Tannous, Afif I. “The Arab

Opposite Page: 1. Tamara Husam Rasoul, Sha’biyat Al Shurta, Dubai, December, 2017

ABSTRACT

The nomads are there, on the land, wherever there forms a smooth space that gnaws, and tends to grow, in all directions. The nomads inhabit these places; they remain in them, and they make themselves make them grow, for it has been established that the nomads make the desert no less than they are made by it. They are vectors of deterritorialization. They add desert to desert, steppe to steppe, by a series of local operations whose orientation and direction endlessly vary.

- 1227: Treatise on Nomadology - The War Machine 1

The nomad and the landscape is a relationship founded and built upon the earthbound philosophy adopted by all indigenous populations. Their respect and attachment to their context stems from their recognition of all it has offered them. Gifting them with food, language, intelligence and life and upon their death, taking them back.2 For the nomads of the desert, this relationship is no different. Learning from, growing with and adapting to their landscape, the nomads make the desert no less than they are made by it. This inherent adaptability, versatility and flexibility of the tribe becomes the crux of this research. A characteristic that has historically framed the bedouin as a national problem, a source of trouble and a backward, uncontrollable entity in the way of state development and progress.

This research aims to examine and analyse the role of social housing in the consolidation of a distinctly modern Arabia through the domestication and “settling” of the bedouin. A solution to the problem of nationhood adopted among leaders within and outside Arab government circles.3 Where housing is seen as an infrastructure of socialisation and detribalisation 4 that integrates the bedouin fully with the rest of the nation in a stable and permanent manner to achieve nationhood and development.5 A solution materialised historically in a variety of state-subsidised housing programs within the Arabian Peninsula.

Focusing on state-subsidised housing schemes in the United Arab Emirates and chronicling the process of political frictions becoming spatial, communities becoming isolated, extended families becoming nuclear and movement becoming settlement; how has this process of sedentarisation and adaptation created a new national identity and form of living which defines the urban fabric of the Arabian Gulf today?

1. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 445. 2. Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines, (London: Vintage Classics, 1998). 3. Tannous, Afif I. “The Arab Tribal Community in a Nationalist State”. Middle East Journal 1, no. 1 (1947): 5–17. http://www. jstor.org/stable/4321824. 4. Printz, Gabrielle. n.d. “Al Badawa, Al Bayt, Al Watan”. Ph. D, Architectural Association School of Architecture. 5. Tannous, “The Arab Tribal Community in a Nationalist State”, 5-17.