The Gulf World That Air Conditioning Wrought

As host-country Qatar took the pitch against Ecuador during the 2022 men’s World Cup opener, machines thrummed in the bowels of Al Bayt Stadium.

Outside, it was a humid 75 degrees Fahrenheit, but inside the open-air stadium, the crowd of more than 67,000 fans enjoyed ambient temperatures of about 68 degrees. Some even donned sweatshirts as chilled water was pumped through pipes in the underground machines, called absorption chillers, and then forced into the stands.

The installation of air conditioning systems across seven open-air stadiums at Qatar’s World Cup was controversial. Climate advocates warned that the tournament could set a dangerous precedent with its energy-guzzling air-conditioned amenities being marketed on the world stage as desirable and progressive.

Since Argentina’s Lionel Messi left Qatar with soccer’s most-coveted trophy, the concerns of climate advocates seem to have panned out. The region’s Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) nations, which include Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), are all doubling down on air conditioning.

Increasingly, too, the technology that has long facilitated life indoors in the sweltering Gulf states is being deployed to cool the open air. Abu Dhabi unveiled the first of a promised series of air-conditioned outdoor promenades encircling shopping malls this year. Saudi Arabia is building air-conditioned stadiums as it prepares to host the 2034 men’s World Cup. Qatar has even built an air-conditioned outdoor track at a Doha park to keep visitors cool while they enjoy the outdoors.

Developers tell the media that the new infrastructure is designed to be green. Still, Deen Sharp, an urban geographer and expert on the climate crisis in Kuwait, had a different take when I spoke to him via video conference. “No matter what efficiency gains you make, if you’re doing something crazy like trying to cool a park, that’s going to defeat any efficiencies you gain in creating the air in the first place.”

As climate change drives regional temperatures higher, and CO₂-emitting climate control technologies contribute to the problem, some climate advocates, architects and researchers have begun to ask whether reducing the Gulf’s reliance on mechanical cooling could better help it weatherproof its future. The idea is not far-fetched; it’s rooted in traditions of the past. Yet, in today’s world of fossil-fueled air-conditioned comfort, it can be easy to forget that life was not always this way.

Manufactured Weather

Before modern air conditioning, the Gulf’s locals coexisted with the sun and heat, utilizing local thermal-resistant building materials and architectural and urban design elements that harnessed nature to lower indoor temperatures. During the hotter months, many rested in the afternoons, bathed in the sea or natural springs or retreated to cooler environs.

Modern air conditioning is a relatively young technology, dating back just over 100 years to the turn of the 20th century, when it was designed to control humidity in manufacturing facilities. But other methods of cooling the air or reducing humidity indoors date back millennia, and many traditions originate in the arid and semi-arid plains of Central and Southwest Asia and the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa.

One archaeological expedition in the early aughts claimed to have found air conditioning at Hamoukar in northeastern Syria near the Iraqi and Turkish borders. There, a team of researchers from the University of Chicago and Syria’s Department of Antiquities and Ministry of Culture unearthed double-walled living quarters buried under soil littered with potsherds dating back as far as the fifth millennium BCE.

The roughly 2-inch gap between the exterior and interior walls of the double-walled dwellings would have allowed for insulation and reduced heat transfer into the home, protecting inhabitants from the region’s hot summers. “They had air conditioning systems over 6,000 years ago,” an incredulous Mohamed Maktash, a Syrian archaeologist and co-director of the excavation, told The Independent in June 2000.

Other examples of vernacular passive cooling systems are dotted throughout the region’s historical record. Chimney-like towers that harness winds and manipulate indoor air temperatures through downdraft cooling, common in cities in Iran’s central and eastern plains, are believed to date as far back as 2,500 years. When outside temperatures exceed those inside, air that enters the tower through side openings is cooled. Since cool air is denser than warmer air, it sinks down through the tower and is released through vents that open into the building. Protruding windows enclosed with wood latticework that shield interior spaces from sunlight grew popular across Southwest Asia and North Africa during the Ottoman Era. The indoor ledge of the shaded window also offers space for a basin of water to rest and spur evaporative cooling.

Unlike the cooling technologies of an earlier era, the purpose of the modern air conditioning that appeared in the Gulf in the 1930s was no longer to channel nature but to command it. American engineer Willis Carrier is credited with inventing that technology at the turn of the century. He later co-founded Carrier Engineering Corporation, which adopted the phrase “manufactured weather” to describe its systems. This phrase reflected not just the potential of air conditioning but also the arrogance of its creators, who fashioned their invention as a replacement, rather than an augmentation, for natural ventilation, historian Gail Cooper wrote in “Air-Conditioning America.”

Carrier first installed his soon-to-be patented “apparatus for treating air” at Sackett & Wilhelms Lithographing and Printing Company’s printing plant in Brooklyn in 1902. The system worked by blowing air over a set of coils filled with cold water that was later supplemented by a refrigerant (the building, complete with the brick ducts that once distributed cooled air from the basement up to the factory floor, still stands on the corner of Grand Street and Morgan Avenue).

The following year, the new building for the New York Stock Exchange opened on 18 Broad Street, becoming the first structure in the world outfitted with modern air conditioning specifically for the comfort of those inside. The building’s cooling system was the brainchild of engineer Alfred R. Wolff, known in the field as an eccentric who refused to speak on the telephone or join the American Society of Heating and Ventilating Engineers.

Like its creator, the cooling system installed on Broad Street to keep 1,500 hot-tempered brokers in the block-long building from sweating through their shirts was a curiosity. It was designed to lower the trading floor temperature to 75 degrees Fahrenheit using 11 high-powered fans, four high-pressure boilers, and three 150-ton ammonia-absorption machines — forebears to Qatar’s stadium coolers.

It was not until decades later, in the early 1930s, when engineer Henry Galson designed an affordable and compact unit, that the air conditioner burst into home cooling. By the 1950s, tens of thousands of window air conditioners were humming in homes, hotels, restaurants and offices worldwide.

When mass-manufactured air conditioners hit the market, they became available for import to the Gulf for the first time. The region’s first customers were British and American oil companies in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, and Western elites in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, who soon had the machines installed in their villas.

For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, the British Empire and its officials were the dominant power in the region, exercising control over Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, parts of what is now Saudi Arabia, and today’s UAE. Between the two world wars, American and British oil companies also arrived, intent on commanding the region’s natural resources. But the sweat staining their colonial dress uniforms and Western suits was a constant reminder that the weather was beyond their control.

A series of handbooks for British diplomats serving in the Arabian Peninsula between 1885 and 1924 warned of summers that were “exceedingly,” “insupportably” and “intensely” hot. The island of Bahrain and parts of the peninsula’s southern coast, one volume noted, were prone to “violent whirlwinds, from all sides” that felt like “a blast from a furnace” and stirred up so much dust that it was impossible to navigate.

Many of Britain’s early descriptions of the Gulf could be interpreted as examples of what historian Diana K. Davis has called “environmental orientalism,” where an environment is narrated as defective and unproductive in relation to Europe’s norms.

Colonial commentators also wove racist tropes of the region’s inhabitants into their contemptuous depictions of its climate, signaling their belief that both land and people were strange, backward and in need of Britain’s civilizing influence. Generations of European thinkers exemplified this project of simultaneous environmental and sociocultural othering with the claim that the intense heat and sun of colonial territories in the tropics, North Africa and the Gulf rendered locals idle and less intelligent than Europeans.

But what these foreigners failed to recognize was that locals had developed sophisticated means of adapting to the climate over generations. When norms of resting through hot afternoons and migrating to cooler oases during the hotter months clashed with European and American working patterns, they were treated not as a way to cope with the heat but as proof of racist claims about the local population’s laziness.

The British also disparaged architectural and urban design elements long used to temper the harshness of the sun. Gulf homes were often built with local thermal-resistant materials, such as coral stones and palm fronds, and arranged around a central open courtyard. The yard provided a shaded and open-air space within the home and promoted air circulation through downdraft cooling similar to Iran’s wind towers. By the 19th century, some in the Gulf had wind-catching towers of their own, as knowledge of the design element had traveled across the Persian Gulf with migrants from southern Iran.

Towns often had narrow and labyrinthine streets, such that the streets themselves and the buildings that lined them were shaded by one another from the sun. Colonial observers condemned the paths as disorganized and a threat to public health, associating the design with filth, disease and ignorance. One British engineer stationed with the colonial government in Egypt in the 1910s described the style, which he also saw on the streets of Cairo, as “detestable to the engineer of European training.”

From 1983 to 1985, British architect John Yarwood lived in Muharraq, an old pearl-diving center and one of Bahrain’s largest cities, where he observed that while the British adopted coral stone as a building material, the homes they constructed with it ignored complementary design traditions. Built with insufficient ventilation and rooms that were much larger than the local norm, the dwellings were left with sagging roofs and damp interiors. Yarwood’s predecessors blamed the stones for their architectural problems.

Anthropologist Marwa Koheji, whose forthcoming book documents the adoption of modern air conditioning technologies in Bahrain, writes that the British also lacked the knowledge to care for their coral stone homes, which required regular maintenance to prevent water damage, labor usually carried out by local women.

The arrival of air conditioning to the Gulf promised foreign administrators not only relief but also a level of technological control over their natural and built environments that had eluded them for decades.

Reengineering The Gulf

Air conditioning made it possible for those in the Gulf to reproduce certain Western norms — whether it was the oil barons’ stiff Western suits or their furnishings of thick fabric curtains and upholstery — in a region ill-suited to them.

When Mark Stott, manager of the British Bank of the Middle East, moved into a new home in Dubai in the early 1950s, he decided there was no need to postpone his housewarming for the arrival of cooler weather. With an air conditioning unit installed in the new home, Stott wagered he could recreate the pleasant atmosphere of an English luncheon even at the height of Dubai’s summer.

Stott unveiled his novel appliance as guests filed in on one August afternoon, assuring them that there was no need to open windows or switch on the old ceiling fan to stay cool. Unfortunately, things began to heat up at the meal, and it was later discovered that the air conditioner’s fans had been installed backward. The incident was a relatively minor mishap, and the promise of summer luncheons lived on.

By 1953, Peter Doherty, a doctor tasked with advising British diplomats in the Gulf, observed that air conditioning had become “a necessity.” Oil companies expected their employees to work an eight-hour day, six days a week, Doherty noted, but the companies provided air conditioning in their homes and offices. The machines enabled the ceaseless extraction of oil that has since made Qatar and the UAE among the richest nations in the world.

This air-conditioned embrace of foreign norms also extended to imported urban and architectural styles, as well as building materials, which became popular in Gulf cities during a post-World War II oil-fueled building boom. The explosion of wealth generated by the burgeoning oil industry required a simultaneous expansion in lodging and amenities to serve an influx of workers and trade infrastructure to get the oil to market. Among those workers were European and American planners, engineers, landscapers and architects, who brought with them design norms better suited to their native countries. These professionals, Sharp told me, were “producing at a rapid pace what they thought was suitable with little regard to the structural and design specifications needed for the local context.”

The urbanization of the immediate post-war era was so dramatic that sometimes it seemed as if old cities were being torn up by the roots. One visitor to Doha in 1957 remarked that the town appeared to have suffered an artillery bombardment due to the extensive construction. Architect Christopher Mitchell, who worked at the British firm John R. Harris and Partners in Dubai, which began remaking the architecture of the Gulf in 1952, commented in a talk given at the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies’ annual conference in 1976 that “from every point of view, it is the degree and speed of change which is so remarkable and which is more revolutionary than evolutionary in impact.”

Concrete soon became the foremost building material, supplanting traditional, more thermal-resistant materials like the coral stone long-maligned by colonists. Similarly, many home and urban design principles maximizing shade and ventilation were abandoned. Narrow maze-like paths were replaced by grids of wide streets intersecting at right angles and paved with heat-trapping asphalt. Courtyard homes were phased out in favor of one- or two-story European-style villas, where families gathered in a salon inside their concrete-walled home, rather than the shade of an internal yard. Trees and other flora — as well as gardeners to tend them — were all sourced from abroad, in an effort to recreate the verdant lawns and gardens of Westerners’ faraway homes.

The embrace of steel, glass and concrete as building materials has been taken to an extreme in Dubai. There, Emirati developer Emaar marshalled 330,000 cubic meters of concrete, 39,000 metric tons of steel rebar and 142,000 square meters of glass to erect what became the world’s tallest building in 2010. The tip of Emaar’s 163-storey-tall Burj Khalifa towers more than half a mile above Dubai’s streets and sidewalks. It joins a lineup of dozens of other skyscrapers rising at least 300 meters (or nearly 990 feet) in the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, making up more than a quarter of the “supertall” and “megatall” buildings worldwide, according to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat.

Air conditioning makes life possible within these mind-bending concrete, steel and glass skyscrapers, all so ill-fitted to the region’s climate as to render them bizarre, noted Sharp: “It’s literally building greenhouses in places of extreme temperatures.”

As foreign experts reproduced much of the West’s urban form in the mid-20th-century Gulf, they also replicated colonial and racial hierarchies in the structure of the region’s growing cities. This was epitomized in the segregated enclaves designed and built by oil companies like Ahmadi in Kuwait; Awali in Bahrain; and Dhahran in Saudi Arabia. There, the drawing of color lines was a guiding design principle, and the region’s newest technology was only made available to some. 

In Ahmadi, the Kuwait Oil Company’s British and American senior staff resided in lush subdivisions of pre-fabricated homes with air-conditioning units, bathrooms, kitchens and separate servants’ quarters. Meanwhile, the company’s other foreign workers, mainly from Egypt, Jordan and Syria, were given fans and housed in Nissen huts or large concrete apartment blocks with detached latrine blocks in an “Arab Village.” Other oil towns sprouted ramshackle labor camps on their peripheries, where the makeshift nature of the homes reinforced perceptions of their residents as unskilled and transient laborers.

At every turn, air conditioning enabled the hubris of the men who fashioned themselves the Gulf’s masters. As household incomes rose with oil wealth, many residents bought imported air-conditioned cars to traverse new networks of unshaded roads and air conditioners to cool their concrete homes. Later, when the machines became so popular that their demand for energy began to outstrip local power supplies and cause regular summer shortages, the GCC’s six nations joined their electrical grids in an unprecedented feat of political cooperation and infrastructural engineering.

Manufactured Crisis

In 2016, Kuwait’s Mitribah weather station measured one of the world’s highest-ever recorded temperatures, equaling the 129.2 degrees Fahrenheit measured by the aptly named Furnace Creek Ranch weather station in Death Valley, Calif., three years earlier. But while the population of Death Valley is in the hundreds, Mitribah lies just north of Kuwait City, which is home to 3.4 million people. 

In April, temperatures in Kuwait once again rose to near world-record-breaking triple digits — this time amid power cuts across the country. “There’s not enough supply, and people are abusing the hell out of their air conditioning systems,” said Mariam AlSaad, founder and director of AlManakh, one of Kuwait’s only environmental advocacy organizations. The region’s knitted-together power grid has begun to strain, as the machines that have chilled Gulf cities for almost a century put increasing pressure on its energy supplies.

Summer temperatures of over 120 degrees Fahrenheit are no longer news in the Gulf. Research suggests that by 2050, even in what the research group Climate Action Tracker calculates is an optimistic scenario, Gulf nations will likely experience as many as 250 dangerous heat days annually, with temperatures and the relative humidity exceeding 103 degrees Fahrenheit. Extreme temperatures and sea level rise threaten the already scarce groundwater in the region, exacerbating the gap between freshwater supplies and demand. One 2015 report in “Nature Climate Change” projected the region could “exceed a threshold for human adaptability” by the end of the century.

The climate crisis has arrived in the Gulf, driven in no small part by the mid-20th-century remaking of the region’s cities and relationship to the natural world. Today, annual per capita water use in the region is 560 liters, or 148 gallons, daily, compared to a global average of 180 liters, or 48 gallons, daily. As water supplies dwindle, the UAE has turned to desalinated water to care for the imported grasses, wildflowers and other non-native plants that dot its cities and line its highway medians. Meanwhile, Qatar and Bahrain have the highest per capita CO₂ emissions in the world, and the other four GCC nations are among the top eight.

Air conditioning accounts for up to 70% of household electricity use in the Gulf, and across the Middle East, the amount of energy used to cool spaces increased fivefold from 1990 to 2016, according to the World Bank. Air conditioners run almost non-stop — an estimated 250 days or more per year in households and daily in most commercial and office buildings — to shield residents from the region’s scorching temperatures. The constant hum of machines and brush of chilled air have become as much a part of everyday life in the Gulf as the dust that settles on sidewalks and parked cars.

During her research in Bahrain, some told Koheji that they prefer their homes to be cool enough to wear sweaters and sleep under quilts year-round. One woman admitted to sometimes using a portable heater to keep from freezing at work. “Low temperatures have become status symbols in the Arabian Peninsula,” said Gökçe Günel, a professor of anthropology at Rice University, who studies clean technology infrastructure in the Gulf.

Recent investments in renewables include Qatar’s World Cup solar farm, two more solar plants inaugurated in the nation earlier this year and one of the world’s largest single-site solar parks — stretching across an area greater than that of Manhattan — in the UAE that is expected to be fully operational by 2030. Saudi Arabia and the UAE’s rush to grab land across Africa for carbon offsetting projects has garnered the nickname “The New Scramble for Africa” among environmental advocates and Western media.

But these efforts have drawn criticism for their power to greenwash, rather than reduce emissions. To critics, Gulf nations seem less interested in a true transition away from fossil fuels than they are in laundering their petrodollars and reputations, while maintaining their positions at the center of the global energy regime. Indeed, the region’s governments appear committed to expanding oil production as long as there is demand. Or, as Abdulaziz bin Salman, Saudi Arabian Minister of Energy and member of the royal family, vowed back in 2021, “every molecule of hydrocarbon will come out.”

For Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE — all particularly concerned with their international reputations — participating in the popular discourse of environmentalism has translated into power on the world stage. During COP28, the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference, host city Dubai dazzled attendees with images of its planned investments in renewables. Meanwhile, COP28 President Sultan Al Jaber, who heads the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, allegedly leveraged his position to pursue close to $100 billion in oil and gas deals on the side.

The investments in renewables also serve a purpose at home, where the region’s rulers are facing diminishing faith in their power to stave off the effects of global warming and ensure the uninterrupted flow of subsidized fuel, electricity and water that their subjects have come to expect. One 2017 public opinion survey on climate change in the GCC nations found that 80% of respondents feared the current approach to economic development in the region was unsustainable. That’s a problem because “being able to secure consumption amongst your population is how you secure legitimacy,” Christian Henderson, a lecturer at the Netherlands’ Leiden University, told me. Henderson’s research concerns the political ecology of the Middle East. The Gulf’s delicate social contract, which has kept royal families in power since the end of the colonial era, is under threat as the globe teeters on the brink of climate disaster.

A Manufactured Future?

As the Gulf warms, some local architects are drawing inspiration from the past to prepare for the future. Over the past few decades, the courtyard homes of the pre-British period and the insulated walls that originated millennia ago have made a limited comeback. Some designers have begun experimenting with positioning buildings to maximize shade and foregoing glass in sun-facing facades.

In Salmiya, not far from Kuwait City, AGi Architects, a firm with offices in Spain and Kuwait, built a 21st-century wind tower in 2017. The striking 12-unit apartment block’s hollow center offers the benefits of shaded courtyards on a vertical scale, while an indoor-outdoor pool on the first floor lowers the temperature of air entering the building before it flows upward and cools internal terraces. Located on the south side of the granite-faced tower, the stairs and elevators insulate the building’s residential quarters from the sun. Typically, families resting on their terraces enjoy temperatures more than 14 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than those outside — without mechanical cooling.

Other architects like Noorihan Abdulmageed are pursuing new methods, such as building homes 5 to 10 meters (or roughly 16 to 32 feet) underground with sunken courtyards that use the Earth as a natural cooling agent. Abdulmageed used local weather and climate data to determine that building at that depth could reduce the heat inside homes by up to 13 degrees Fahrenheit. Other thoughtful design choices, such as locating the heat-producing kitchen and laundry room along an outermost wall on an underground level and incorporating natural ventilation, could reduce the number of months mechanical cooling is needed annually by at least half, according to the architect’s calculations. For now, her homes exist only as two prototypes designed and tested in Bahrain.

A wider adoption of sustainable building practices like these will require letting go of foreign professional standards that experts argue are not sensitive to the region’s needs but are still in fashion. Local engineers continue to use cooling standards from the American Society for Heating, Refrigerating and Air Conditioning Engineers, while architects refer to green certification systems developed by the U.S. Green Building Council or Britain’s Building Research Establishment.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE have tried developing standards of their own. But the efforts remain underfunded and underappreciated, Sharp said: “If they would put as much attention into developing their own frameworks as they do [into] building the highest skyscraper, then the region would be in a much better place.”

Recently, Sharp and colleagues argued in a paper that achieving more “climate-just” cities in the Gulf requires investing in pragmatic interventions, such as developing building standards or even something as simple as installing bus shelters along transport routes. Instead, Gulf rulers have turned to futuristic megaprojects promising limitless supplies of energy, water and air-conditioned comfort.

The most famous among these is Saudi Arabia’s Neom, in northwestern Tabuk Province at the northern tip of the Red Sea. The $500-billion so-called gigaproject was announced in 2017 as part of the nation’s Vision 2030 development plan. At 26,500 square kilometers, or more than 10,200 square miles, it is larger than Bahrain, Kuwait as well as Qatar, and includes over a dozen planned regions with high-end amenities and housing for over nine million people. An island resort destination with a yacht club, golf course, and 86-berth marina, called Sindalah, became the first of Neom’s planned developments to open in October 2024. Another of Neom’s planned regions, a mountain resort dubbed Trojena, is set to host the Asian Winter Games in 2029, welcoming skiers and parka-clad spectators to its artificial slopes in the desert.

Developers have promised that Neom will run on renewables and that one of its cities, called The Line — comprising a pair of 500-meter-tall glass-faced skyscrapers stretching over 170 kilometers (or nearly 106 miles) through the desert — will be car-free and carbon-neutral. But to fund what is supposed to be a green project, Saudi Arabia is relying on continued oil revenues, drawing criticism for creating what journalist Lyse Mauvais called “a global showroom of false climate solutions” in an article on climate disinformation for Germany’s Heinrich Böll Stiftung.

A decade before Saudi Arabia began to sell the world on Neom, Abu Dhabi announced a car-free, zero-carbon metropolis meant to welcome about 50,000 residents and as many as 60,000 commuters who would move between high-tech office blocks on a 100-station public transportation system. Called Masdar City, the project was met with a buzz of excitement and fawning coverage. But after breaking ground in 2008, the global economic slowdown and shifting government priorities meant development sputtered out before most plans could be realized.

Today, Masdar City feels like a ghost town. Students enrolled at the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, part of the development completed before construction stalled, trudge across plots of desert land and past unfinished office buildings to get to class. The city never succeeded in zeroing out its fossil fuel emissions. Critics eye Neom, wondering if it will meet the same fate.

The Stakes

The air-conditioned environments of Masdar City and The Line are supposed utopian oases set against “Mad Max”-like images of a dystopian near future of extreme heat and drought beyond their walls. “These cosmopolitan experts coming together inside these hubs is one imagination,” Günel told me when I asked her about the projects. “But what’s happening outside these spaces, you have this vision of landscapes devastated by climate change.”

The other side of the 21st-century Gulf is manifested in neighborhoods like Jleeb al-Shuyoukh, one of the most congested areas in Kuwait City, where migrant laborers reside in informal shelters with few protections from the searing heat and increasingly common extreme weather events, such as flash floods and dust storms. Many of the migrants who live here, and in neighborhoods like it across the GCC nations, are from poorer parts of the Arab world, South Asia, Southeast Asia and Africa. They immigrate with hopes of earning a sliver of Gulf oil wealth but often find themselves on the front lines of the climate crisis instead, as they labor on precarious contracts in the region’s construction, manufacturing or service industries.

Traveling through Jleeb al-Shuyoukh in 2023, AlSaad said she saw the carcasses of stray dogs that had succumbed to the heat scattered among housing that resembled “a bombed-out village.” Working environments for many of the region’s migrant laborers are no better, and labor and immigration laws in Kuwait and across the GCC nations preclude many from exercising their most basic rights, including accessing healthcare, changing jobs, driving a vehicle or migrating with their families.

Rather than shedding the hierarchies etched in the urban landscape with the steel and concrete of the Gulf’s mid-20th-century transformation, the region’s rulers have allowed the segregated labor camps of colonial oil towns to be transfigured into ever-expanding slums on the outskirts of their gleaming cityscapes. Today, the Gulf is the world’s most unequal region, according to the Centre for Economic Policy Research.

The juxtaposition of wealth and death is most stark among the region’s megaprojects, where the bodies of migrant workers are marshaled as if they are raw material for construction work. More than 21,000 migrant workers, primarily from India, Bangladesh and Nepal, are believed to have died working on Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 development projects since 2017, according to a documentary investigation by British broadcaster ITV.

More than 6,500 workers from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka died making Qatar’s 2022 World Cup dream come true, according to the Guardian. Human Rights Watch has warned that the upcoming World Cup in Saudi Arabia could cost thousands more lives. Regionwide, as many as 10,000 migrant workers reportedly die annually due to overwork, abuse and extreme heat. Those who survive experience a slew of harmful health conditions, including cardiovascular, respiratory and kidney diseases, as well as diabetes and stress-related mental health conditions.

Those invited to inhabit the region’s hypermodern safe havens are expected to make a different sort of sacrifice. Günel, who detailed the development of Abu Dhabi’s Masdar City in “Spaceship in the Desert,” found that experts charged with administering the space often positioned the achievement of a green future opposite the promise of personal freedoms and equality. She called this impulse one of “technocratic dictatorship,” wherein scientists and engineers promised to protect an in-group from existential threats as long as they give up certain rights. “It was almost like a compromise had to be made in order to have these utopian spaces exist within these dystopian landscapes,” Günel told me. “That compromise was the possibility of collective decision-making or any kind of democratic norms.”

Air conditioning has made today’s life, this life, possible in the Gulf. But some have begun to question whether the cost and its vision are worth the tradeoffs — might there be a way to make a new and different Gulf world?

Creating a world that is less unequal and better prepared for the challenges of climate change will require balancing mechanical cooling with a re-embrace of millennia-old knowledge about life in the region and recognizing air conditioning technologies for what they have long represented: A tool for those who seek to divide and rule over both man and nature.

Nour Alsabagh contributed research to this story.