ABSTRACT
The city of Doha, a sleepy shing hamlet only a few generations ago, is now a rapidly emerging hub city on the Arabian Gulf, popularly known as the Khaleej.1 The Khaleej region in the Middle East is an area which is gaining increasing strategic importance both nancially and politically on the world stage. Before Doha and its particular urban phenomena can be investigated, it is esstential to provide a general overview of contemporary urban developments across the globe. Since the 1970s cities have become increasingly dened by globalisation and its various social, political and economic consequences; this development has meant the end of welfare states in the West but not in the auent emerging citystates of the Arabian Gulf. The dissolution of collective consumption, a terminology introduced by Manuel Castells to identify public control mechanisms,2 has led to more dynamic and complex developments within newly emerging networks. By focusing on the phenomenon of international division of labour, Robert B. Cohen was one of the rst pioneers to investigate the map of the new global urban order.3 The outsourcing of industrial production to less developed and developing countries resulted not only from various economic crises in the West, but was also propelled by an increasing level of connectivity via modern technologies such as bre optic cables as well as the development and extension of aviation and shipping routes.4 The digital information age has thus changed the patterns and dynamics of global urbanisation and spaces of ows as Manuel Castell points out: ‘…The new spatial logic, characteristic of the Informational City, is determined by the pre-eminence of the space of flows over the space of places. By space of flows I refer to the system of exchanges of information, capital and power that structures the basic processes of societies, economies and states between different localities, regardless of localisation.’5 Accordingly, cities have become important nodes in expanding international trading networks while the concentration of transnational companies and their headquarters have turned them into global control centres challenging the national state and its political boundaries.6
