Dubai planners walled off migrant workers’ housing to sanitize the tourist city

Evidence

Surrounded by imposing concrete walls to obscure them from the main highway are the dorm-like facilities in which Dubai’s migrant workers live. It was not so long ago that these workers were seen walking throughout the city. To sanitize the city for tourist consumption, however, planners relocated the workers to such camps. Now they are bused to work sites, although the transportation is often unreliable. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 637

Categorization

• XREF: Links to urban-design scholarship on deliberately hidden service infrastructure, and to the invisibility-of-labor theme in the diamond bourse readings.