Cosmopolitanism and Urban Space in Doha, Qatar

Abstract

This essay commences with an ethnographic sojourn through the Industrial Area, a peripheral zone of the urban landscape in Doha, Qatar that is densely inhabited by low wage migrant laborers. In this segregated urban enclave, I ascertain the openness to alterity and the interactions with difference that connect their experiences to the conceptual legacy of cosmopolitanism. Via a discussion of the segregated experiences of transnational migrants in Doha’s urban landscape, I then stake out a speculative argument for the connection between that segregation and the resulting cosmopolitan conditions. Together, these two assertions explore manifestations of cosmopolitan urbanism in non-Western and non-democratic cities. In the conclusion to this essay, I suggest that we might usefully disentangle our assessment of these cosmopolitan conditions from our sustained critiques of the global landscape of inequality, and turn my attention briefly to the western ethnocentricities that suffuse the analytic lens by which we gauge cosmopolitanism and the city.

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