Taysir Batniji: Gaza to America – Home Away From Home

When Taysir Batniji left his home in Gaza City in 1993, he was only able to do so thanks to a laissez-passer issued by the Israeli authorities. Valid for one year, the travel document provided the then 25-year-old with the permission he needed to travel to the Italian city of Naples, where Batniji hoped to build on the studies he had already completed in the West Bank and to continue his education and progression as an artist.

The laissez-passer included all the details one might expect from a passport: a photograph and sections relating to the bearer’s name, sex, date and place of birth, the document’s date of issue and the issuing authority.

But when it came to the section entitled nationality, the laissez-passer described Batniji as neither Palestinian nor Israeli but simply as “undefined”.

Batniji eventually realised his dream of becoming an artist not in Naples but in Paris, where he has lived since 1996, the only member of his immediate family to have left the Gaza Strip.

In the intervening years, he has built a reputation as a nuanced chronicler of Gaza, where he returned to regularly and often until 2012, and of states of exile, displacement and what he describes as the cultural and geographical “between-ness” that now increasingly defines the lives of migrants the world over, Palestinian or otherwise.

Even though it is 25 years out-of-date, Batniji still retains his laissez-passer as a reminder of his journey to the West, which is just one of the many things he shares in common with his cousins Kamal, Khadra, Sobhi, Ahmed, Samir, and Akram who are the subjects of his latest exhibition, Gaza to America: Home Away From Home.

Gaza to America was produced in 2017 as part of Immersion, a French-American Photography Commission, a program initiated by the Fondation d’entreprise Hermes together with the New York-based Aperture Foundation.

In it, Batniji retraces the journeys made by his cousins who decided to leave Gaza and who now have extended families of their own in California and Florida.

Their stories are captured in 143 works that include photographs, video portraits and interviews, drawings, old family photographs and objects such as passports that investigate the intimate functioning of this familial diaspora and the practices that define their identities as cousins, Gazans, Palestinians and Arab expats but also, increasingly as Americans.

“I do not pretend to reveal the lives of my American cousins in their entirety, in all their complexities, nor to present an exhaustive statement on the Arab and Palestinian diaspora in the United States,” Batniji writes in his introduction to the book that accompanies Gaza to America: Home Away From Home.

“These works are instead my impressions, born of these encounters, varying in their intensity, according to the context, place, and degree of interaction with these members of my family.”

The title of the work comes from a conversation that Taysir Batniji had with his cousin, Khadra, who in response to the question “Do you feel at home in America?” answered: “My original home is Palestine. But this is a home away from home. Yes, like home.”

What follows is the result of two visits the Palestinian artist made to his cousins in California and Florida, the first of which lasted for three weeks and the second a-month-and-a-half, during which time he had to stay with family members, some of whom he had not seen since he was a child.

“What was strange in this experience was that tradition dictated that I had to stay with the family. There was no question that I would stay in a hotel or rent another house,” Batniji explains, speaking from Paris.

“I knew them, we share family ties, but at the same time, they were strangers to me and there were many things about their family lives that I didn’t know about and had to learn through conversations and interviews.

“It took time for us to become familiar, but through all this time I spent with them, there were always comparisons between me and them, so for me it was a kind of mirror.”

Accompanied by a monographic survey of Batniji’s work which spans the years 1999 to 2012, Gaza to America is one of five exhibitions that form the America Great Again! stand at the 49th edition of the world’s most famous and best-loved photography festival, Les Rencontres d’Arles.

America Great Again! includes some of modern and contemporary photography’s biggest beasts including Robert Frank, Raymond Depardon and Paul Graham, each of whom offer a foreigner’s perspective on modern and contemporary America, and each of whose exhibitions have been allotted serious real estate in the centre of Arles.

In contrast, Batniji’s work is currently being exhibited on two floors of the austere Chapelle Saint-Martin du Mejan, a 17th-century Baroque chapel that sits not far from the banks of the River Rhone.

While Gaza to America occupies the ground floor, the monographic survey of Batniji’s work occupies the first, including series such as the Bernd and Hilla Becher-inspired Watchtowers (2008) and Fathers (2006), which consists of photographs of commemorative portraits that hang in shops and workplaces across Gaza and Gaza Diary #3 (1999-2006).

Initially taken during visits to Gaza as nothing more than a private and personal record, the images that comprise Gaza Diary were first exhibited by the artist in 2008.

“What’s important about Gaza Diary is that I never thought they would be exhibited as an art piece. I was documenting my life in a diary during each period I spent in Gaza, long or short. Until 2008 when the Municipality of Paris commissioned me and another artist, Rula Halawani, to show daily life in Palestine,” he explains.

“At that time, and still unfortunately, it was impossible for me to go to Gaza, but I told them that I had hundreds of photographs that I took, and all of them were about daily life and it was only then that I started to think of these pictures as things that might be shown as artworks.”

As more time has passed, however, Batniji’s Gaza photographs have become like his laissez-passer, objects whose resonance is only increased by absence and loss.

“The more the prospect of a return grows distant, the more the photos are of tremendous importance to me,” he writes. “They are my memory.”

Taysir Batniji, Gaza to America: Home Away From Home runs at Arles 2018 Les Rencontres de la Photographie until September 23, 2018. Visit www.rencontres-arles.com for details

 

Urbanism: how do you (re)build a Palestinian state?

Decades of sporadic violence in Gaza have inevitably left their mark on the urban landscape. Today, entire neighbourhoods stand in ruins, with some 18,000 homes destroyed or severely damaged and 100,000 Gazans left homeless.

“In the last decade, Gaza witnessed repeated catastrophes,” the Palestinian architect Elias Anastas explains. “The disasters are as random and as violent and as badly predicted as natural disasters, except that they have been much more frequent.

“In Gaza [however], the annihilation has become so frequent that the building, rebuilding and destroying are happening at the same time.”

For Muna Budeiri, the head of the housing and camp improvement unit at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), the current need for swift action has to be tempered with careful consideration.

“Planning is usually a long and tedious process, but emergencies and conflicts require very quick solutions because people are homeless,” the Amman-based architect explains. “There is always a period where you need to create transitional housing for refugees before planning can begin, but even then it is very important for planners to be involved from the start.”

Budeiri’s understanding of the pressures and the pitfalls associated with the earliest phases of reconstruction is born of 20 years’ experience of working as an architect and a planner in the region’s refugee camps such as Jenin in the West Bank and Nahr Al Bared in northern Lebanon.

“In the early stages of the reconstruction of Jenin and even in the early stages of the reconstruction of Nahr Al Bared, there were suggestions that we use prototype buildings, with designs that were very easy and that we build them in a standard grid with roads and walkways, like a city from the 1950s.”

For Budeiri however, the inherent dangers in such an approach stem from the fact that it fails to take the culture, living habits and family bonds of the displaced persons into account. “Most of the Palestinian refugee camps are based on extended family housing and each plot has a house that has been vertically and horizontally extended to house the family itself.

“So, decisions made at early stages that come up with multi-storey or high-rise buildings to create higher densities and to make prototypes that make [reconstruction] quicker, all of these will affect the social fabric later on. These are issues that planners can provide solutions to at a very early stage.”

Last Sunday, the streets of Gaza filled with more than 430,000 children finally making their way back to school.

They are the lucky ones. According to the latest report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), 501 children were killed in the recent conflict and estimates by the Palestinian Authority (PA) suggest that about half a million children no longer have a school to go to, either because of damage and destruction to their school buildings or because their schools are now being used to house displaced persons or refugees. Due to the severity of the situation, the start of the new school term had been delayed by two weeks.

However, for the pupils of Children’s Land, a kindergarten in the Bedouin village of Umm Al Nasser, there was no possibility of return.

The school, located just 600 metres from the security barrier that defines Gaza’s border with Israel, was one of 26 in Gaza that had been destroyed completely, razed to the ground by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) during a devastating attack that also depopulated the village.

The school’s designers Mario Cucinella of Mario Cucinella Architects (MCA) and Alberto Alcalde of Architettura & Cooperazione (ARCo), only learnt of the kindergarten’s fate a month after the attack. “The Israelis came from the north to Erez and demolished everything,” Cucinella explains. “They came with bulldozers and they just took everything down.”

Cucinella admits that he was shocked by the news “but when we saw the pictures we were most sad for the community. These people were living at the very edge of society, a very small community of Bedouin, really living with nothing.”

Built using corrugated sheeting and timber and with walls made from sandbags filled with earth, the 120-pupil school and community centre had included six classrooms, a family counselling space, an infirmary and a community kitchen.

“When we opened the school it was a moment of joy for the community because they had the feeling, for the first time, that somebody was taking care of them,” the Italian architect explains.

“The problem was that there were no services for families with children aged between zero and five so the kindergarten was built to care for children who would have to play out in an environment that is very dangerous. This was the first time the kids had been able go to school and play in safety.”

Thanks to the simplicity of the centre’s design, the kindergarten took only a few weeks to build using unskilled labour from the local community and cost only Dh856,000 (€180,000) when it was completed in 2011.

Funded by the Italian ministry of foreign affairs and international cooperation, the project was coordinated by Vento di Terra, an Italian NGO. According to Cucinella, both the NGO and the ministry are already making assessments for the Umm Al Nasser kindergarten’s reconstruction.

“There was no reason to demolish [the school] but there are very good reasons to rebuild [it] and I think that the Cooperazione Italiana want to show that they are stronger than any war. We have to do this.”

A decade ago, in the unlikely setting of Santa Monica, California, Doug Suisman was surprised to find his attention turning to the seemingly intractable urban problems of one of the most troubled regions in the Middle East.

An experienced architect and urban planner, Suisman had been approached by the RAND Corporation, a US-based, not-for-profit think tank, and was given the task of developing a concept plan for a sustainable Palestinian urban future predicated on the existence of peace in the region and a viable Palestinian state.

Initially, the challenge seemed overwhelming, not least because RAND had given Suisman a deadline of six weeks. As Suisman remembers, the whole project seemed a rather unlikely prospect at the time.

“I said: ‘You must be kidding’ … You’re saying to me, take the world’s most intractable political conflict in a region that I don’t know, am not expert in and travelled to once 30 years ago and in six weeks you’d like me to come up with some kind of concept for housing and urban development. [RAND] said: ‘Yes, that’s about the long and short of it.’”

As early as 2002, RAND had assembled a multidisciplinary team of experts to work with Palestinians, Israelis and the international community to develop an in-depth and comprehensive nation-­building plan to address the issues that might affect the peace associated with a successful two-state solution.

It was during this period that the need for a framework that addressed Palestine’s urban future became paramount in order to facilitate the state’s success.

“What would it need to be successful, that was really the question,” Suisman remembers. “Because the creation of a state was one thing, but no one wanted to create what would become a failed state.”

Unexpectedly, Suisman’s status as an outsider became his most useful aid; it allowed him and his team to consider the everyday – the topography of the land and the density of existing settlements – even as the raging Second Intifada made travel to the region impossible.

“We almost made the point of making it like any other urban design challenge. It made it easier but it also matched the problem, which was ‘let’s just assume that the political conflict had ended’.

“We were looking at ordinary things, like how people would buy their groceries in the morning; would they walk or would they get into a car; how would they get to school or a doctor or to a university.”

Having worked on numerous downtown city planning projects as well as a mass transportation system for Los Angeles, Suisman found that, at a certain level, planning for Palestine’s future away from the region and as a desktop exercise actually worked.

As part of an earlier study, RAND had identified the need for infrastructure to connect the cities of the West Bank to Gaza, an idea which led Suisman’s team towards a simple and striking concept for meeting the challenges of Palestine’s rapid urban growth – The Arc.

The benefits of the early introduction of efficient, fully integrated public transport and urban infrastructure was a lesson that Suisman had learnt from his experience in LA. One aim was an urban future free from the problems associated with a predicted influx of cars.

“In a sense, Palestine would leapfrog over the urban sprawl phase. They would jump past that, which would be a blessing, like missing an unpleasant adolescent phase of urban growth and just be grown up.”

For Suisman, the key to The Arc’s success lay in engaging with its intended audience, something that could only be achieved by developing the concept to a stage where it was sufficiently detailed to make sense to them – the politicians, planners and residents of Palestine.

To achieve this, Suisman made what was potentially a politically charged decision, to render his plans with the kind of detail that a wider public could get excited about. “We developed different schemes where people could potentially project themselves into these places and say: ‘Oh, that is what it would look and feel like in a prospective Palestinian state,’” he says.

“And, I think that was powerful in that the notion of a Palestinian state had remained such a political abstraction. So many Palestinians told us – and others involved – that for the first time they could see and envision what such a state would look like and feel like …”

Following the earliest phase of The Arc’s development, Suisman visited the Palestinian Territories some 13 times but he first crossed an Israeli checkpoint to present his plans to president Mahmoud Abbas in June 2005. The reception was positive, Suisman says, so much so that he continued to work with planners from the Palestinian Authority on The Arc’s development until 2011.

According to Suisman, the period was one of relative optimism. “It seemed plausible that the plan might help in some small way, just as a concept or as a guiding star.”

Although the Arab Spring brought work on the scheme to a standstill, Suisman is not entirely pessimistic: “At this moment, I am not optimistic that in the immediate future there is any prospect of bringing it back on the table, but I have been surprised before,” he says. “On at least five occasions, I thought it was dead and over, and someone came back to it, so it seems to have staying power.

“We certainly designed it that way … We felt that if the concept is clear and strong and bright enough, it can survive upheaval and changes of personnel and administration, in the way that any long-term urban plan must because otherwise, every plan gets thrown out by the next round of folks.”

Within the Palestinian Territories, Suisman believes that the plan has been used as a starting point for discussions on development that had not previously existed because of a fear that anything concrete might derail or curtail the outcome of negotiations. In one sense, however, Suisman’s Arc achieved a modicum of success, despite the fact that not a single spade of earth has been turned nor a foundation stone laid.

“As we talked to people, the one phrase that we heard again and again to our surprise – it was not any­thing we intended – was: ‘This gives me hope.’ We heard this from very senior Palestinian officials, from certain Israelis, from others in the region: ‘This gives me hope.’

“So, there was a kind of power in the idea, fleshed out, that seemed to inspire people. And that kept it going. People began to say to us, this is not just about the day after peace, getting these images out could actually help get to peace because it gives people an idea of what it might be like. It makes it plausible.”

Despite the recent agreement between the UN, the Palestinian Authority and Israel for the rebuilding of Gaza, there remains a lack of large-scale, long-term thinking about the future of the Territories, but for Suisman his experience with The Arc and in Palestine has made one thing certain. “When people dream of peace, they are dreaming really of very ordinary things and peace means being able to do very mundane things without fear.

“Most people aspire to just live a decent life for themselves and their families. And that’s how we developed it. Every day we got up and thought: ‘OK, how could life be made better on a daily basis in a prospective Palestinian state,’ and that’s what people responded to.”

Two Palestinian brothers, Elias and Yousef Anastas, form the core of AAU Anastas, a small architectural practice with offices in Paris and Bethlehem. The brothers are currently designing a new paediatric hospital in Bethlehem and new courthouses for the West Bank communities of Hebron and Tulkarem, but it is the links their works draw between architecture conducted at a small scale and the larger urban issues faced by the Palestinian Territories that have brought most attention to their work.

Given the situation in the Territories today, Elias Anastas agrees with the basic proposal that lies at the heart of the RAND Arc – that reconstruction needs to focus on major infrastructural renewal – but that is where their similarities end.

If The Arc can be characterised as a rare and well-intentioned attempt to propose a large-scale, long-term solution to Palestine’s urban problems, it does so, necessarily, from the outside.

Despite Suisman’s long experience as an urban designer and many visits to the region, The Arc also has no option but to be an exercise in strategic urban planning conducted from the top-down.

As Palestinians in the West Bank, however, the Anastas brothers command an insider’s knowledge of their own heritage and culture and begin at the opposite end of the planning spectrum, from the bottom up, with the individuals and the buildings that form the DNA of successful neighbourhoods.

When it comes to talking about Gaza, however, Elias Anastas insists that he is also an outsider. “It’s quite complicated for us as Palestinians living in the West Bank to have a correct assessment about the priorities for Gaza. We are physically completely separated from Gaza – I have never been there – and a majority of my generation living in the West Bank are not allowed to go there.”

What divides Elias Anastas’s approach from Suisman’s most profoundly, however, is a fundamental question of scale. For him, it is the inability to conceive of an appropriate sense of scale, or agreed borders, that has prevented local architects and planners from taking a longer-term perspective when thinking about Palestine’s urban future.

“Usually, the planning of cities is connected directly to a territory and a limit, whereas in Palestine, the recognised 1967 borders are infringed by the path of the segregation wall,” he explains.

“This means we cannot count on them as a base on which to plan. How can we plan for these disconnected cities without knowing or having a territorial limit? It makes any planning on the Palestinian side impossible.”

This adherence to a smaller scale can be understood most clearly in the AAU design for the Bethlehem branch of the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music. In 2007, AAU won a competition to design the new community centre and in 2012 the conservatory was built on land donated by the municipality of Beit Sahour, east of Jerusalem.

Both the conservatory and its adjacent neighbourhood, a form of outdoor souq, can be understood as a contemporary reinterpretation of traditional Palestinian architectural features and urban forms and as an attempt to envision a new, nuanced, form of Palestinian future.

Clad in traditional Sour Ma’in stone from a nearby quarry, the conservatory also features external louvres over its windows that reference traditional mashrabiya, and a central plaza, or hosh, inspired by the communal, semi-private courtyards that were once an important feature of rural Palestinian homes.

Not only does this contemporary hosh act as a new semi-public open space for both the students at the conservatory and the residents of Beit Sahour, but it also helps as a cooling mechanism for the central plaza, reducing ambient temperatures by one or two degrees.

“The project started at the scale of the music conservatory but gradually it grew into an urban form that enabled us to understand and question the process of city construction at the local scale,” he explains.

The parcel of land adjacent to the conservatory was originally intended to be a public open space, but as construction began the local municipality changed its mind and wanted to create a mall or a commercial centre immediately in front of the new conservatory’s hosh.

In response, AAU made a counterproposal which aimed to balance the outward-looking character of the conservatory’s central plaza with the municipality’s desire for an adjacent commercial scheme. AAU achieved this with a plan that aligned the pedestrian street of the new outdoor souq with the central hosh of the new conservatory, reinforcing and expanding the neighbourhood’s public realm while visually connecting the conservatory with the city in the process.

The result was an expanded design not just for a building but for a neighbourhood, something Elias Anastas refers to as an “urban fragment”, that not only reflected the culture and heritage of the traditional Palestinian city, but which also responded to contemporary urban issues and demands.

“We wanted to think about the future of the city in an inclusive manner, so we involved the citizens, the municipality, bricklayers and the engineers in a conversation and a process that made our design feasible,” the architect explains.

This strategy of inclusion not only allowed the brothers to gain acceptance for their design and make it workable, it also helped them to persuade the local municipality to maintain many of the areas around the conservatory as public open spaces.

Elias Anastas admits this is no easy task in the occupied territories. “People have a lack of trust in public spaces and so, even at the municipal level, it’s not easy to try to persuade them to keep a space open for the public in the evening. Public space became associated with expressions of power so today, public spaces are not perceived as places where you can have confidence.”

If AAU’s conservatory attempts to reconstruct an idea of contemporary public space in Palestine, so too does another AAU project, Stonesourcing Space, an experimental stone pavilion created by Yousef Anastas. A contemporary reinterpretation of the mounteer, a type of refuge or shelter traditionally found throughout the Palestinian countryside, Stonesourcing Space was first constructed in Bethlehem’s Nativity Square in September 2013.

Like the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music, the Anastas brothers see their pavilion as an “architecture of resistance”. The aim of this temporary structure is to encourage Palestinians to reclaim, occupy and redefine public space in ways that move beyond the terms of surveillance, control, security and protest.

The pavilion’s resistance stems from its ability to introduce the notion of exhibition, discussion, inquiry and play in Palestinian public space by virtue of its location and existence.

For the Anastas brothers, however, there is an extra dimension to Stonesourcing Space’s resistance. Each time a pavilion is erected, it becomes a symbolic marker, like some contemporary cairn or a 3-D version of a graffiti artist’s tag, that acts as a mark and a reminder of property ownership and a symbolic act of resistance to the path and the existence of the Israeli West Bank Barrier.

“As Palestinian architects,” Elias Anastas explains, “our challenge is to develop urban forms and construction techniques that can evolve and develop into the urban fabric of the future Palestinian city.

“As time passes, we are more and more persuaded that an architecture of resistance has a real place in solving the complex territorial reality in Palestine [but] I think in order to achieve peace, an architecture of resistance should contribute to the emancipation of the Palestinian population.

“To achieve peace, the Palestinian population must be emancipated.”

This article was originally published in The National in 2014

Driving: I’m a 45-year-old man who takes the bus. So what?

Outing yourself as a 45-year-old non-driver in Abu Dhabi attracts the same mixture of disbelief, suspicion and pity that’s usually reserved for British teetotalers and vegetarians in France

In 1986, the year her government privatised and deregulated Britain’s bus networks, Margaret Thatcher is reputed to have said that: “A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself a failure.”

If that’s the case, then the vast majority of men in Abu Dhabi are certain winners in the great commute of life, whereas my failure is absolute: not only do I not drive, but I cannot.

In 2009, fewer than 1 per cent of men in the emirate used buses as their primary form of transport; a whopping 49 per cent used private cars, 8 per cent used private taxis and 22 per cent walked.

Only 0.3 per cent travelled by bicycle and 0.1 per cent used a motorbike, which is understandable given the suitability and safety of the UAE’s highways where, according to estimates, 5.9 road traffic fatalities were recorded per 100,000 people last year, with the number of fatalities surging by 7.4 per cent.

Outing yourself as a 45-year-old non-driver in Abu Dhabi attracts the same mixture of disbelief, suspicion and pity that’s usually reserved for British teetotalers and vegetarians in France.

“You mean you don’t drive?” people say when I confess, seemingly happier for a journalist to have a criminal record or a problem putting words in a coherent order, than an inability to steer a potentially lethal piece of machinery that travels at high speeds.

At home in the United Kingdom, where 80 per cent of the men eligible for a driving licence have one, I was happy with my minority status, but now that I live in the UAE, a place where the distances between work, home and my children’s school are vast and the love of driving runs deep, I’ve decided it’s finally time I learned to drive.

As I make my way to the Emirates Driving Company (EDC) in Mussaffah, the idea feels both liberating and rash.

It’s only 2pm in the afternoon, but homebound traffic is already hurtling thick and fast as it jockeys for position along Al Khaleej Al Arabi Street.

Four-wheel drives bank across the highway like jets in an aerobatic display, and my taxi driver, who clearly thinks that a stopping distance of three metres is more than generous, cruises behind a white Lexus at 120 kilometres per hour, sending my stress levels sky high.

After nine years in Abu Dhabi, I’m normally inured to such behaviour, but I’m now focused on the road around me as never before and I’m finding the experience alarming in the extreme.

Sending non-drivers to Mussaffah feels like a punishment that is particularly cruel. If areas such as Yas, Al Maryah and Saadiyat Islands represent Abu Dhabi’s polished super-ego, Musaffah is more like the city’s unburnished id, a bewildering labyrinth of workshops, foundries, factories and camps that become increasingly industrial and more confusing the further you venture in.

As the prize-winning author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, Suketu Mehta, confessed to me recently after he had to abandon a walking tour of the district, Mussaffah may be the place to discover Abu Dhabi’s unvarnished underbelly, but it’s no place for pedestrians.

Arriving at the vast driving-school campus, I join a knot of salwar kameez-­clad fellow hopefuls who are just as eager to escape the 46°C heat, and through the heat haze before us we spy our immediate goal: the EDC test area packed with learners. A rink of infrastructure – bridges, flyovers, underpasses and car parks – designed specifically for driving instruction, it represents a condensed and uncanny simulacrum of Abu Dhabi’s urban landscape.

Before we can join in, however, we’re required to open a file, have our eyes tested, submit our documents and pay our fee, a process that takes place in a sparkling building on the far side of the campus, an anvil of melting asphalt that feels soft and sticky underfoot.

Arriving at speed, we push at doors with scalding, stainless steel handles, only to be repelled. They are locked, so we work our way around the building, desperately looking for an opening.

It’s only once we complete a circuit that we notice the sign bearing the news we had all feared: at 2.30pm, the EDC may be open for learners, but for non-drivers, registration is already closed.

Before even reaching the rink, I’ve failed my very first driving test so I leave the EDC’s car park in search of a taxi, knowing I will have to make the 60-kilometre round trip to Mussaffah all over again.

My feelings of exasperation are intense, but as a 45-year-old pedestrian in Abu Dhabi, what more did I expect?

This article was originally published in The National

 

Art: the Townhouse Gallery, Cairo at the Mosaic Rooms, London

Thanks to a series of carefully curated exhibitions at major institutions throughout London this summer, the British capital is as good a place as any from which to assess the recent past and potential future for contemporary culture in the Arab and wider Muslim world.

While the Design Museum is hosting a show dedicated to the work of the Tunisian couturier Azzedine Alaia, the work of the eight shortlisted finalists for the fifth Jameel Prize can be seen on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

At the other end of Exhibition Road a 20-metre-tall pyramid, The London Mastaba, floats improbably on the Serpentine, the star exhibit in a show that chronicles Christo’s unrequited, four-decade-long love affair with Abu Dhabi, where the 83-year-old artist still hopes to build the largest sculpture in the world.

At the other end of the scale, a display of newly acquired and very mundane objects – a milk bottle, magazines, cigarette packages, a banknote and a vinyl record – strikes just the right note at the British Museum. They are used alongside a video installation by the artist Maha Maamoun in her exhibition The Past is Present: becoming Egyptian in the 20th Century to investigate the interplay between ancient heritage and modern Egyptian identities.

And yet it is another ­modestly-sized show that also aims to bring something of Cairo to London that takes the prize for the exhibition with the best sense of timing.

Staged at The Mosaic Rooms, What do you mean, here we are? commemorates the 20th anniversary of Cairo’s famous Townhouse Gallery and is also part of a series of exhibitions mounted to celebrate The Mosaic Rooms’ tenth anniversary.

To read the rest of this article, please visit The National

Suketu Mehta: Bombay’s laureate on Abu Dhabi’s backstreets

A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2005, Suketu Mehta has gained global acclaim for his book on Mumbai and his writings on migration and community in major world cities, Nick Leech talks to him about Abu Dhabi.

When it comes to thinking about cities, the view from his temporary home at New York University Abu Dhabi provides Suketu Mehta with all the material he needs.

“When I look at a place like this, I wonder what genius of an urban planner thought that it would be a great idea to make a city without sidewalks and decided that the automobile would have primacy over the pedestrian?” the writer wonders, looking across Saadiyat Island’s twisting motorways and flyovers towards the hotels that line its distant coastline.

“I’d love to be able to walk to the beach but I can’t really go for a walk outside this apartment. And, as you can see, I’m literally at the end of my road,” he says, pointing to a patch of waste ground beneath his window where six lanes of motorway simply disappear into the sand.

More than his role as an associate professor of journalism at New York University, his alma mater, it’s Mehta’s thinking and writing about urbanism that have brought him to NYUAD.

Since January, the award-winning author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found has been teaching a course at the university that not only involves looking at fiction, film, non-fiction and poetry, but also includes field trips to places such as Dubai’s Hor Al Anz, a neighbourhood that he considers to be one of the UAE’s more inspiring destinations.

“It’s the Jackson Heights or the Southall of Dubai. We hung out, we walked the streets, had a biryani and I really felt at home,” Mehta enthuses.

“The more time I spend here the more I realise how little I know and how wrong the rest of the world is about this place,” he says. “It’s much more complex.”

It is difficult to consider a contemporary writer who is more committed to cities and city life than Mehta.

Born in Kolkata in 1963, he spent his early years in Mumbai before his family moved to Jackson Heights, a multicultural neighbourhood in Queens, New York, in 1977 and it was 21 years before he returned to the city he still refers to as Bombay.

After years spent working as a journalist and editor for business-to-business computing titles, Mehta returned to India with a determination to write and a seductively simple question: Can you ever go home again?

“I thought I would go to Bombay for a year to write a quick and dirty book about a quick and dirty city,” Mehta told the writer William Dalrymple in a panel discussion at last year’s Zee Jaipur Literary Festival in Boulder, Colorado.

Fortunately, as it turns out, the budding writer was mistaken. Mehta spent two and a half years immersed in the company of gangsters and hitmen, Bollywood moguls and call girls, police chiefs, religious rioters, actors and politicians.

“In Bombay I met people who lived closer to their seductive extremities than anyone I had ever known. Shouted lives,” Mehta writes in the book that resulted from his unexpected sojourn.

“These are not normal people. They live out the fantasies of normal people. And the kind of work they do affects all other spheres of their lives … in this sense they have become artists.”

Published as his first book in 2004, Maximum City earned Mehta a place on the finalist’s list for the Pulitzer Prize in 2005 and catapulted him, then 41, to the forefront of world literature.

Before long, Maximum City came to be considered not just as a great book about a great Indian city, Mumbai’s answer to Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi or Geoffrey Moorhouse’s Calcutta, but it also earned Mehta a place in the pantheon of literary urban investigators alongside Dickens and Orhan Pamuk, Joseph Mitchell and Jan Morris.

Since the publication of Maximum City, Mehta has spent a decade writing articles for publications such as The New Yorker, The Guardian, Time magazine, and Newsweek while working on a new translation of Mahatma Gandhi’s autobiography and researching material for his next book, a study of the immigrant experience in New York tentatively titled City of the Second Chance.

At the same time, Mehta, whose accent still ties him to Mumbai and bears no trace of his many years in the United States, has been visiting cities as the only writer to participate in Urban Age, an itinerant city research programme established by Richard Sennett and Ricky Burdett at the London School of Economics.

“I’ve never taken a course in urbanism or architecture, but after Maximum City I was asked to be part of this travelling group of urbanists, planners, architects and mayors,” he says.

“I started getting invited to their conferences in cities all around the world where there were all these debates taking place about the future of cities. I started wondering why they invited me, a complete amateur at all this, and I realised that it’s because the story of the city needs to be told.”

For Mehta, writing about cities and the deliberations of the people who have the power to shape their future is a civic duty and helps to ensure that, rather than talking about buildings, the debate around our urban future focuses on people instead.

“The jargon of urbanism has become like a Latin mass and this is where I think storytelling needs to re-enter the whole conversation,” he says. “There’s a role for journalists and writers to listen to the deliberations of the good and the great and to translate this into stories for the rest of us.

“If you’re a literary theorist or a philosopher you can write in obscure journals, but it will not have much effect on the rest of the public. But the dreams of urban planners can become our nightmares because we have to live with them.”

The outcome of all this travel, research and meetings with urbanism’s great and good is a book-length essay, The Secret Life of Cities, that Mehta describes as an amuse-bouche for his forthcoming book about New York.

Focusing on migration, alienation and community in the world’s cities, the book, which is yet to be published in English, examines just what it is that makes great cities great, a quality, Mehta insists, that is quite different from the liveability indexes produced by organisations such as the Economist Intelligence Unit.

“The world’s most liveable cities always include places like Canberra and Munich, places made for expat bankers that completely bore the s*** out of me,” Mehta says.

“I think there needs to be another list of liveable cities that considers that metropolitan excitement, that sense of chaos and informality and a little bit of unpredictability, even a little frisson of danger. This is what makes for a great city.”

Rather than the sterile lakeside sidewalks of cities such as Geneva, the epitome of the kind of vibrant urban environment that Mehta favours is the Coney Island boardwalk and beach in New York, which serve as a metaphor for a workable urbanism that is open and realistic.

“A great city doesn’t have to include everyone. You could sit at Ruby’s Bar in Coney Island and watch the whole parade of humanity,” he says.

“Bangladeshis in their hijabs next to Russian girls in bikinis, and anarchists from the East Village in leather and Dominicans, and they all walk side by side before going off to their little knots on the beach.

“It’s not that they’re all happy and talking to each other. It’s not that you’ll get invited to every picnic on the beach, but somewhere on the beach there’s a picnic that you too can go to.”

The alternative view, as Mehta sees it, is a socialist notion of equality that he rejects as utopian and unrealistic, preferring instead to focus on openness, tolerance and dignity.

It is an approach that is heavily influenced by Mehta’s upbringing and from his teenage years when he grew up in a building in Jackson Heights in Queens, the easternmost and largest of New York’s five boroughs and a district that is statistically and linguistically the most diverse in the US.

In the building where the Mehta family lived, which was owned by a Turk and managed by a Greek, Indians lived alongside Pakistanis, and Jews lived next to Muslims.

“It’s not that we started loving each other. When we went inside we all said horrible racist things about somebody else. But there was a cessation of hostility and an understanding that we were all making a new future,” Mehta says.

When it comes to the UAE’s future, the real stories, he believes, lie not in the architectural visions that adorn the property developer’s hoardings he sees from his window, but in the backstreets of the neighbourhoods where the vast majority of Abu Dhabi’s population lives.

“This city is made up of layers, but the most visible layer – the one you see in advertisements and on airlines – is only the tip of it,” he says.

“There are all these other layers that are South Asian and Filipino and African and Egyptian, and the most interesting parts of the city are the interstitial spaces where these bubbles mix.

“There’s a great Maximum Abu Dhabi or Maximum Dubai to be written,” Mehta insists. “I’m certainly not the person to write it, but I think somewhere out there there is a young writer – they could be Emirati, they could be Pakistani or they could be English – who is collecting observations and stories and will write the great non-fiction book about this city, because it certainly demands it.”

This article was originally published in The National