Doctoral Dissertation Research: Landscape and the Production of Attractive Markets in Dubai

文化与经济的多方面关系日益成为地理学研究的焦点。调查领域包括对时尚和旅游市场文化等行业的调查，以及对国籍和性别等文化类别如何影响公司在不平衡的全球化经济中的空间组织的调查。按照这样的思路，这篇博士论文研究项目将考察文化景观在非西方世界创造和维持“市场吸引力”方面所扮演的角色。文化景观是人类建造的日常生活环境，长期以来一直是地理研究的对象。这位博士生将对阿拉伯联合酋长国迪拜进行案例研究，这个城市国家正在经历重大的景观变化(包括建造人工岛、巨型购物中心和世界上最高的建筑)和外国投资热潮(涵盖从印度软件公司和美国媒体集团到数千家小型进口商的一系列公司)。除了提供完善的基础设施，包括港口、道路和电信外，迪拜的景观还提供了工作场所内外的高质量生活，这是波斯湾和中东地区其他地区通常缺乏的特征。为了更好地理解迪拜景观和投资繁荣之间的关系，以及它的生活质量和优质地点地位之间的关系，这位博士生将采用一种混合的方法，同时关注景观的生产者和消费者。用来调查景观是如何表现的，以及它实际上是如何被用作物质对象来执行提升地位和建立信任等任务的方法包括在代表迪拜经济不同方面的四个地点进行参与者观察。这名学生将与迪拜不同的居民群体协调一个景观使用日记项目，以了解景观在经济活动中所起的作用。其他将使用的方法包括采访政府和企业的管理人员，讨论如何进行营销和选择迪拜投资的过程，以及在迪拜和其他酋长国的图书馆和政府部门进行档案分析，以更好地了解迪拜的竞争战略是如何随着时间的推移而演变的。这个项目将加强文化景观和文化经济的多学科文献，将两者的理论和方法相互联系，不仅对地理，而且对规划和城市治理等领域也有影响。该项目将加强对波斯湾下游地区的了解，该地区的研究仍然不足，对其所有复杂性的了解也很少，尽管这是关于当前全球化阶段什么是正确的或不正确的辩论的核心。作为博士论文研究改进奖，该奖项还将提供支持，使有前途的学生建立一个强大的独立研究生涯。

The multi-faceted relationship between culture and economy has increasingly become a focus of geographic scholarship. Areas of inquiry have included inquiries into how industries such as fashion and tourism market cultures and investigations of how cultural categories like nationality and gender affect the spatial organization of firms in the uneven, globalized economy. Along such lines, this doctoral dissertation research project will examine the role played by the cultural landscape -- the human-built setting of everyday life that has long been an object of geographic study -- in the creation and maintenance of "market attractiveness" in the non-Western world. The doctoral candidate will conduct a case study of the United Arab Emirate of Dubai, a city-state that is undergoing significant landscape alteration (which includes the creation of artificial islands, mega-malls and the world's tallest building) and a foreign investment boom (covering a range of companies from Indian software firms and U.S. media conglomerates to thousands of small importers). Beyond just supplying a well-developed infrastructure, including ports, roads, and telecommunications, Dubai's landscape offers a high quality of life both at and away from workplaces, a characteristic often lacking in other locales in the Persian Gulf and Middle East region. To better understand the relationship between Dubai's landscape and investment booms and between its quality of life and status as a quality location, the doctoral candidate will employ a mix of methodologies that focus on both producers and consumers of the landscape. Methods used to investigate how the landscape is represented and how it is actually used as a material object that performs tasks like enhancing status and building trust include participant observation at four sites representing contrasting facets of Dubai's economy. The student will coordinate a landscape-use diary project with a diverse group of Dubai residents to understand the role played by landscape in economic activity. Other methods to be used include interviews with managers in both government and business regarding how the process of marketing and selecting Dubai for investment is undertaken and archival analyses at libraries and government departments in Dubai and the other emirates in order to better understand how Dubai's competitive strategy has evolved over time.This project will strengthen multi-disciplinary literatures on both cultural landscapes and the cultural-economy by bringing the theories and methods of each to bear on the other, with implications not just for geography but also fields like planning and urban governance. The project will enhance understanding of the lower Persian Gulf region, which, remains understudied and poorly understood in all its complexity despite being central to debates about what is or is not right with the current phase of globalization. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career.