Department, which is already on blockchain, they’ve already successfully shifted over, so every single property, title deed and ownership and everything is already on blockchain. They have their own app, where I can type in my property number and it will show me who’s the owner and it’s all blockchain based and there are no issues with that. They’re also facilitating purchase and sale transactions on that platform in the sense that if I’m going to buy from you or sell to you it’s all on that platform. RERA [Dubai Real Estate Regulatory Agency] … they have very recently been absorbed or moved into the Dubai Land Department. They were primarily responsible for rentals, so every single rental contract you have in Dubai is required to be registered with them. So, land department was owning properties, purchase and sale, and RERA is filing your rental paperwork and that’s all been merged into one now.

There are, of course, benefits to the establishment of the UAE Pass and DLD’s smart city app:

There have been multiple cases where an agent has taken fraudulent papers and rented out an apartment … So, all of these sorts of things, and again this is exactly the same as Silk Road, it eliminates a lot of the fraud, creates a lot of transparency in the process and system, establishes trust.

The UAE Pass, however, may also be leveraged against residents’ existing capta shadows in order to facilitate their virtual observation and control. The secure digital identity created by the UAE Pass and tied to the EID will enable the city to work to eradicate various forms of legalist informality, beginning with informal rents. Recall that earlier in this article I argued that informal rents represented an existential threat to Dubai, as rents make up a significant share of the city’s revenues. Towards the end of our interview, I asked Ali Khawaja if it was safe to say that all future real estate transactions – whether rents or purchases – would be mapped against the EID and UAE Pass databases. His response was: ‘Yes, pretty much. That’s our understanding as of now.’ Mapping rents and purchases – in other words the entirety of the DLD and RERA databases – against the EID and UAE Pass databases will facilitate the mapping of every one of the city’s residents to a specific housing unit and, subsequently, the determination as to whether or not the unit’s capacity has been exceeded, and by whom. This will also enable the enumeration of residents who are not mapped to a specific housing unit. The city will thus be able to practically, if not absolutely, eliminate the practice of informal rents by mapping its residents against its housing, residency and virtual identity databases, thereby maximising the rents it receives.

Conclusion

In this article, I have argued that the case of Dubai necessitates that we understand smart cities as variegated phenomena that are comprised of both worlding strategies and provincial manifestations. The use of Smart Dubai in the city’s scale-making project and its infrastructural worlding strategies has enabled Dubai to compete with other cities for residents from the creative class through a series of smart services while referencing the competitive smart city initiatives found in other smart city projects. To this extent, Smart Dubai appears and functions much like smart cities located in the global north.

Smart Dubai’s variation, however, must also be seen in contradistinction to that in western smart cities. The city’s authoritarian governance structure, its response to old Dubai’s informality and its extensive use of guest workers, who have very limited residence rights in all sectors and at all levels of its economy, mark the city’s political economic difference from those in the west. Moreover, the emphasis that Dubai places on its use of its smart city infrastructure to carry out the systematised and omnipresent surveillance and tracking of its residents – Emirati and expatriate alike – as they move through the city marks Dubai’s key priority as the buildout of a smart city infrastructure that is designed to maintain the depoliticisation of its citizens, harvest information from its residents and maintain sociocultural, political and economic control over of its residents in conjunction with Smart Dubai’s intensification of the city’s formalism.

Here, Smart Dubai charts a course that is distinctly different from its counterparts in the global north and west, and that must be understood within its local context. The role of the city’s authoritarian governance structure and the focused nature of its smart city project cannot be underestimated in this regard. The speed with which Smart Dubai has been deployed and the extent of its invasiveness in the everyday lives of its citizens are indicative not only of the efficacy of the city’s governance structure, but also of the lack of any meaningful opposition to any aspect of the project, which is perhaps the greatest marker of the city’s difference from smart city projects in the global north and west. In this respect, Smart Dubai is representative of smart cities in the global south and east, such as Singapore and Beijing, which are following a very similar model in the buildout of smart infrastructures to that of Dubai, where pastoral aspects of the smart city – communications, efficiency, entertainment and sustainability, for example – mask the population-wide disciplinary subjection through the security, surveillance and control functions that I have argued are the underlying reason for the deployment of Smart Dubai.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Harris Breslow

Notes

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