Prologue 1. Introduction:.Transience in Arabia Part I: Prelude: Constructing a Landscape of Temporality 2. Forming an Urban Imaginary 3. Scenes from Dubai 4. The Arab Gulf City in Fiction Part II: Urban Interventions: Resistance and Defiance 5. Quotidian Space 6. Sheltering Space 7. Cosmopolitan Space 8. Local Space 9. Transience and Gulf Exceptionalism. References. Index
Biography
Yasser Elsheshtawy is an independent scholar, researcher and writer. He is author of Dubai: Behind an Urban Spectacle and editor of Planning Middle Eastern Cities and The Evolving Arab City, published in the Planning, History and Environment series.
'Based on several years of field research and an extraordinarily creative approach, that mixes behaviour mapping, architectural plans, pictures capturing life moments, testimonies and literary accounts, this book is truly ‘an ode to the resilience and ingenuity of the temporary inhabitants of the Khaliji city’ in the author’s words.
Yasser Elsheshtawy manages the tour de force of being as deeply analytical, intellectually nuanced as profoundly moving and emotional in demonstrating masterfully the sheer impossibility to obey the absurd injunction of not to belong where you live.' - Claire Beaugrand, Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter, author of Stateless in the Gulf: Migration, Nationality and Society in Kuwait
'Temporary Cities is to urban studies what Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is to French literature: a masterpiece … [the book is] an invaluable contribution not only for urbanists but all social scientists who, interested in ethnography, grapple with tangibly researching the pervasiveness of authoritarianism and political silencing prevailing in the Gulf hierarchical and segregated societies and, more widely, the exclusionary systems that globalizing cities represent.' - Claire Beaugrand, Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter, Built Environment Journal
'With his latest book, one of the most reputed urban scholars on Dubai, Yasser Elsheshtawy, provides an unrivalled fine-grained ethnographic insight into the urban life and every-day struggles that he and countless others have encountered in the rising Gulf cities. This book delivers an impassioned transnational call: recognizing these intensively lived-in places and their most diverse migrant peoples would not only lead to more just local societies, but also provide ever higher opportunities for both cities and their populations to root, endure and thrive.' - Davide Ponzini, Associate Professor of Urban Planning, Politecnico di Milano, co-editor (with Harvey Molotch) of The New Arab Urban: Gulf Cities of Wealth, Ambition and Distress
