In 2015, Egyptian general-turned-president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi an- nounced that Cairo – Egypt’s capital for the past millennium – would be replaced by a (still) unnamed location 35 kilometers to the east that is for now being referred to just as “The New Capital”. Over the past year, I have been visiting the still under construction capital and talking to lead people in the project in an attempt to understand what exactly will become of Cairo after the move. The New Capital is being marketed marketed as a Dubai; in an interview, the chairman of the project asked me “wouldn’t you want to live in a Dubai?” Unlike the UAE, Egypt is a country of 100 million people, has a shadow economy and just took out a $12 billion IMF loan that halved the currencys value, came with stipulated subsidy cuts, and income stagnation. The Egyptian government has recently announced “four foundations” for its strategic plan of which the New Capital is a part: strengthening national security, restructuring the public sector, spreading urbanization, and utilizing human capital. Notably absent in this formulation is the historic “sha‘b” or popular masses of Egypt to which legitimacy of the state has been linked, at least theoretically in the past. What does it mean to move the administrative core of the Egyptian state and to empty key squares and neighborhoods in which the revolutionary events were centered, without any reference to the Egyptian masses? In this paper, I explore the question of what it means for a government to plan urban futures without actually thinking of “urban majorities”. I use plans of the new city; interviews conducted with policy makers and civil servants; and my own background having grown up in Cairo, to open up that question. If the future of urban theory should learn from everyday experimentations of urban life, what happens when life is not part of the plan?

In 2014, Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Ruler of Dubai and Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) decided that the happiness of the people of Dubai would become a new focal point for governance. This was unveiled as part of the “Dubai Plan 2021”, a governmental strategic development framework laying out the intended future of Dubai, imagined as a world-class metropolis and a global center and destination . Dubai Plan 2021 is mapped according to six “pillars”, each representing a key focus sector for government action over the next seven years. The first and most important pillar is the “Happy, Creative and Empowered people” of Dubai. I ask, who are “the people of Dubai” hailed by the government’s discourse and policies, and how collective is this fantasy of happiness? Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s theorization of happiness within multicultural societies , I analyze the political and affective work that the discourse of happiness performs in Dubai, a city that prides itself on being the home of over 200 nationalities while deploying an extremely strict federal migration control regime to govern its population. My argument is that the government of Dubai mobilizes a discourse of (neoliberal) happiness, where the image of a happy multicultural society displaces the harm brought upon by the structural racial and classed hierarchy – a legacy of British colonial presence in the region – that this city-state’s social, economic and political organization is predicated on. To do so, I critically examine the policies laid out in Dubai Plan 2021, reading them in light of existing literature that have analyzed how Dubai/UAE (and GCC countries more broadly) manage their populations according to multiple logics of citizenship that produce groups of differentiated, racialized, gendered, and classed subjects. Focusing on an underrepresented case study, which exposes the ways in which governmentality operates on an affective register, I offer an original contribution that holds potential for valuable insights on Dubai/the UAE as well as subsequent research in the fields of Gulf Studies and Middle Eastern Studies.