This phrase – or rather motto – is taken from the Emirati magazine, SHAWATI’, which is owned by the Cultural Programs and Heritage Festivals Committee in the UAE (see ). Taking ‘space’ as a category of analysis, the article attends to the cultural, political and economic implications embedded in the project of ‘globalizing the local and localizing the global’. This article examines the spatial metamorphosis taking place in the Arab Gulf region, using the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Qatar as two exemplary cases. Juxtaposing the UAE’s and Qatar’s urbanization projects with the nineteenth-century phenomenon of world exhibitions and fairs, this article takes the Louvre Abu Dhabi and Villaggio Mall as case studies to investigate the modalities of knowledge generated through processes of cultural and spatial (re)production and the impact of the latter on the construction of personhood and lived experience in the Arab Gulf region. 2 The production and organization of social space, in this sense, cannot be seen as a ‘dead’ or passive category with no influence over various dimensions of lived experience, including thought, politics and economy. 1 It can be argued that Arab Gulf cities should be looked at as ‘political actors’ due to ‘the functions they fulfill as spatial command posts for globalized capitalism’. While some consider these projects to be ‘part of strategies to prepare for the post-oil era’, others hold that ‘Arab Gulf States aim to strengthen or … creatively (re)construct identitarian patterns’. To this end, these two states are engaged in a process of collecting and borrowing antique objects and canonized artefacts, as well as reproducing and duplicating some internationally celebrated architectural sites and spaces. Embedded in the ambitious urban development projects launched by the UAE and Qatar is an endeavour to ‘bring the world to the Arab Gulf region’. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Qatar are taking the lead in the urbanization boom that is drastically transforming the spatial fabric of the Arab Gulf region.
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