The Straw man speaks in Dubai

Flying back via Dubai to Australia on a recent trip to Europe, I watched a promotional video as the plane began its descent into the city’s sprawling built-up landscape. The male voice on the video spoke in a plummy English accent that is inevitably heard in advertisements for things that represent upper-class culture and consumption in post-British colonial countries in Asia and Africa. Not frightfully English, if you please, but the calm, authoritative tones of British Broadcasting Corporation English that invokes the voice of reason and a sense of trust. Through the window, the desert, streaked by the contoured shadows of sand dunes stretched out as far as the eye could see, gleamed brightly under the sun. The city’s skyline appeared in the distance.

The voice in the video urged travellers to discover the natural beauty of Dubai as the images flipped through shots of Burj Al Arab, people swimming underwater alongside brightly coloured fish, in four-wheel drive vehicles in the desert, the outline of the palm-shaped islands, large shopping centres, the gold souks, high-class restaurants, luxurious hotels and smiling, attentive staff.

‘I am Dubai’, declared the voice, as the video faded away and the airplane’s tyres hit the runway.

The video format was not all that different from other tourism promotion videos for various cities shown on airplanes. They all have the same formula, a bit of nature, an adventure experience, pictures of happy shoppers, shots of fancy restaurants and so on. But this video felt strange as I saw the sprawling city and the coastline appear in the airplane window, and I couldn’t put my finger on why it felt so. I wondered how to make sense of Dubai’s geography. Which analytical framework would it be? Neoclassical explanations of urbanization and economic development? Neoliberal explanations of urban growth à la the World Bank’s (2009) report describing the economic geography of development in terms of ‘density, distance, and division’? The world city hypothesis? Or, following the latest urban theory buzzword, ‘planetary urbanization’ (Brenner and Schmid, 2014)?

Over the years, I have taught a course that focuses on city-regions in countries on the Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean rims. My aim is to get students to see Australia within its larger regional surrounds and contemporary geopolitical context which, as I tell them, encompasses over half the world’s population and with huge city-regions that are the driving force for national and global economies of the 21st century. I give a brief historical overview of trade networks and international alignments over two centuries linking Australia with countries in the Indian and Pacific Ocean regions, before leading them through theories of regional economic development, industrialization and industrial location, urbanization, urban economies, spatial planning and governance. Parallel to the lectures, the students select a city-region within one of these oceanic rims and work in groups to identify the critical urban issues that emerge from the available data published in empirical studies, government reports and the like. Their final assignment is to develop and present a strategy that addresses the problem that they have identified through their desk research.

The exercise is fairly straightforward and instructions clearly laid out, but it nevertheless generates a great deal of anxiety. As they listen to my lectures about the different urban and regional development theories, their evolution, critiques and divergences, the students realize that the data they are collecting for their city-regions are never quite appropriate: they reflect the theories they are based on, are limited, discontinuous, or at the national scale. They call me out on the theories I talk about, they seem either irrelevant or arcane for their assignment; or so it seems, until we get to the world city hypothesis and global cities literature. Thereon, things seem to make more sense.

My coverage of the global and world city literature is, again, fairly routine and follows an evolutionary path. I discuss Friedmann’s world city hypothesis (1986), how it weaves together Wallerstein’s world systems theory, Marxist theories of core-periphery, unequal exchange and new international division of labour to interpret the key role played by particular cities in facilitating the global economy. Then I go through some of the literature that van Meeteren, Derudder and Bassens (2016) call the ‘invisible college’ of Global Cities Research (GCR) (e.g. Beaverstock et al., 2000; Sassen, 2001), followed by some examples of postcolonial critiques of GCR such as those by Robinson (2002) and Roy (2009).

The GCR has immediate appeal to the students in spite of all the critiques, because it provides an analytical framework they can use. They understand the criticisms of rankings, of world city envy, the importance of ordinary cities, the lack of proper acknowledgement of issues and processes experienced by cities in the global south. But the GCR literature as a whole, and in particular, the GaWC research website, provides them the means to look at their city-region data through a comparative framework and criteria that may be directly applicable, translatable through proxies, or replaced by others. The GaWC rankings and league tables, including those put out by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU, 2015) for the world’s most ‘liveable’ cities, are all reviewed with healthy scepticism and amusement before they settle on those that seem meaningful to their city-region context.

This, to me, is the vital point of the GCR, and why I am in broad agreement with the arguments made by the authors against its misrepresentations in postcolonial critiques. Not that these critiques are irrelevant or wrong, but that they are selective in what they choose to portray in caricatured form as typifying the entire body of global cities research. Perhaps they are acceptable as the opening gambit for challenging a prominent theory or paradigm, but they cannot continue to dismiss this wide range of research in a few throwaway lines by citing a few well-worn criticisms. Postcolonial critiques of GCR need to follow up on their claims and articulate more robust analytical frameworks for empirical research. As van Meeteren et al. (2016) rightly point out, ‘studies critical of GCR could be far more productive if they would challenge GCR’s actual assumptions and the ‘process geographies’ it produces, instead of taking issue with its imagined ‘trait geographies’ assumptions. Such engagement could help thwart faulty assumptions being uncritically reproduced…’.

If we are to heed the arguments of postcolonial critics for ‘provincializing’ Europe and recognize the situatedness of theories, then we must also acknowledge the ‘provinciality’ of postcolonial theory and not accept that it speaks for all ‘non-European’ situatedness. It has a very specific geography and situatedness within the Anglophone academy and is simply one of several ‘provincial’ perspectives such as ‘dependency’, ‘decolonization’ and ‘inter-Asian’ theories emerging at different moments and from political academies concerned about different parts of the world. Even if we set out with this awareness, there is still the question of how we might understand these provincial theories in relation to each other, and more specific to the context of this dialogue, how we compare the process geographies shaping ‘global’ cities in these ‘provincialized’ spheres. Like it or not, the ‘spectre of comparisons’ (cf. Anderson, 1998) is ever present in every situated perspective.

Thus, the call for consolidating comparative urbanisms, as the authors say, makes good sense. But I don’t see much point in their suggestion to ‘start “stress testing” Meeteren et al. (2000) the explanatory value of a variety of situated theories – GCR and others – in cities in both the Global North and South’ (p. 22 in manuscript). Far more useful would be to look for key features in these analyses that can be brought together in a comparative framework and used for grasping the empirical dimensions of both globalizing cities and global urbanization processes.

Robinson’s (2015) suggestions for pursuing comparative global urban studies is a useful interjection for moving beyond the politics of critique. She offers a schema for comparative strategies (genetic and generative) and methodological tactics (tracing, composing and launching) through which, as she says, ‘interconnections’, ‘repeated instances’, ‘shared features’ and ‘differences’ (p. 20). This, to my mind, is what the invisible college of GCR has been attempting to do over the years across a varying number of cities as they engage with the dominant processes driving the global economy. Using the evolutionary biology metaphor that Robinson invokes, what GaWC research, for instance, has done, is look at selected genetic markers across a range of cities and see whether their evolution generate patterns of interconnections and shared features or differences. One can argue that they need to include more markers in their genetic analysis and examine them across many more population samples, use different methods of quantitative and qualitative analysis, but these arguments do not fundamentally challenge the basic theoretical premise of GCR for understanding global city formation and evolution.

Scott and Storper (2015) provide a good starting point for defining the broad features of the ‘genus’ of cities. Their five variables (economic endowments and infrastructure, rules of resource allocation, structures of social stratification, cultural norms and traditions in neighbourhood formation and operation of local labour markets and governance of the urban land nexus) can be seen as the ‘genetic markers’ or DNA sequences that together help identify cities as species and individuals within the genus. These generative ‘traits’ of cities contain many ‘microsatellite markers’ that reveal higher diversity and mutations which show patterns of speciation and may, over time, lead to the emergence of new city species that require to be named.

In effect, these are the main urban genetic markers, with the additional variable of ‘physical environment’, that form the basis for the research my students do for their chosen city-regions in the Indian and Pacific Ocean rims surrounding Australia. In doing so, they discover many details related to the ethnic and gendered dimensions of local labour markets; the size of the financial services sector in relation to other sectors of activity; the proportion of informal and casualized workers in producer and consumer services; foreign and local investment and the class-nexus in urban land appropriation, siting of industries, and real-estate development; landfill developments along coasts, rivers and swamps; transport infrastructure, airport and seaport connectivity, volumes of traffic and so on.

Which brings me back to Dubai. Reflecting on which analytical framework might work best for understanding the city, I came to the conclusion that the GaWC framework would serve as a good starting point. But while this framework has a basic vocabulary for a rough sketch of Dubai, it is not adequate for gaining a fuller grasp of its urban geography. The framework would need a few more astute words (or variables) which can reveal the agents that have made it the global airport city connecting hemispheres, oceans and antipodes. These crucial variables would include data on the proportions of ethnic, international and gendered characteristics of labour employed in urban producer and consumer services; and the proportion of foreign and local financial investment in ‘land-creation’ projects such as Palm Jumeirah, the ‘world archipelago’, and other extravagant property developments that have produced the ‘natural beauty’ of Dubai extolled by the airline’s promotional video. By adding such incisive words to his existing vocabulary, the GC straw man might be able to speak more effectively about the making and evolution of global cities.