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Yasser Elsheshtawy explores Dubai's history from its beginnings as a small fishing village to its place on the world stage today, using historical narratives, travel descriptions, novels and fictional accounts by local writers to bring colour to his history of the city's urban development. With the help of case studies and surveys this book explores the economic and political forces driving Dubai's urban growth, its changing urbanity and its place within the global city network. Uniquely, it looks beyond the glamour of Dubai's mega-projects, and provides an in-depth exploration of a select set of spaces which reveal the city's 'inner life'. Table of Contents Preface  1. The Emerging Urbanity of Dubai  2. Arab Cities and Globalization  3. The Other Dubai: A Photo Essay  4. The Illusive History of Dubai  5. The Transformation of Dubai or Towards the Age of Megastructures  6. Spectacular Architecture and Urbanism  7. The Spectacular and the Everyday: Dubai's Retail Landscape  8. Transient City: Dubai's Forgotten Urban Spaces  9. Global Dubai or Dubaization

A multitude of concepts and ideas have shaped practices in professions such as planning, urban design and urban management. Now, however, the speed and intensity with which these ideas travel seems historically unprecedented. This paper explores how some of these ideas are formed and circulated, often with unpredictable consequences. In order to understand the circulation and impact of these ideas this paper constructs an analytical framework which views these concepts within wider networks of social agents and institutions. Using insights from actor-network theory and discourse analysis we propose a framework that focuses our understanding of how ideas are translated into new spatial settings. The...