Espace populations sociétés (Oct 2021)
De quoi la tolérance est-elle le nom ? Questionner le modèle émirien de « ville inclusive »
Abstract
Abu Dhabi and Dubaï, the two largest cities in the United Arab Emirates, epitomize the otherness as an urban issue, and the tension between inclusion and exclusion of minorities. On one hand, foreigners – mostly low skilled workers- account for nearly 90 percent of the population and are officially prevented from accessing citizenship or political participation. On the other hand, the country has been striving to present itself as « tolerant » over the last decades, in terms of non-discrimination against ethnic, religious or national communities. The article explores how the vague and abstract concept of tolerance is translated into urban policy, more particularly in terms of compliance with the « inclusive city » model, which is supposed to be more precise and operational. In addition to a conceptual analysis, the article discusses the empirical outcomes of a three years fieldwork, focusing more particularly on the case of South-Asian low skilled workers within Abu Dhabi’s public spaces. Based on the analysis of how they access and use these spaces and interact with other users, the paper discusses the image of a tolerant city, and highlights how these categories of habitants tend to be excluded and relegated by specific temporalities, social norms and regulations of uses on a micro-scale. The urban translation of the concept of tolerance can eventually be analyzed as fragile, by occuring informally and temporarily, and incomplete, being far from encapsulating the whole meaning of the notion.
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