Dubai Neighborhood Paves Way for Urban Design Preservation

In a book brimming with photos, architectural renderings and maps, Peter Jackson, an architect, and Anne Coles, a social geographer, examine the origins, flowering, decline and restoration of the famed Dubai wind towers, focusing on the homes in the historical al-Bastakiya neighborhood. Windtower is both a cautionary tale for cities that heedlessly obliterate their early beginnings in a rush to modernize and a road map on how cities can preserve and revitalize their historical hearts to make the past an essential part of their vibrant future.

Coles became aware of al-Bastakiya in 1969 while studying summer migration patterns in the emirates. Several years later, Jackson, a student architect, arrived in Dubai, and Coles asked him to make a drawing of a wind tower for the Dubai Museum. The single drawing evolved into a monograph, issued in 1975, that detailed the Bukhash family home in al-Bastakiya. When Jackson returned to Dubai in 2002, and with the encouragement of some neighborhood families, the authors produced a book in 2007 on the district, adding chapters on additional homes, the history of the neighborhood, construction techniques and an engineering analysis of how wind towers work.

This update of the 2007 edition adds a chapter on the pre-oil, trading and merchant history of Dubai, expands the engineering analysis to examine how the millennia-old science behind wind towers could spur contemporary applications and considers the legacy and impact of al-Bastakiya on local and regional urban design.

The story of how a traditional home-cooling system became a beloved cultural landmark begins with the arrival of merchant families, primarily from Persia, in the early 20th century. These merchant families brought the tradition of multidirectional wind towers with them and built a neighborhood of courtyard homes made of sea stone and gypsum, topped by wind towers (often ornate) and featuring glass fanlights, elaborate wooden doors and carved ventilation screens and balustrades.

The core of the book details seven significant wind-tower homes and the multigenerational families who built and lived in them. The families' stories reveal the vanished life of a close-knit community and reflect the social and commercial history of Dubai.

As its economy boomed in the 1970s, Dubai's gaze was fixed on the future, and old-fashioned reminders of its past fell into decline. Even as waves of demolition swept through in the 1980s and 1990s, nascent efforts argued for preservation. The tide turned in 2005, when a program was launched to reconstruct buildings and restore others in the al-Bastakiya and al-Shindagha neighborhoods.

The legacy of al-Bastakiya offers lessons for the renewal of historical neighborhoods. Drawing on the authors' decades of original research, Windtower is a love letter to the old heart of Dubai and a substantial achievement.