Will Abu Dhabi’s municipal plan to “beautify” old souqs forever alter its cultural flair?
Not long ago I described my hometown in Virginia, where humble wooden houses were replaced with giant McMansions. In that same town, there was an old woman who sold ice-cream out of a tiny little house on the outskirts of Great Falls. Her name was Thelma. For a few months towards the end of my painful high-school days, Thelma and I smoked cigarettes and drank coffee all day, scooped her famous ice-cream into cones, and prepared dry ham and cheese sandwiches. These days I neither smoke nor eat ham, and Thelma died years ago, but that little shop – like Abu Dhabi’s souqs – was an institution. Decline of “mom & pops” However, business shrank as the area became increasingly popular among a wealthy elite. The surrounding shops became bigger and fancier and Thelma’s quaint but ramshackle place faded into oblivion. This trend circulated throughout the United States. “Mom & Pops” have since been replaced with franchises and Walmarts to such an extent that many American towns today are defined
