A Call for the Preservation of Heritage Landscapes in the United Arab Emirates

By: Ronald Hawker

I always say that the best semester of my academic career was my sabbatical, when I spent six months combing through the dusty abandoned farms and hamlets of Ras al-Khaimah on a research project funded by Zayed University and an Emirates Foundation grant in the winter of 2011.

My forays into the dying date gardens on the emirate’s alluvial fans were punctuated with shared parathas –flatbreads- with my friends at the National Museum of Ras al-Khaimah or tea with my student and her family in Wadi Sha’m, all of whom helped facilitate field research for my students.

By that time, I had lived in the United Arab Emirates for fourteen years and had forced busloads of Emirati university students to various archaeological sites and abandoned villages – an experience that probably taught me a lot more than it did my students. I never got tired of Ras al-Khaimah.

Nonetheless, my students always asked (with a hint of complaint), why Ras al-Khaimah? There are other options and wide swathes of the land and seascapes of the other emirates offer similar opportunities for holistic interpretation of cultural history.

Ras al-Khaimah, though, was a paltry hour and a half bus ride from the university’s gates. There, productive agricultural lands, proximity between environmental zones, and access to shipping lanes, deep water fisheries near the coast and the pearl banks of the southern Abu Dhabi embayment, led to relatively high density settlement. No oil, and therefore slower late twentieth century urbanization, mean large stands of traditional architecture still remain.

Unlike Abu Dhabi and some of the other Gulf cities, the Ras al-Khaimah hasn’t yet been transformed into a late 20th century metropolis of concrete and glass. Here more than anywhere else in the United Arab Emirates the possibility of preserving not only buildings, but also their physical context, remains viable.

Taking a rough 10 x 10 kilometre square section of the district from Ras al-Khaimah town east to the Hajar mountain range, one finds three distinct environmental zones. The surviving hamlets, canals, gardens, and other historic remnants demonstrate that even with a short distance of the city’s core, there are substantial architectural differences. Rather than perceiving these as independent, iconic objects, it is important that future preservation accounts for how the buildings function in both practical and symbolic terms, and how they relate to the overall regional socio-economic networks – economic and social factors revolving around tribe, geographic location, climate and seasonal habitation patterns, and economic status and activity.

The first challenge for preservation is to maintain a sense of the complex factors that give these different structures meaning. Preservation and presentation need to go beyond object-based architecture to include not only the ways in which the surrounding land and seascapes were manipulated – the fields, canals, wells, paths, pearl banks, backwaters, lagoons, anchorages and breakwaters – but how the built environment was configured within the natural world.

Agricultural villages and fields, for example, were laid out according to water salinity, quality of earth, and the direction of underground aquifers. The falaj system used gravity to feed water into date gardens, directing water run-off from winter flooding to large cisterns scattered strategically throughout farming networks. Ports were located in relation to sand banks, water depth for anchorage, and backwaters that provided protected corridors for shallow-draft boats. The notion of passive cooling, essential to human survival in the region, was to harness and work within, not transform, nature.

Ras al-Khaimah has urbanized less rapidly than the oil producing emirates of Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Sharjah. Nonetheless, the city has spread from its original peninsula across reclaimed land in the lagoon with extensive industrial development. There are pockets of old masonry houses built from beach stone and coral in the old town of Ras al-Khaimah. These are still inhabited, mainly by a new underclass of expatriate Asian labourers. The buildings exhibit several phases of building, with reconstruction or additions added using compressed shell and sand bricks from the 1950s and breezeblock introduced in the 1960s. The landfill has erased the old anchorage sites and filled in the shallow backwater transportation corridor. Few old houses survive in Ma’airidh and the fishing fleet has been relocated to a dedicated harbour at the north edge. The palm gardens have been reduced by the combination of a water table emptied by mechanical pumps, introduced in the 1940s, and the development of mixed commercial, industrial and residential zones.

Fortified towers and houses, high status seasonal residences, and mosques exist in crumbling condition, scattered and abandoned in undeveloped pockets along the edge of the alluvial fan. A number of individual sites, typically belonging to the ruling Al Qasimi family, are preserved or restored by the National Museum of Ras al-Khaimah. Other sites and buildings have been all but destroyed by industrial development. The old village of Ghubb, for example, lies within a cement factory. The terraced farms in the wadis were mostly abandoned with the construction of villages on the alluvial fan for the mountain tribes in the 1970s. Some itinerant farming is still carried out and members of the Habus and Shihuh tribes who previously resided in the wadis are returning, constructing new houses on or near the old villages.

Preservationists can be defined as “a distinct social group with distinct beliefs acquired through specific training and practice.” In the United Arab Emirates specifically and the Gulf generally, this group is small, with indigenous institutions providing neither training nor practice. Professionals are often countries from outside the UAE, although this is now changing. Isolated from each other and often from decision-making processes, practitioners are, at best, a nascent social group. While development in the Gulf is based on adopting best practices, identified by international professional communities, contemporary approaches that link landscape and power are sometimes anathema to governmental hierarchies. The result is that buildings associated with the ruling family are preserved, often fenced off from public interaction, and other structures and elements of the land and sea are either left to be reclaimed by the climate and erosion or erased by modern urbanization.