Extrastatecraft

In Dubai, workers can call a Ministry of Labor hotline to register a complaint. The Ministry of Labor can pressure a contractor to make restitution, or it can deport either the laborers or the contractors.

There is Dubai Internet City, which opened in 2000 (the first to mix the IT campus with the free-trade zone), Dubai Health Care City, Dubai Maritime City, Dubai Silicon Oasis, Dubai Knowledge Village, Dubai Techno Park, Dubai Media City, Dubai Outsourcing Zone, Dubai Industrial City, Dubai Textile Village, and Dubai International City, among many others.

The urban world that the sociologist Manuel Castells described in The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring, and the Urban Regional Process (1989), and the world that he and Peter Hall described in Technopoles of the World: The Making of Twenty-First-Century Industrial Complexes (1994), was, in part, the world of zone urbanism—what Castells called a space of information “flows.” The zone was not an accumulation of buildings, but urban space as the product of more formulaic drivers. Digital capital created the landscapes of logistics and IT within which, as Kevin Kelly has written, cars were “chips with wheels” and airplanes were “chips with wings.”