key: cord-0047647-p89h152p
authors: Chandra, Uday; Promodh, Irene
title: A Divided City in a Time of Pandemic: Dispatches from Doha
date: 2020-06-22
journal: City Soc (Wash)
DOI: 10.1111/ciso.12310
sha: b4d492225972c7633fcd41c6965f88281ae509ec
doc_id: 47647
cord_uid: p89h152p

nan

The arrival of in Doha at the end of February was met with a sense of nonchalance that soon gave way to fear and confusion. Few appeared perturbed when a handful of Qatari citizens were evacuated from Iran and quarantined in a plush hotel in West Bay. By mid-March, however, malls, restaurants, banks, and public transport shut down as did flights into Doha.

Social gatherings were prohibited as mosques, public parks, and beaches closed. A part of the Industrial Area was completely closed off. Doctors and employers were required by law to report positive tests or face fines of up to 200,000 riyals (USD 55,000) or imprisonment. Fourteen citizens who had contracted the virus during their stay in Iran had signed pledges to selfquarantine at home, but when they failed to do so, state television named and shamed them before arresting nine of them. While white-collar "expats" began referring to Doha as "home" as they chose to stay behind in lavish employer-provided apartments, blue-collar "migrants" faced a new dilemma: to go to work and potentially ruin one's physical health and long-term economic prospects or not go to work and deplete any savings to remit home and face deprivation and hunger. In late April, the government introduced a new app named Ehtaraz that used QR color

With the onset of COVID-19, access to masks, gloves, and sanitizers as well as the ability to distance oneself from others took on an uneven distribution across Doha's spatial divides. In the Industrial Area, migrant workers expressed concerns over poor standards of hygiene and sanitation in overcrowded living quarters and communal dining spaces where social-distancing and mask-wearing norms were flouted routinely on the grounds of being impractical. Although supermarkets were stocked with masks and hand sanitizers, most migrant workers, temporarily unemployed and confined to their residential compounds, found it difficult to spare 40 riyals for 20 masks on salaries of 800 riyals/month (QQ1, interview, 7 May, 2020). Given the impossibility of social-distancing in their dormitories, purchasing and wearing masks also seemed redundant to many (QQ2, interview, 7 May, 2020). In addition, many were not allowed by their employers to leave their living quarters. As such, even for those who could afford masks, their confinement to their Industrial Area compounds prevented them from going out to buy them (QQ2, interview, 7

May, 2020). This was effectively a part of the city that has been marked "red" as either infected or susceptible to infection, though no such official zoning norms exist. By contrast, the West Bay waterfront district and the Pearl Doha, inhabited mostly by whitecollar expats and citizens, operated as a de facto green zone. Mask-wearing residents in their branded sports gear went about their daily exercise regime, whether cycling, running, or walking.

Set apart from the rest of the city as "safe" or infection-free spaces, these residential districts served as ideal spaces for families and friends to gather during the pandemic even when they violated official regulations in place. It was not uncommon to hear complaints about an influx of "outsiders" into these "safe" spaces in the evenings. The occasional police patrol served as a reminder of the state's presence, but as long as someone wore masks and, later, showed their "green" status on the Ehtaraz app, they could move freely throughout these spaces. Residents in these upscale residential neighbourhoods were more concerned with their privacy than by the On the outskirts of Doha, the underbelly of the thriving city was revealed. Blue-collar migrants housed in Industrial Area's Asian City seemingly operated according to a different set of norms from the city's wealthier denizens. Social-distancing was more or less impossible in workers' accommodations that housed typically four to five, sometimes even eight to ten males, in a single dormitory. Shared bathrooms, densely-crowded dining spaces, and the constant inflow and outflow of residents working at construction sites greatly exacerbated the risk of contagion. From first-hand accounts of migrants in Asian City, we learned that, contrary to government statements, no-cost gloves, masks, and sanitizers were largely unavailable for their use. Some construction workers wore masks and gloves they had received at their worksites in their living quarters and dining spaces (QQ1, interview, 7 May, 2020). For those without jobs, however, the lack of masks, gloves, sanitizers, and social-distancing in overcrowded dormitories translated into poor sanitary standards. Not only did this state of affairs result in a rapid spread of infection in the neighborhood, but it greatly increased anxieties over lives and livelihoods. These anxieties were heightened further with the quarantining of a part of the Industrial Area, an area that was already out of bounds for the rest of Doha's denizens. The spatial politics of the city thus began to reveal itself in the city's most densely populated and affected neighborhood. Construction sites across the city were also states of exception within Doha's quarantine regime.

Each day throughout the pandemic, hundreds of construction workers were transported in overcrowded buses from the Industrial Area to construction sites across the city. In these buses, neither masks nor social-distancing norms were visible, much to the dismay and chagrin of the workers. On their work sites, however, construction workers were, as required by the government and construction firms, provided face masks and issued social-distancing guidelines.

The responsibility for following these guidelines, of course, rested wholly on the workers themselves. In hot weather, it was not unusual to spot workers with masks lowered or without masks altogether along highways or outside construction sites. Construction sites themselves, uninhabited and still in scaffolds, were relatively isolated work spaces from their urban surroundings. In pursuit of jobs and a steady income amidst mass layoffs across the city, construction workers effectively found themselves placed outside Doha's quarantine regime with its performative politics of visible mask-wearing and social-distancing. At the same time, their state of exception ensured that Qatar's high-modernist architectural projects went ahead as planned, particularly in preparation for the 2022 FIFA World Cup. popular among Qatar's expats and citizens, adapted to the new circumstances by advertising their unique healthy and safety measures, including contactless, safe delivery across the city. Talabat also no longer featured primarily fast food and medium-range restaurants, but became a portal to the city's fine dining scene. In turn, the city's five-star hotels and independent high-end restaurants became increasingly dependent on the gig economy, most notably apps such as Talabat, to stay afloat financially. Migrant workers picking up and dropping off food and groceries gradually became the most visible presence on Doha's streets in March and April. By contrast, Uber drivers grew restive without a regular flow of passengers and their earnings plummeted with every passing week. Our ethnographic data suggest that Uber drivers' earnings dipped below 100 riyals (approx. USD 27) per day, somewhere between half to a third of their typical levels. Many began to work shifts of 14 to 16-hours after the arrival of COVID-19, though passengers grew increasingly fearful of the closed, contagion-prone spaces of Uber taxis.

Some drivers reported that their earnings peaked between 2 and 4 AM daily when passengers, particularly air hostesses and other cabin crew residing in West Bay and the Pearl, travelled to or from the airport. Both food delivery workers and Uber drivers, who routinely breach the spatial divides of the city in the course of their work, now found themselves the only ones doing so in a time of pandemic. Although both were seen by the city's wealthier residents as sources of infection, the effects on these two sets of workers differed radically. While Uber drivers grew anxious as the virus threatened their uncertain livelihoods by inducing a dearth of passengers, food delivery workers, whose numbers grew during the pandemic, risked daily exposure to the virus during their itinerant work, which, in fact, further reinforced Doha's spatial divides.

In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault (1995: 195-200) contrasted the pre-modern state logic of excluding lepers from medieval European cities to the modern state's "panopticism" with regard to plague victims within quarantined urban spaces. For Foucault, the birth of the modern state was tied inextricably to the rise of a new disciplinary mechanism by which power flowed through multiple capillaries that suffused all individuals as state subjects. Our dispatches from Doha during the COVID-19 pandemic urge us to think with Foucault and, at the same time, rethink the modalities of power at work in our times. On the one hand, as we see in Doha, statist logics of exclusion and quadrillage can happily coexist with each other in the time of a pandemic. On the other hand, in a digital age, modern state power in Qatar, as elsewhere, is much less omniscient and all-encompassing than what Foucault proposed.

Doha's spatial divides long predated the arrival of COVID-19. Indeed, these divides are hardwired into the city's makeover from a colonial port city into a twenty-first century metropolis. Under a regime of authoritarian high modernism, the separation of the residential neighbourhoods of the well-to-do from the working poor is as striking as their dependence on each other. In this social setting, the liminality generated by a virus threatened to efface the city's social divides as white-collar expats faced the prospect of ending up in the same quarantine facilities as blue-collar migrants. Over time, however, the virus seemingly adapted itself to the city and effectively reinforced its spatial divides as much as their mutual dependence. Social exclusion and disciplining thus came to coexist with each other in much the same way as the city's diverse residents. The hybridity of modern state power in Doha mirrors by the mélange of

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