I had in my hand a printed satellite image of the town. I could point to the hotel where we were and could drag my finger along the streets to indicate exactly where we needed to go. The Al Ain taxi driver took the image, rotating it several times, studying it, before handing it back to me and shrugging. A rapid stream of questions in passable English soon followed. Clearly I didn’t understand the difficulty. It was a couple of miles and a handful of turns, the town itself being virtually flat and organized as a 60s-era colonialist pastiche of Milton Keynes with its obscenely wide roads, expansive views, and roundabouts. It could easily be read in plan, yet, it wasn’t happening. My printed artifact of Google-driven God’s-eye Manifest Destiny simply did not match up with the spatial markings and physical cues familiar to the driver. The impasse wasn’t merely the result of a clichéd opposition between the everyday and the digital, or the local and the global, but more that of conflicting directional shorthand. The driver was not native, likely a Bangladeshi transplant from a couple of years back, and I was not familiar enough with the lay of the land to do more than trace lines on a page.

Fortunately, architecture was on our side. Only a few years after the creation of their road system, the municipal authorities had set about commissioning iconic public art projects to be placed in the grassy centers of traffic circles so as to alleviate the horizontal sameness that plagued the area. Not unlike a series of Hejduk masques, or escaped fragments from Charles Moore’s Piazza d’Italia, giant coffee pots, fountains, clocks, and treasure chests soon filled these irrigated islands. It was excessive figuration at its worst, yet borne out of the same strain of blunt pragmatism that drove the initial approach toward transit organization. Left at the incense burner, right at the shiny horses, and a handful of dirhams later, we were dropped off beneath the arrow on my map.

While Dubai and the city of Abu Dhabi represent the global face of the United Arab Emirates, the modest municipality of Al Ain would appear to be something of an outlier. Yet upon closer scrutiny, this “oasis city” is situated at the very heart of the struggle to locate, or perhaps retroactively construct, an Emirati cultural identity. The birthplace and domain of the late Sheikh Zayed, Al Ain is the product of a fruitful convergence of tribal heritage, date palm cultivation, Western urban planning, and tourism, underpinned by a substantial immigrant workforce. Emirati nationals project an ever larger built footprint within the city, yet their homes are, more often than not, secondary residences—walled family compounds of leisure. Despite its claim toward Bedouin authenticity, the modern city is scaled almost exclusively to the vehicle, offering a continuous experience of interiority from one air-conditioned point to another. Such insularity is at once visually excessive yet a climactic necessity, with arid conditions and desert terrain being the primary drivers of tribal settlement in this region dotted with shade- and sustenance-granting oases. In a spot graced by some of the hottest temperatures on earth, the date palm is not only king, it is a personal savior.

Over time, the oases of Al Ain became parceled amongst competing tribal factions, effectively fracturing this public good into loose aggregates of ancestral properties. With each new prominent son came another subdivision with its requisite earthen retaining wall. After Abu Dhabi struck black gold, allowing the state to import resources, recruit a sizeable foreign labor force, and irrigate vast tracts of previously uninhabitable land, date harvesting became a matter of family prestige rather than a pragmatic enterprise. As Al Ain modernized, it turned away from its vegetated centers, isolating them within the vast gridiron of its city planning strategy. The maintenance of these abandoned plots of date palms fell to individual Emirati families and the foreign laborers whom they employed; a situation which has persisted to the current day.

Of the oases which remain, Al Ain is the most prominent due to its location within the heart of the city’s modern commercial district, yet it too is bracketed by dry earthen barriers. Upon reaching the entrance trail, my colleagues and I were greeted by a large sign posted by the municipality stating outright that entrance was forbidden with the exception of “owners and tourists,” a de jure limitation that somehow made no allowance for the date harvesters themselves, many of whom lived in makeshift shacks within their employers’ respective parcels. The crenellated triumphal arches—signs of civic grandeur in other parts of the world—that marked various ends of the path seemed here to stand for nothing but themselves, granting passage to bussed-in German tourists (and, evidently, curious American architects), but excluding over eighty percent of the city’s population. The oasis, for many, remains a mirage.

If there could be little hope for the explicit demarcation of a public space for a public that is acknowledged only insofar as to be negated, then evidence of public activity would have to be found elsewhere. And so it was, in the ornamented traffic island roundabouts residing in the highly visible interstices of the street grid. Originally, these iconic markers were intended as instantly-recognizable wayfinding devices for those tethered to the demands of speed and the glamour of mobility. An eclectic assemblage of sculptural historicist caricatures, these set pieces were jubilant attempts to re-assert the primacy of place within an infrastructural framework that so decisively eroded it, with the municipality playing Jane Jacobs in penance to its earlier conjuring of Robert Moses. The roundabouts are named rather than numbered; Sheikh Mubarak, Al Foah, and Mandoos, to list but a few. Each of these interventions sits within a lavishly manicured landscape maintained through a copious irrigation regimen. Enveloped by traffic in the city center and by three empty lanes of asphalt on the outskirts, these islands, with their cool grassy surfaces, serve as highly formal stages for casual leisure. When dusk arrives, small groups begin to populate these lawns, choosing to linger outdoors, one suspects, for the first time all day. Invariably, a cricket bat will emerge with an impromptu match on an adjacent field or cleared construction site likely to follow as onlookers watch from a palm-shaded median. Here, visible within the blind spots of the infrastructural space of high-speed mobility and the islands that facilitate its unhindered operation, is a parallel, yet distinct set of constituencies operating at a slower pace and a more communal scale.

Even prior to the economic downturn, the identification and formalization of these marginal spaces had become a part of city’s agenda. The construction of new linear parks adjacent to long stretches of preexisting roadway is but one attempt to craft something akin to public space, introducing the notion of long-term quality into a place that has become known for technique and fleeting transaction. One wonders, however, whether such a move will lead to a more inclusive public sphere that incorporates the vast array of transient, politically-unrepresented ethnic enclaves or if it will serve to further marginalize these hidden constituencies beneath the ambivalent umbrella of petroleum-enabled noblesse oblige that has characterized the Emirates’ mode of governance for the last few decades. In a region where assembly is largely curtailed, the ways in which these parks develop could prove essential to defining either the limits or the potential efficacy of unorthodox forms of spatial occupancy as a transformative political act.

Justin Fowler received his M. Arch at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and currently serves as the research project coordinator for the Columbia University Lab for Architectural Broadcasting.  His writing has appeared in Volume, Pidgin, Speciale Z Journal, and Conditions magazine, along with book chapters in “The New Urban Question: Urbanism Beyond Neoliberalism” (TU Delft, 2009), “Invention/Transformation: Strategies for the Qattara/Jimi Oases in Al Ain” (Harvard GSD, 2010) and “Material Design: Informing Architecture by Materiality” (Birkhauser, 2010).