Cultural Infrastructures in a Transient City: Learning from Dubai

Abstract

Dubai is a city structured around economic mobility rather than generational continuity in settlement patterns. With over eighty percent of its population composed of migrants lacking long-term legal or spatial security, cultural life unfolds amid conditions of susceptibility. Yet immigrant communities - particularly the Indian diaspora - have developed robust forms of cultural presence that sustain social continuity, collective memory, and territories of trust despite limited access to formally recognized space. This thesis asks how such infrastructures can be discerned, mapped, accommodated and re-imagined as systems that generate spatial security and cultural presence within a transient city, and how design might facilitate this without neutralizing their potential for adaptability. The research develops a taxonomy of these infrastructures operating across time, scale, and practice while critically interrogating their fragility. It explores how visibility becomes vulnerability, how flexibility is unevenly distributed, and why communities must repeatedly reproduce spatial security without institutional support. The design component proposes a kit-of-parts framework that sustains cultural presence and mitigates displacement within cities shaped by migration and redevelopment.