The Era After Oil

Abstract

This chapter investigates seven Gulf cities (Kuwait City, Manama, Doha, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, and Muscat) that have grown rich due to large reserves of oil and natural gas. Now, with the threat of ending resources, governments focus on the development towards a knowledge society with knowledge-based industries and knowledge-intensive cities. The authors analyzed the cities in terms of their “smartness” or “informativeness” by field research on-site, a quantitative survey and in-depth qualitative interviews (N = 34). They studied prototypical building blocks of a city of the knowledge society, namely infrastructures (digital city, smart, green and sustainable city, creative city, and knowledge city), economy, politics and administration, location factors, as well as physical and digital spaces. Especially Doha in Qatar is well on its way towards becoming an informational city, but also Dubai and Sharjah (both in the United Arab Emirates) received good scores.