Dubai School of Government in partnership with Harvard University hold Port Cities Workshop

The workshop, entitled "Port City-States of the Indian Ocean: Their Past, Present and Future Trajectories," was a multi-disciplinary effort bringing together academics and experts from a variety of fields, including economics, business, urban planning, anthropology, history, and architecture.

The panel of participants included scholars from Harvard University, the Dubai School of Government, centers of Gulf studies in Europe, researchers from city states such as Singapore, and economists specializing in China's rapid coastal development. The workshop devoted particular focus to the development of the United Arab Emirates.

As stated by its organizers, the workshop is a preliminary attempt to define the trajectory of the small Gulf oil states in terms of their history, their present structures and their possible future prospects. According to Roger Owen, A. J. Meyer Professor of Middle East History at Harvard University, "This workshop is the start of a bigger and more elaborate project that will be producing a study framework of a project that will last several years."

This multi-year project will place the port cities of the UAE and the Arabian Gulf in context by examining the rise and fall of other port cities, and by tracing the paths of factors which influenced the making of these cities such as migration, Indian ocean trade, the role of oil and gas, the porous boundaries between public, private and family enterprise, and the development of combined forms of international law.

"Port Cities of the Indian Ocean" is one of many projects that the Dubai School of Government has coordinated in partnership with Harvard University under the rubric of the Dubai Initiative, a joint venture bridging the expertise and resources of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University with the Dubai School of Government.

Aimed at forecasting the future of the region and sharing best practices of port city states, this workshop is the first ever held in order to focus specifically on the rapid rise in global importance of the port city states of the Arabian Gulf throughout the past decade.

According to Nabil Alyousuf, Executive President of the Dubai School of Government, "This workshop is reflective of the greater visibility that Dubai and other Arabian Gulf port cities now have on a global level."

"By encouraging this kind of dialogue and research, the Dubai School of Government is bringing some of the world's foremost scholars to focus their expertise on developing knowledge that will benefit Dubai, the UAE and the Gulf region."

Workshop participants and organizers agreed to hold the next "Port Cities" workshop in Dubai, as well as to further develop a scholarly framework for studying the port city states of the region.