Harvey Molotch & Davide Ponzini

The New Arab Urban: Gulf Cities of Wealth, Ambition, and Distress
Harvey Molotch, Emeritus Professor, NYU
Davide Ponzini, Associate Professor, Politecnico di Milano

With response by:
Shamus Khan, Chair and Professor of Sociology, Columbia University
Kian Tajbakhsh, Visting Professor of Urban Planning, GSAPP

Cities of the Persian Gulf display themselves as exceptional in cosmopolitanism, architectural reach, and futuristic capacities. Critics, in turn, stress environmental backwardness, radical inequality and cultural dependence. The aim of this lecture (and the edited volume from which it springs) is to show what Gulf cities can substantively teach: how world places connect to one another through new patterns of real estate investment, design, and human migration. Experts, problems, and putative solutions circulate to the Gulf and out of it. We can learn by attending to such trends that – for better or worse, and however inconsistent with prior analytic paradigms – are now ascendant in other world regions as well.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Sociology and the Middle East Institute. The Lectures in Planning Series (LiPS) is an initiative of the Urban Planning program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.

All lectures are free and open to the public. For more information or to make program suggestions, email lipscolumbiaplanning@gmail.com.