Balancing Privacy with Connection Through Culturally Sensitive Urban Design
Reflections on a Happy Cities' blog post about the United Arab Emirates (UAE)
Dear City Person,
In this free weekly newsletter, I have the first post of the month highlight something I have read or heard about urban belonging. Today I will be reflecting on a blog post by Happy Cities about how to promote social connection in a culturally sensitive way through urban design in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) where I was born and raised and where I am currently based. You can find the blog post by clicking here and learn more about Happy Cities by clicking here.
Before I dive in…
I have three questions for readers which you can reply to either privately via email or publicly in Substack by clicking on the comment button below:
What aspects of your city’s design helps you connect with people?
What aspects of your city’s design makes it difficult to connect with people?
What do you believe needs to be done in your city’s urban design to promote belonging?
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One quiet afternoon, I was aimlessly walking in a residential area in Central Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts during my decade living abroad in the US. I felt my breath slow down as I took in the colorful houses and the ways people designed their gardens and front porches or the ways they let nature and human mess take over. I took for granted how much I enjoyed getting such tiny snapshots into people’s lives, even if I don’t see or talk to the residents themselves, until I moved back to Dubai, UAE. Not only are many neighborhoods in Dubai car-centric unlike Cambridge, many residential areas are quite gated or/and lack common areas.
My family is not particularly conservative so I did not see the link between the importance of privacy for conservative Gulf Arabic households and design until I overheard a conversation on the Clubhouse app during the pandemic shutdowns. One Lebanese person there mentioned about how homes are designed much differently in Levantine Arabic countries where people can easily talk to each other from their balconies and how this contrasts with what they described as “more conservative Gulf countries.” The blog post on Happy Cities’ work with the UAE government had me appreciate some nuances I have missed in my past reflections and in the Clubhouse conversation.
The blog post mentions that traditional Emirati homes used to involve several homes from an extended family that share a courtyard which would balance between privacy and social connection. A friend of mine from Sudan told me that this is still the case in her country and how much she misses this. If I understood her correctly, she mentioned that the homes would even have doorways that connect to each other which I can imagine can be helpful during bad weather.
If any of my readers from Sudan can correct me or let me know if there are other details I am missing I would very much appreciate hearing from you! I would also appreciate hearing from readers from other cultures who have heard of similar traditional residential designs that balance between privacy and social connection.
In contrast, Western consultants and urban designers in UAE would copy-paste Western models without considering the cultural landscape. Or if it was considered, it would highlight privacy but not the element of social connection within extended families. So one sees neighborhoods that either have exposed balconies and yards or balconies that can easily peer into the yards of neighbors, which are not culturally sensitive to conservative households, or very gated homes that don’t allow any connection with other households. As Happy Cities blog post mentions, this has had detrimental impacts on community connections.
There is a book that is in my ever-growing reading list that mentions how healthy urban design ideally needs to balance between privacy and opportunities for social connection. The book is called Creating Great Places: Evidence-Based Urban Design for Health and Wellbeing by Debra Flanders Cushing and Evonne Miller which you can get by clicking here (I don’t earn affiliate fees from this).
What worsens matters is designing cities with cars as the central mode of public transportation which makes more walkable parts of the cities and public transportation overcrowded. My brother, who is an architect, commented on how having a highway like Sheikh Zayed Road go between skyscrapers in Dubai is an example of poor urban design that is disruptive of social connection.
In Dubai at least, traffic has been significantly worsening over the years as the population rapidly grew. Sometimes me and my family don’t feel motivated to go out as much because of the traffic. My locally-based friends and cousins are spread out in the city and in Abu Dhabi and Sharjah which can make it difficult to spontaneously see them more often. A part of me is appreciating that the government is aiming to make Dubai a 15 to 20-minute walking city by 2040 but I believe that more needs to be done to assess other factors that affect social connection.
Before I continue, here’s a question I have for readers:
What are ways you have tried to prioritize in-person social connections while dealing with heavy traffic?
I have observed that less millennial Emiratis are living near extended family especially as some move to other Emirates after marriage or for studies or job opportunities. Since many Emirati social circles primarily consist of family and family friends and those they grew up with from schooling or university years, such moves can be particularly disruptive of their social connections. One of my cousins and a friend of mine who both moved to Abu Dhabi after marrying and having a child told me how they have been finding it harder to “break into” Emirati social circles there even though they are both Emirati and dress conservatively.
I wish that the the Healthy Cities blog post considered how to better integrate expats in the community through urban design, particularly blue collar ones, given that expats form 89% of the population and 70% of the population are blue collar expats. There has generally been little motivation to do so because the dominant view is that expats only live in the country temporarily but many of them have been doing so for decades, some even since before the country was formed. The UAE has also introduced new types of long-term visas to motivate wealthy expats to invest in the country and stay longer. These changes bring up questions on how to best integrate them especially as the population continues to grow.
One Emirati cultural facet the Healthy Cities blog post did not mention is the majlis which is a traditional gathering space for neighbors and guests that tends to get built as a separate extension of the house, again reflecting the cultural value of balancing privacy with social connection. I have seen some contemporary Emirati homes still have a majlis.
Recently the Dubai government has introduced neighborhood majalis (plural word for majlis) for Emirati citizens and decree holders to socialize across generations and to host public awareness programs. These neighborhood majalis require booking ahead of time and most people use them for weddings (particularly if some conservative families are uncomfortable even being in the presence of any establishment that serves alcohol like a hotel as consuming alcohol is sinful in Islam) as well as funerals and UAE National Day celebrations. I wish more neighborhoods had them and that they were more open for spontaneous connections and include expat neighbors. You can learn more about the initiative by clicking here.
Much of the urban design in the country, as in many market-oriented places of the world, follows a top-down approach that does not consult with residents on their needs, especially their social connection and privacy needs. Development often prioritizes high income neighborhoods and there have been cases where lower income people were displaced as I have seen happens in America as well. Our connection to a place is often linked with our connection with its people and the memories we build with it so I believe the impacts on mental health and community wellbeing need to be taken more seriously everywhere as it is not unique to the UAE.
All this is not to say that people don’t find ways to adapt within the limitations of urban design. Afterall, urban design is only one part of a multi-faceted puzzle in how we can promote social connection. I am still reading a book on this by Emirati sociologist Rana AlMutawa called Everyday Life in the Spectacular City: Making Home in Dubai. I hope to write my reflections about it in a future post but I’m not even halfway through and need time to gather my thoughts so it will not be any time soon. You can get the book by clicking here (I don’t earn affiliate fees from this).
I would be curious to hear if you have found ways to adapt while living in a city that was not designed with relationships in mind.
Next week’s newsletter will cover the lost art of writing physical letters and how that helped me feel connected in my Boston years and ease my transition back to Dubai.
Before I wrap up…
I am ending each of my posts with a randomly drawn conversational card that you can consider using to deepen your conversations with people this week. So here’s today’s card drawn from a deck called Scenario Cards:
“What if you could bring one sleeping dream to waking life? What dream would you turn into reality?”
Let me know if you end up using this question in any of your conversations and how it goes!
Click the link here to learn more about Scenario Cards. I currently earn an affiliate fee for every purchase from this link. This is so far the first affiliate partnership I have and I only plan to do so with products I genuinely benefited from. I had previously written a post about conversational cards in general prior to being invited to Scenario Cards’ affiliate program. Click here for the link to the post.
Yes, I agree with you- it is overly simplistic to say individualistic/collectivist. But one starts somewhere to try to grapple with topics like this.
My experience of living in the US South was that the hospitality was only on the surface and often fake. Behind the veneer was an unspoken "now you'll owe me" covering whatever the interaction was. The so called hospitality was never about the needs of the guest but instead about what the host would get from the transaction.
I called the Southern US a "guess culture" because people would do things in the name of hospitality- often obviously reluctantly-and if you didn't read their minds correctly and return the hospitality in the way they - unspokenly - expected you to do there likely would be serious social consequences. But if you directly asked what they wanted in return- they'd get offended at that too.
And yes, certain groups of people are simply never ever accepted in the South. Non-English speakers aren't welcome for example.
In the Northern US I find things are much more direct. People's hospitality is more genuine and if they can't accommodate you they'll say so if they expect something in return they'll say so. There is more acceptance of many more kinds of people. Many different languages are spoken and are welcome in my Northern city for example.
The sense of personal space is also different in different parts of the US : in a cafe in the South someone will put packages, coats, hats on other chairs - sometimes using 3 chairs for one person's self and belongings. Here in a cafe in the North people contain self, coat, packages, hats on or under the chair in which they sit.
The use of space and the interactions within space is so different... I see the Southern US as (over simplifying again) more individualistic in the "I don't have to consider others around me" sense. The Northern US as (over simplifying again) in the "I need to consider others around me" sense.
I see this reflected in the architecture and the city design...and even in the road signs.
Related to your topic: when I moved away from the more conservative areas of the southern United States to a more liberal area of the US I noticed that the private houses in the conservative areas had small common areas and large private areas. But the private houses in the more liberal areas have much larger common areas and smaller private areas.
Similarly I noticed the more liberal northern areas of the US have more and larger common areas in public too.
Almost makes me wonder which comes first the general attitudes or the architecture.