Huma Gupta speaks with architectural historian Todd Reisz about the transformation of the marshy estuary known as Dubai Creek (خور دبي) into infrastructure–a process which was central to the city’s architectural and urban development projects in the twentieth century.
Huma Gupta
Huma Gupta is a scholar of environmental planning and the political economy of architecture. Gupta is a postdoctoral fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University, where she is working on two book projects: "Dwelling and the Architecture of Dispossession" and "Dwelling and the Wealth of Nations." In 2020, she completed her dissertation "Migrant Sarifa Settlements and State-Building in Iraq" at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she was a fellow in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture.
Todd Reisz
Todd Reisz is an architect and writer based in Amsterdam. His work examines the global practice of architecture, specifically how the architect circulates technologies and cultural narratives. His book Showpiece City: How Architecture Made Dubai was published by Stanford University Press in 2020 and it explores architecture’s packaging to sell Dubai on a global scale. He is also co-editing Building Sharjah (2021), an archival investigation of the Middle Eastern city’s vanishing twentieth-century landscape.
- Todd Reisz, "Gathering at a Roundabout," ToddReisz.com.
- Todd Reisz, "Landscapes of Production: Filming Dubai and the Trucial States," Journal of Urban History, 2017.
- Access the 1955 Halcrow Report at the Arab Gulf Digital Archive
- Archival Photographs of the Transformation of Dubai Creek
