In the Arab Gulf states, the overwhelming majority of the urban built environment has been constructed since 1950 – meaning settlements were largely built for cars, instead of being retrofitted for them. This, when combined with the influence of post-World War II planning, means that a significant percentage of land in Gulf metropolitan areas is low density, resembling what is globally imagined as “suburban.” Despite rapidly increased use of towers and apartment blocks since the 1990s, this suburban image persists throughout media coverage of, and the academic literature on, the region. Unsurprisingly, much commentary on the desirability of Gulf urban landscapes has depended upon which widely available epistemology about the “suburbs” differently positioned actors subscribed to – e.g., a realm of spacious infrastructure functionality or, alternatively, one of stifling, auto-dependent gendered isolation. By drawing on the presenter’s coded archive of more than 1000 newspaper stories from the 1940s onward concerning economic development in the Gulf (drawn from both inside and outside the region), as well as participant observation of contemporary Gulf landscapes and their diverse residents, this paper analyzes how images of sprawling auto-centric development have fed, and sometimes redirected, attempts to locate the Gulf as an “Other” type of urban space, subject to “market Orientalism,” where in emerging markets are imagined as slightly “off” copies of what is most desirable. The Gulf’s citizen-majority, low-density, urban zones – which signaled the “inevitable” coming of “progress” in the 1950s – have since not only come to be seen as a sign of the region’s lack of readiness to accept “urban best practice,” but also, the seemingly opposite position: a sign of the region’s full acceptance of individualized and hierarchalized global neo-liberal consumption.