Old Dubai, and Older Dubai

March 19, 2020 3:44 PM

Old Dubai was a project that started really small, and ended up being something big, I had a few images about Dubai and I didn’t want them to leave in my hard disk, so I decided to make a Fanzine, to show the world an Old Dubai, a Dubai that you don’t see in social media, a Dubai who has soul. The project instantly got a little traction from some Art focused medias (Booooooom.com). Gonzalo Palaveccino's personal project is also available as a zine (PDF) [via Mltshp]. More from his Instagram account.

See also: A Trip Back in Time to Old Dubai -- Supercars may be Dubai’s current transport of choice – but a spice-scented dhow trip will take you worlds away from the modern Emirate’s shiny skyscrapers. (Lucy Taylor for BBC Travel, 2016)


Old Dubai VS New Dubai (Khawar Jamil for Dxb Blog, 2014)

Whenever i think about Dubai and how different it is from rest of the world and how advance and a global city it is, it always makes me reach to the conclusion that all the facilities that the Dubai residents and Specially locals enjoy today, is all because of the people from the 19th century who worked hard and made Dubai and the UAE a global hub.

The article includes photos from 50 years prior, compared to modern photos, for a different definition of "old."

posted by filthy light thief (3 comments total)

I love it. The architecture of Old Dubai (per the zine) looks like nothing so much as what I erroneously call "tropic modern" (and in French colonies "concrete Pacifique") regarding the hulking concrete structures one finds all throughout the Pacific (particularly in places where typhoons are prevalent).
posted by deadbilly at 9:06 PM on March 19, 2020 [1 favorite]

Thank-you to both Gonzalo Palaveccino and filthy light thief. The mid-recent past can be very instructive on the trending direction of civilization and is too often buried.
posted by fairmettle at 11:11 PM on March 19, 2020

Thank you for this! I visited Dubai in 2017 and while I enjoyed it, conspicuous Western capitalism was overlaid on nearly everything. This is a great perspective shift -- much appreciated.
posted by wicked_sassy at 6:49 AM on March 20, 2020