Utopian Desert: Investigating Smart cities in the Gulf Region

Introduction

Across the Gulf, smart cities combine AI, digitalisation, and state-led visions of a post-oil future. Massive urban projects promise sustainability, innovation, and global relevance -transforming the desert into laboratories for tech-optimism and as vehicles to reinvest oil-generated cap –creating new frontiers for branding and experimenting with utopian urban futures.

Research Questions

The project investigates how the global trend of smart cities, with its AI-based solutions to both everyday living and urban infrastructures –is translated and materialised in the GCC. We ask:

• How are smart cities imagined and materialised in the Gulf States ?
• Which are the emerging networks and partnerships and how do these global and local actors translate smart cities to the local context?
• How are sustainability ambitions formulated and anticipated to work?

Theory – moving and translating ideas

The research combines previous studies in smart cities in MENA with

• theoretical discussions on translation and mediationof global ideas and visions and
• smart cities as forms of anticipation and economisation.

Smart cities are envisioned as engines of development, turning imagined futures into reality through plans, policies, and visualisations that align actors and attract investment. These dynamics unfold through a dual process of movement and transformation.

Methods and cases

The project is based on four smart city projects, ranging from realisation to speculative initiatives:

• Masdar City and the Loop (UAE),
• Lusail (Qatar),
• NEOM, theLine (Saudi Arabia).

The project combines artistic methods investigating howfuture oriented expectations and imaginaries are formulated and carried into planning processes with ethnographic analysis of the international networks, pathways and mechanisms in translation processes in smart city-making.

Expected Outcomes

• Critical exploration of visions and spatial imaginaries of smart cities in the Gulf region.
• Mapping and analysis of global networks producing smart cities in the Gulf region, including governments, starchitects, corporations and local actors.