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In a newspaper editorial, Reem al-Kamali, an Emirati journalist, wrote an homage to Bin Souqat Centre, a neighborhood mall in Dubai. Kamali describes the mall as a place where prominent members of Emirati society congregate:
[Bin Souqat Mall] became a home for important Emirati figures in the country who held important positions in the past. Some of these faces were constantly in newspapers in the 1980s and 1990s, and now meet on a regular basis every morning and evening in the mall's coffee shops. . . . What is beautiful is that Bin Souqat, the owner of the mall, joins these men in their gathering and wanders back and forth in the malls' long hallways before going up to his office on the upper floor, or to his official majlis behind the mall. Although he has recently been absent because his health is not as it should be, the mall's visitors are still continuously meeting each other there, and their longing brings them there for these chance encounters.1
The scenes that Kamali depicts in Bin Souqat mall are in some ways similar to how many Emiratis depict the good old days of thefrij (neighborhood), when neighbours could chance upon each other and socialize. Instead of the community life of the frij, places that some dismiss as "glitzy"-shopping malls, coffee shops, and new developments-provide opportunities for many inhabitants (Emiratis and non-Emiratis) to see other members of society, interact with them directly or indirectly, people-watch, chitchat, and keep up-to-date with the community.2 These actions mark these places as important sites of belonging. Marc Augé describes shopping malls as "nonplaces" in which users are anonymous and faceless.3 In contradistinction, I argue that some citizens in Dubai go to glitzy places like shopping malls precisely in order to "show their face" and be seen by society. As important places of social life, malls are sites in which they observe, perform, negotiate, and challenge cultural and social norms.
Some academics find that the large-scale developments such as those in Dubai do not allow "ordinary people" to engage and connect with each other. For example, Khaled Alawadi writes:
While bigness [in architecture] has emerged as a successful branding strategy for attracting international capital, its architecture has failed to connect with ordinary...