Dubai is often characterized as a city of artificiality and repackaged public spaces -a city without a past. The old historic Dubai has essentially disappeared, lost in the shadows of iconic resort projects and popular shopping malls. This article asks the following question: how do Dubai's museums function in relation to an urban field for the most part bereft of historical fabric, and in which the history that is made visible within the public realm is largely fictional or highly sanitized? We argue that to make sense of the ways history is represented and circulated in Dubai's public spaces, the traditional categories of 'museum' should be extended to include both large-scale history-themed malls and small heritage houses. Taken altogether, Dubai's museums and museum-like institutions constitute a conceptually complete and closed system that manages to 'resolve' the apparent paradox of an urban context characterized by absence and historical loss, in which, paradoxically, expressions of historical fullness are everywhere.

Muscat's development into a modern city has been of an entirely different order from that experienced elsewhere in the Gulf. The Muscat of the 1970s and 1980s was a complex urban environment, and the Muscat of today remains complex in ways not typical of cites such as Dubai and Abu Dhabi. The novel Warda by Sanallah Ibarahim and the memoir Arabia by Jonathan Raban, provide insights into the ground conditions of Muscat at a time before present economic pressures propelled a new round of changes in the physical fabric of the city and tourist resorts nearby. Under pressure to accomplish agendas both of heritage preservation and economic development, recent urban transformations in Muscat comprise three basic strategies, each organically linked to the Muscat of previous decades: Re-Covering the Past, evident in Muscat's historic core; Phasing Space, seen in the Grand Mosque of Sultan Qaboos; and Forging Reality, present in a new wave of tourist enclaves along the Oman coast. Taken together, these strategies can be understood as original attempts to harness Muscat's complex urban and cultural pasts in order to construct a robust framework for the development of everyday life, national identity, tourist engagement and a uniquely Omani modernity for the future.

Dubai, one of the most mobile cities in the world, is rapidly cementing its image as a global city and icon of Islamic tolerance. Dubai's economic opportunities, relative safety and geographic centrality in the heart of the Middle East make it attractive to a wide range of economic and political migrants from across the region. This article asks how a city which is overwhelmingly populated by members of a highly mobile and diverse non-citizen workforce could construct a plausible sense of collective memory, a fundamental requirement for any meaningful social cohesion. In considering this question, the article reviews two well-known history-themed commercial centers, Ibn Batutta Mall and the Khan Murjan in Wafi Mall. Each of these emphasize Arab-Islamic cultural heritage and the region's long history of trade and transit. Both malls highlight culturally significant journeys documented in historical manuscripts. The article concludes that in constructing a complex experience which maps immediate spatial movement onto well-known travel narratives, the Ibn Battuta and Khan Murjan centers provide scaffolds for a cultural memory essentially "made to order" for a population who share, if little else, a profound sense of dislocation, flow and perpetual movement.

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This essay begins with a review of Mister X, a comic serial taking architectural modernism as its point of departure. The graphic narrative renders a dystopian view of architecture and urbanism, as well as a biting critique of the architect as theorist. Rather than demonstrating that architecture is mute and impotent, however, the Mister X story theorizes architecture as unpredictably powerful and effective, albeit malicious. The essay examines four architectural failures suggested by the Mister X text, identifying how these limitations of the formal, material object of architecture, are, paradoxically, its very possibilities for social effect. Dean Motter's Mister X is a contemporary pop culture text, a comic serial taking architectural modernism as its point of departure. On one level, Mister X presents a straightforward dystopian view of architecture and urbanism, as well as a rather biting critique of architects' reformative desires. Indeed, the comic chronicles an alternative architectural modernism seen as a sad comedy of failures and reversals. On another level, however, Mister X suggests unexpected possibilities for recovering the modernist dream of social and personal transformation through architecture.