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3.7 Living in the Future with Rahel Aima
170 Plays6 months ago
Writer and art critic, Rahel Aima, who grew up and currently lives in Dubai, talks to us about living in the Gulf, a region rapidly developing itself as the place to be for smart cities and high-tech living.
Rahel explores a concept she has been thinking about for some time, the Khaleeji Ideology, which meets at the intersection of technology, economy, the environment and nation building, as a way of understanding developments in the contemporary Gulf.
This episode also features comment from Michael Mason, Director of the LSE Middle East Centre and Professor of Environmental Geography at LSE, who explores the rise of “progressive” urban development projects in the Gulf, and whether technology can be the solution to pressing environmental challenges of our time.
Rahel Aima is a writer, critic, and editor from Dubai. She writes about art, technology and the Gulf. Her work has been published in Artforum, Artnews, ArtReview, The Atlantic, Bookforum, frieze, Mousse and Vogue Arabia, amongst others.
Read Rahel’s ‘The Khaleeji Ideology’ here: https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/horizons/498319/the-khaleeji-ideology/.
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Transcript
00:00:03
Speaker
Welcome
Introduction to the Season
00:00:03
Speaker
to season three of Instant Coffee. I'm Nadine Almanasvi. And I'm Sima Shehad. And this latest season is an exploration of technology and its development in the region. Beyond the emergence of Chet GPT and Sophia the Robot, we wanted to speak with people who are applying, adapting, and reimagining technology in their fields. We will be exposed to medieval Islamic hospitals, failed Gulf techno cities, emerging Iraqi fintech startups, inclusive artificial intelligence, and much more.
Interview with Rahel Eima
00:00:32
Speaker
In this episode, Nadine speaks to Dubai-based writer, editor, and art critic Rahel Eima about what it was like growing up and now moving back to the Gulf as it becomes a region of the future. The conversation focuses on a concept she has been thinking about for some time, the Khaliji ideology, and how these ideas of future, technology, nation, and identity come together.
Urban Development and Technology in the Gulf
00:00:52
Speaker
One major example of these intersections is the urban development projects we are seeing emerge in the region. Rachael and our other guests have our very own Professor Michael Mason, Director of the LSE Middle East Centre, discussing this episode. Rachael's writing spans an impressive range of themes, blending together art commentary and criticism, and social and cultural analysis, with her eyes firmly focused on where technology intersects.
00:01:19
Speaker
Hi Rahel, so let's start with the reason why we approached you to talk on instant coffee and it was a recent article that you wrote on a phenomenon that you coined the Khiliji ideology. Obviously the point of this conversation is not to rehash the article and we do encourage those who are listening to read the full piece which we will link to, but to start off I just wanted to say that it is a really fascinating read that really tries to make sense of how the gulf as a region is perceived as a place of the future.
00:01:49
Speaker
When did you start thinking about the place that you grew up in, in this way? And where did your thinking around the Khaledji ideology start? Was there a specific event or a trigger for you to think that this new kind of analyses of the contemporary Gulf needed to take place?
00:02:05
Speaker
So I did grow up in Dubai. I lived in the US for a while and returned more recently. But this particular piece is kind of the product of a good probably at least 10 years of thinking about this idea. And there's just kind of noticing that the future here and in the broader Gulf region is very much, there's no individual future, right? So you had this idea, again, kind of harking back to the US or a certain conception of what a techtopia looks like, you know, technology can save the world.
00:02:34
Speaker
And you have this idea that came out of the 90s of the California ideology, which is very much about individual liberation through technology. And the thing that always struck me here, and this is something that especially kind of picked up steam, I would say in the 2010s, is
00:02:51
Speaker
that the future is inextricable from government here. It's collective, but it's also really hand in hand. There's no opposition to government. There was a really big push around that time as well for things like smart government for everything to be centralized.
00:03:08
Speaker
technology not even as a mediator, but as really the link between people and between people and the state. So
Evolving Narratives of Gulf's History and Future
00:03:16
Speaker
I think that's what really got me thinking about what does it mean, a future, you know, because you tend to think of a future as an individual liberatory thing, but as a future that is kind of hand in hand with and defined by the government. The way I think about it, this is an interesting region in that
00:03:32
Speaker
The past is something that's always contingent depending on the kind of framing and national narratives at the time. You know, I feel like when I was growing up, it was a kind of zero to 100 narrative. First, there was nothing, and then there was oil, and then there was Dubai.
00:03:47
Speaker
and or the rest of the UAE. And that narrative has changed more recently to think about actually this was around for, you might very see this place as being around or continuously inhabited at a very small scale for 10-15,000 years. I think it's one of the first places that were inhabited after the kind of human migration out of Africa.
00:04:06
Speaker
And then you kind of have now more of an emphasis about at least the last few hundred years that the current ruling family has been in power. So the past is something that's constantly changing within the present. If that's something you inhabit, I think what's interesting about this region is the future is the only thing that's certain, which kind of goes against in a way the way you might think of the future as a question mark elsewhere.
00:04:30
Speaker
This is a really interesting way of thinking about this vision of the future that's coming out of the gulf. How do you see its real life manifestations?
00:04:39
Speaker
So I think this is something that's happened at several levels. I think the first level is aesthetic. And I would say it's an aesthetic that is very much informed by a kind of 1960s Western conception of the space age, but a ready association with the new cities. By new, I mean they've been around for some time, but have kind of exploded in growth in the post-oil period.
00:05:04
Speaker
So a kind of ready association for people around the world and an association which has become congealed into city and national brands is these cities are futuristic. They're silver and shiny and they perhaps resemble, because of the desert next to them, they resemble a lunar or a Martian kind of landscape. I don't know how much of this was actively constructed, but it's something that's happened and I think these cities have really run with it. If you don't necessarily have a claim to the past,
00:05:34
Speaker
which is a case for very many cities here, you can absolutely have a claim to the future. So I think that's one part of it is on an aesthetic level. Another one is that all of these cities, or many of these cities, I'm worried talking about a lot of places at the same time, are trying very hard to organize or to reorganize themselves for a post-oil future and what that would look like. And with that comes a very heavy emphasis
00:06:01
Speaker
on technology, I think it's against like, what are the arenas that you as a city, as a country can compete in technological development, and having most crucially the resources to fund that development, I think is a big thing. And I would also say a third thing is some of these cities or city states, and they say city states in the sense that they might be part of looser federations, as is the case in the UAE, until more recently have functioned
00:06:28
Speaker
relatively autonomously, although that's changing now in recent years, with the push from Abu Dhabi in the UAE. But most of these cities are futuristic on a demographic and illegal and socio-political level, not necessarily because of what they look like, but you have these cities that have more in common with other major metropols around the world
00:06:51
Speaker
than they might necessarily have with the city that's 100 kilometers away in the same country. So part of this is kind of new forms of citizenship, new forms of belonging or not belonging. I wouldn't say a dissolution, but just kind of a reframing of what the nation state and the relationship between the population and the nation state looks like if you don't necessarily inherit or choose to inherit some of the older forms of relationships between the person and the state.
00:07:19
Speaker
And
Futuristic Projects and Clean Energy Focus
00:07:20
Speaker
one major way that Gulf states are exploring the future is through these large-scale urban development projects and tying them to progressive environmental initiatives. What do you make of these? For NEOM and Saudi Arabia it goes as far as I believe the way they framed it in the recent Venice architecture by NEOM was zero gravity.
00:07:40
Speaker
but kind of zero footprint, zero everything. And you have these things which are about let's, we're going to revolutionize the way of living in this century, in the centuries to come, with the assumption that these places might be around in centuries to come. But really, they are about maintaining very much a presence
00:07:58
Speaker
I think one of the big pushes is clean energy. So I think there's a plan to have something like 75% of all energy to be clean energy by 2050. I think it's another kind of maintenance of the present, right? The CUE right now is among the countries that are the biggest energy providers. There's an aim to have that kind of seamlessly transitioning to still be being the biggest energy providers. I think you're seeing this on a global level with energy countries are like, we used to do hydrocarbons, now we're going to do
00:08:27
Speaker
clean or green. However realistic those are, we're going to do these different kinds of energy and it's still going to be us playing the same role into the foreseeable future. So I think the usage of clean energy, cleaner energy, I don't think there's necessarily such a thing as clean energy. I think that's another thing that they're working on. I know that I don't know
00:08:51
Speaker
how successful there is. I know they're making efforts to preserve water resources and looking at ways to reverse desertification. And I think one of the more interesting things they're working on is biosaline.
00:09:02
Speaker
agriculture which is using slightly salty water because right now we're in a situation where actually long ago all the groundwater is pretty much tapped out. All the water that we use or almost all the water that we use, I don't know the exact percentage, is desalinated from the sea which is incredibly expensive and resource intensive.
00:09:23
Speaker
Technology is really used to kind of, I wouldn't even say necessarily maintain the status quo, but maintain the current systems for as long as possible. I think there's language of environmentalism brought in. It is on an optical level talking about change, but really it's about just maintaining the current situation and the current levels of comfort for as long as possible as supposed to make dramatic changes.
Grassroots and State Vision on Environmental Change
00:09:52
Speaker
I mean, these initiatives are all state led, right? I guess I'm thinking now about grassroots initiatives who want to utilize technology for environmental good. I guess perhaps sometimes big changes might want to be achieved. Where do these communities or interest groups fit?
00:10:08
Speaker
My sense is that there isn't such a differentiation. Maybe sometimes it's about access to resources or about a willingness on the state level to do as much as it can. How successfully, I don't know. But my sense of everything that's happening is that really it does happen at a state level. It begins with kind of these future casted plans, you know.
00:10:30
Speaker
the plan for the exterior vision, for the green plan for clean energy. I guess it does look like that, that things a plan is made and then steps are made to implement it at all levels of society, either through legal means, you know, new buildings must be built in this and this way. And what works here is that there's the possibility of absolute enforcement, you know, if they say, let's say all new buildings should run entirely on renewable energy by this year.
00:10:58
Speaker
that is something that will happen. There isn't the option of it, you know, not happening. Really, it does seem like things are very much directed in that way. If you wanted to do something on a grassroots level, the question would be why? When if your end goal is to affect some kind of environmental change, it works better, or would be more successful kind of
00:11:18
Speaker
working with whatever authority because I think this is a place where at least right now environmental change is very much in the goals of the country. So it's not something that you know you're working against big business because the government is kind of on board. This is everyone in this and this is how things work in general. I think everyone is kind of on board.
00:11:39
Speaker
While Rahal has presented a fascinating picture of how she understands future making in the Gulf, we wanted to understand the intricacies of some of the specific megaprojects taking place now. We
High-tech Urban Developments and their Implications
00:11:49
Speaker
asked Michael Mason, director of the LSE Middle East Center and professor of environmental geography at the LSE about some of these high-tech urban development projects and how he understands their position in the built environment and politics of the region. When we look at the
00:12:05
Speaker
high-profile urban development projects in the region. I think one thing that strikes you, at least me as an observer, is their radical disconnection from their surrounding landscape. We're thinking about things like NEOM, the mega project, mega urban project in Saudi Arabia, Masdar City, Abu Dhabi, or New Cairo in Egypt.
00:12:29
Speaker
And we see they have differences, differences in scale, difference in technologies, but I think we can collectively see them as as spectacles of high technology infrastructure, which construct their own physical environment. In doing so, I think they represent a type of urban development, which some have described as terraforming, in which you create your own kind of physical urban environment. Now, on the one hand, this might seem to be a good thing,
00:12:56
Speaker
insofar as these projects embrace environmentalism. So we see at least in terms of the projects in Saudi Arabia and in Abu Dhabi, quite ambitious plans to embrace renewable energy, car-free walkable neighborhoods, civil waste desalination, housing for rapidly
00:13:15
Speaker
expanding population, so you then avoid urban spoil. So this is all this is all good stuff and even though in practice if we look at Maastai City-Nabudabe, some of the green ambitions of this urban experiment to be the world's most sustainable eco-city were delayed in scale back, but it still today has has demonstrable technologies which
00:13:37
Speaker
demonstrate the potential for using, for example, sustainable energy, water use technologies, supporting investment in green technology companies, and also with NEOM, which is a much earlier stage, much greater scale, both master and NEOM funded by sovereign wealth funds. So you need to have that
00:13:54
Speaker
massive resourcing behind you for this type of mega project. And these are drawn upon so-called smart city ideas from other countries, including in Europe, for example, Oslo, Norway and Amsterdam, with the idea of floating villages, for example, in Amsterdam.
00:14:11
Speaker
electric vehicle use in Oslo. So there is this sort of sharing, if you like, of perceived best practice in greening urban development. But the scale, at least in terms of NEOM, is far greater than anything else in terms of green urban development elsewhere in the world. And that's of interest, that's of interest in terms of the ambition and the scale. At the same time, these are systems, at least in terms of the plans for NEOM,
00:14:38
Speaker
which are high surveillance systems tracking individuals through their individual lives in terms of an energy use, their mobility, what they're doing 24 hours a day. So these are highly controlled technologically driven urban models. And for me at least, what they seem to miss is what I would call the kind of soft city attributes of urban living of individuals and communities, how they experience the urban environment in often earth.
00:15:04
Speaker
quite an organic or contingent or accidental way. So I think there's a livability deficit, I would call it, of some of these grand green megaprojects because they don't seem to factor in the extent to which in urban environments I think livability is being opened to and experiencing and value some of the unexpected inner manifestations of the urban environment.
00:15:26
Speaker
including, for example, the natural world. So I think that's a big challenge when you've got these ultra high-tech, technologically determined models of urban development. Michael also responded to a very broad and probably unfair question we put to him.
Technology's Role in Urban Planning
00:15:40
Speaker
Considering the pressing challenges in the region that also reverberate globally, such as the devastating effects of climate crisis, are smart cities the answer?
00:15:50
Speaker
I mean, this is a big question, of course. I think generally we can say that innovative technologies are certainly valuable, sometimes necessary tool in addressing pressing environmental problems. And there are lots of examples of where they work well.
00:16:05
Speaker
but that technology alone is not sufficient. The environmental technologies can be developed or adapted in situations in which human freedoms may not be respected or fostered, for example. If we think about the neon development, it's been reported that about 50 tries people have been jailed for opposing eviction to make way for work on neon. Some of these tries people receive very large prison sentences, at least three that I know of
00:16:32
Speaker
have been sentenced to death, simply for saying, I'd rather not move. Thank you very much.
00:16:38
Speaker
was saying the compensation you're offering is not sufficient. So there's a glaring contradiction there between the kind of utopian pretensions, deliverability of NEOM. Look at us, this was a great brand green vision of future open living. And then as soon as you encounter a real world need to negotiate with the community negatively affected by this, you do so in a very authoritarian way. And I think that's an alarm in terms of something that should warn us to be careful
00:17:08
Speaker
about how we perceive and understand some of these sort of mega urban projects. If we think about technology, it's application of knowledge to deliver practical goals which contribute to human welfare and well-being. And how we innovate, how we use technology is always embedded in wide understandings of how we want to live, how we relate to each other,
00:17:28
Speaker
kind of society want to be in how we do with each other in terms of politics so you know if we want to think about green technology in terms of living within a free society then the technological choices we make must be part of me.
00:17:43
Speaker
open and inclusive political choices because if you don't have that buy-in from people, if they don't regard themselves as having a real meaningful stake in the choices being made, then you're left with something which is simply a green ideology masking authoritarian rule.
00:18:02
Speaker
But I had spoke of a similar question that those who decide to move to the Gulf way of and the kind of trade-offs that take place. One thing here is a very kind of centralized network, again media or not media through technology. For some people the trade-off of this is a lack of privacy.
00:18:19
Speaker
or of privacy from let's say the government. I think when you live here you assume that everything that is said or written is heard or read just kind of as a very basic baseline. I think this changes the way you interact with technology or the expectations that you have. I remember when I was living in the U.S. and I think came out that Russia had meddled in their elections as the U.S. has tended to do in most people's elections kind of around the world and they're
00:18:46
Speaker
I remember like a lot of my American friends or like American society as a whole was actually like shocked and their shock was kind of shocking to me or just kind of something like you know WikiLeaks like a shock that that governments are doing this kind of thing I think.
00:18:59
Speaker
Considering a place futuristic and this is the way the world is going, I think the Gulf tends to be flashier. I think what you see here is a kind of early indicator of things that are happening elsewhere in the world, just maybe more openly or more easily perceivable. Like what happens here will happen elsewhere, is happening elsewhere, just at a kind of slower pace. For that reason, this is one of the most interesting regions. To me, the most interesting region in the world. It's not unique as people would like to see it.
00:19:31
Speaker
And speaking about external perceptions of the Gulf, of the UAE, to what extent do you think that they are two-dimensional?
00:19:41
Speaker
I think they exist and I think they will always continue to exist. I think the counter to that is a different kind of knowledge production. On an academic level, this is happening a little bit on an artistic level, but when you have people parachuting in, and this is something I think about a lot as a writer who sometimes goes increasingly in a syllable, but often goes on kind of press trips, like how do you write about a place that you don't know?
00:20:08
Speaker
So I think what will be more interesting is when this kind of knowledge production shifts and the place is written about what you see a little bit or you know depicted through film through any media by people who have a more robust understanding of the place or just a different experience of the place because there's no one kind of experience I think.
00:20:29
Speaker
There can also be a tendency to be like, you know, Dubai is not flashy. This is not the real Dubai. There is this organic, this kind of thing. And I think that is equally as one-dimensional. You know, people are like, look, here's pedestrian life with a kind of beeline to particularly South Asian or working class areas as a kind of black and white contrast. I think, you know, all of these things are true. I think the major thing, honestly, in the depictions of Dubai's or the UAE is that this is kind of, I think about it as a kind of warehouse, you know,
00:20:57
Speaker
I don't know how this maps anymore to actual GDP percentages, but this is basically, it always has been. It's a trading city, you know, what you see kind of above the surface and tourism, the finance, all of these things. Fiercely working below the surface of the water is just a bunch. This is a city of warehouses.
00:21:15
Speaker
that moves goods, that moves people, sometimes moves ideas. And one thing that's been interesting is the way this region, Qatar and the UAE, have over a few decades reoriented the global trade routes. But if you want to cross the world, very often you're going to go through this region. I think that's something that contributes a huge amount to the economy and that is really
00:21:37
Speaker
This is a warehouse city. And
Gulf's Role in Global Trade
00:21:39
Speaker
to wrap up, I'd like to come back to aesthetics and art a bit, which is what you write and think about the most. How does the Khiliji ideology compare to previous or maybe still ongoing trends and ways of thinking about the Gulf? I'm specifically thinking about the Gulf Futurism label that was quite prominent in the art scene.
00:22:00
Speaker
So I think Gulf Futurism in retrospect is a useful way of thinking. So when we say Gulf Futurism, we're talking about a kind of aesthetic movement, and the term was coined by artist and filmmaker Sophia Maria, who's a Qatari American around the late 2000s, early 2010s, around this time. I think there was kind of a realisation, the same association of Gulf and future.
00:22:26
Speaker
shiny space age neoprene fabrics, a certain set of aesthetic touchstones, I think is what became understood as Gulf Futurism. There was, I also think of Gulf Futurism as very much post Gulf War, the 1990 Gulf War.
00:22:41
Speaker
and the kind of almost a congealing of this nervous energy of that particular time. A kind of friction or tension, a weariness, a kind of crackle. And I think, girl, futurism and retrospect, people were not necessarily making work in that vein for that much longer. I would be curious what Sophia thinks about it.
00:23:00
Speaker
I think it's very much of that time and what you see with the Khalediyya ideology firstly is a zooming out of scale. You're not looking at an individual and an individual often racialized, ethnicized figure. Golfuturism features a certain kind of body and a certain kind of person and a certain kind of individual figure and you're not seeing that with Khalediyya ideology.
00:23:24
Speaker
This is a time for various economic, perhaps, reasons, which I think will look like the introduction of income tax, if not in one or two years and very soon. Along with this future thing, you had this association of, not even association, it was a reason why a lot of people go to the Gulf, is promise of tax-free income. But kind of what you are seeing, beginning with the UAE, and I don't know if this will change elsewhere, you have two forces, right?
00:23:50
Speaker
happening in the Gulf right now. One is kind of nationalization of the workforce. We're moving of the workforce into the private sphere. In the UAE, it's called Emiratization. In Oman, Omanization, Saudi, Saudiization.
00:24:03
Speaker
And at the same time, you also have in somewhere like the UAE is the introduction of green and golden visas, which are something analogous to permanent residencies, but not quite, in that they don't necessarily come with the set of rights that apartment residency might. But also with the understanding that people in these residencies do not necessarily want a full set of rights, or if one right that you don't have, for example, is the right to vote.
00:24:28
Speaker
of the lower levels here or some people might come from countries where voting is not something they particularly believe in or engage in or the more important thing is to have a stable life and access to a certain standard of living which might not be possible whether because of war or other instability or just the economic situation in their own countries and people are happy to have a new kind of residency which is not quite permanent residency which is not a path to citizenship but are
00:24:54
Speaker
very, very happy to have this and this kind of sense of stability in their lives. And the sense is that this is moving towards changing the relationship of the person. The
Ideological and Aesthetic Comparisons in the Gulf
00:25:04
Speaker
non-citizen resident to the state, I think, is an economic need and moving towards a kind of further changing of this concept of the Gulf as this tax-free haven, a place you go to make money and then leave and the money leaves too.
00:25:18
Speaker
All of which is to say, so I feel like this is a very long detour, but you have two coins, right? One is of the citizen, a kind of semi-national impetus, and at the same time talking about our country, all of us, and a kind of expanded we, which might not be the, you know, the we might not include the same people in five years. That's also possible as priorities and government visions change, but at least from what you're seeing with collegiate ideology, I think
00:25:43
Speaker
it is at this moment a lot more inclusive, which is something that differentiates it very much from Gulf Futurism.
00:25:52
Speaker
So that's actually all we have time for, but thank you so much for speaking to us, Rahel. It was really interesting to hear more about the Khiliji ideology, a frame of thinking about the Gulf that I'm sure we will all now be considering a lot more as we interact with the Gulf in our research and as we read about it in the news. It was really great to hear more about how you understand life in the region as someone who has grown up and watched its staggering transformations and experimentations. So thanks once again.
Closing Remarks
00:26:24
Speaker
Thank you for listening to Instant Coffee, a podcast brought to you by the LSE Middle East Centre. Join us every other Tuesday for a new episode. And don't forget to follow us on your favourite streaming platforms.