The multi-faceted relationship between culture and economy has increasingly become a focus of geographic scholarship. Areas of inquiry have included inquiries into how industries such as fashion and tourism market cultures and investigations of how cultural categories like nationality and gender affect the spatial organization of firms in the uneven, globalized economy. Along such lines, this doctoral dissertation research project will examine the role played by the cultural landscape -- the human-built setting of everyday life that has long been an object of geographic study -- in the creation and maintenance of "market attractiveness" in the non-Western world. The doctoral candidate will conduct a case study of the United Arab Emirate of Dubai, a city-state that is undergoing significant landscape alteration (which includes the creation of artificial islands, mega-malls and the world's tallest building) and a foreign investment boom (covering a range of companies from Indian software firms and U.S. media conglomerates to thousands of small importers). Beyond just supplying a well-developed infrastructure, including ports, roads, and telecommunications, Dubai's landscape offers a high quality of life both at and away from workplaces, a characteristic often lacking in other locales in the Persian Gulf and Middle East region. To better understand the relationship between Dubai's landscape and investment booms and between its quality of life and status as a quality location, the doctoral candidate will employ a mix of methodologies that focus on both producers and consumers of the landscape. Methods used to investigate how the landscape is represented and how it is actually used as a material object that performs tasks like enhancing status and building trust include participant observation at four sites representing contrasting facets of Dubai's economy. The student will coordinate a landscape-use diary project with a diverse group of Dubai residents to understand the role played by landscape in economic activity. Other methods to be used include interviews with managers in both government and business regarding how the process of marketing and selecting Dubai for investment is undertaken and archival analyses at libraries and government departments in Dubai and the other emirates in order to better understand how Dubai's competitive strategy has evolved over time.
This project will strengthen multi-disciplinary literatures on both cultural landscapes and the cultural-economy by bringing the theories and methods of each to bear on the other, with implications not just for geography but also fields like planning and urban governance. The project will enhance understanding of the lower Persian Gulf region, which, remains understudied and poorly understood in all its complexity despite being central to debates about what is or is not right with the current phase of globalization. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career.
