Person:

Doherty, Gareth

“Can transience be inscribed into the built environment, and what tactics are employed by residents to overcome this?” is the central question posed by Yasser Elsheshtawy in Temporary Cities: Resisting Transience in Arabia (p. 6). The resistance referred to is the marks of the disenfranchised etched in the earth between the shining structures of global capital that adorn contemporary cities. Elsheshtawy focuses on the extreme cases of Dubai and Abu Dhabi, and on the activities of the low-income, transient workers who comprise the invisible majority of Gulf, or Khaliji, cities. Elsheshtawy also highlights the plight of Emirati society’s lower echelons describing how state-provided public housing is adapted and appropriated. This foregrounding of the lives of the subaltern looking for homes in the faceless face of globalization’s transience is the book’s most valuable contribution.

This interview by Mark Tirpak with Gareth Doherty of Harvard University Graduate School of Design, focuses on his Paradoxes of Green: Landscapes of a City-State (University of California Press, 2017). With Paradoxes of Green (2017) and via the interview, Doherty recounts some of the findings of his ethnographic fieldwork in the Kingdom of Bahrain and describes tensions arising from differing conceptions of what ‘green’ means or signifies within this growing and predominantly arid region. An argument that Doherty makes in Paradoxes of Green (2017) is that color and form are interlinked, and that color deserves deeper consideration by policy-makers and other formal shapers of cities. The interview draws from Paradoxes of Green (2017) to discuss some of Doherty’s findings as well as his latest work on the intersections between landscape architecture and anthropology.