Planning for the Hybrid Gulf City

Inspired by the idea of planning as a transnational enterprise, this chapter explores the rising of the Gulf hybrid city as a constituent form of urbanization worldwide. The Gulf is one of the regions where a booming urbanization, radically changing traditional settlements, is bringing about several examples of newly planned cities, offering an extraordinary ‘first-hand’ material to investigate how urban ideas – ‘born’ in different places and times – travel and land, shaping new urban environments. Gulf cities provide a mix of architectural styles and urban imaginaries, to produce a world-class urbanism whose main political function is to diversify the Saudi oil economy and make it a global development strategy. In this sense, they work as material and symbolic devices producing distinctive urban forms and landscapes, and connecting actors, technologies, skills, and cultures that are dislocated on different time-space scales. Drawing upon a planning experience carried out in Saudi Arabia and the ongoing experience of a newly-planned eco-city in the United Arab Emirates, the chapter focuses on particular contexts to rise broader issues about how urban ideas traveling worldwide (the Manhattan-style downtown and the carbon-neutral city) are worked out through technical and political interaction, and become hybrid ideas, fitting both the local culture and the international vocation that new urban artifacts are supposed to incarnate. The chapter aims to unsettle relevant features, opportunities and contradictions of transnational urbanism dealing with the hybrid city – in the Gulf as well as elsewhere - as an extreme laboratory to learn from