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Always Let the Road Decide_2008/11

In Dubai, UAE capitalist free-market
ideals and publicity techniques are
interwoven with autocratic state
controls that organise architectural
expansion and manage the spatial
flow of migrant workers in the city.
Highways and roads dominate the
landscape, and within this infrastructure
walking is discouraged. Roads
become walls, boundaries, and lines
to be navigated alienating pedestrians.

Always Let the Road Decide
explores photographically how
South Asian construction workers
who have limited social rights of
use within the city independently
access and appropriate these
busy networks on foot. Climbing
onto the road allows individuals
to dictate the pace of their collective
movements within a hostile environment
/cityscape. Male workers create
informal activities meeting points
or communal spaces and collective
spatial practices in between
highways, on undeveloped plots
and in cultivated gardens.

If, 'diversions' in space offer a
fresh spatial dynamic to city
spaces that have outgrown their
original purpose, 'temporality'
has an important role to play
as a structural component of
urban development and offers
new research opportunities to
explore how the undocumented
and unregulated social activities
of low paid male South Asian
expatriates could influence
planning and construction
procedures within the Gulf region.

These images form part of a
long term photographic project
that considers how leisure spaces
are visually represented within
this city; everyday and unregulated
activities and micro spatial
practices that take place during
workers limited leisure time in
or around the built environment.