CMES seminar: New MECW-project: Utopian Desert

Researchers Lorena Melgaço, Sandra Kopljar, Mattias Kärrholm and Dalia Mukhtar Landgren will present Utopian Desert: Investigating Smart Cities in the Gulf Region and discuss the project's aims and perspectives.

Abstract: Driven by AI and digitalisation, smart cities have become a prominent global concept, increasingly integrated into policies and urban plans worldwide. The Gulf states have recentlyemerged as leading proponents of the smart city agenda, deploying large-scale urban projects to reposition the region globally as post-oil and sustainable. Building on insights from critical smart city research and translation literature, this project examines how smart city visions are translated into urban planning and practices across the GCC, and how these processes produce locally situated urban outcomes. We are interested in how smart cities are imagined, promoted, and materialised as sustainable urban development future models; the emerging networks and partnerships translating smart cities to local contexts; and how sustainability ambitions are formulated, mobilised and anticipated through such processes.

The study analyses four smart city projects at different stages of development – Masdar City and the Loop (UAE), Lusail (Qatar), and NEOM (Saudi Arabia), ranging from realised to speculative initiatives. It weaves together previous studies in smart cities in MENA with theoretical discussions on translation and mediation and smart cities as forms of anticipation and economisation. It uses a qualitative, interpretive approach combining (i) case-study approaches from social science (ii) artistic methods through carried affordance analysis, and (iii) ethnographic circulations. Aligning with CMES research theme “environment and sustainable development” within the MECW framework, this project resituates gulf smart cities scholarly debates from prescriptive implementation towards critical, interdisciplinary analysis, while moving beyond Western-centric frameworks to illustrate the unique smart urbanism configurations in the Middle East.

Coffee, tea and pastries will be served after the seminar.

Everyone is warmly welcome!