The emirate of Dubai has long been synonymous with aggressive economic development, promoting the design and construction of numerous extravagant architectural landmarks. Branded as “the city of superlatives,” Dubai has been the topic of numerous books and articles documenting its humble origins and its journey from rags to riches.1 In Showpiece City, Todd Reisz provides a comprehensive and detailed account of Dubai’s urbanization from the 1950s to the present. He utilizes a multifaceted storytelling approach to capture the roles of architecture, politics, economics, and technology in shaping Dubai’s current reality, beginning with its origins as an impoverished British protectorate, one of the Trucial States of the Arabian Peninsula.Although numerous scholars have attempted to elucidate the architectural history of key cities of the Persian Gulf, much of this work has been overly broad or unduly narrow in its subjects of inquiry. For example, Peter Jackson and Anne Coles’s A Windtower House in Dubai focuses on a particular form of architecture, while The Trucial States, by Donald Hawley, and The End of Empire in the Gulf, by Tancred Bradshaw, offer general histories of the United Arab Emirates or the Persian Gulf region at large.2 Yasser Elsheshtawy provides insightful analysis of the region’s urban development in his two books Dubai: Behind an Urban Spectacle and Temporary Cities: Resisting Transience in Arabia, although he places greater emphasis on Dubai’s current condition.3 Reisz’s book is thus a unique and welcome addition to the study of architecture in the Persian Gulf.Reisz relies on archives covering the history of Dubai from the 1950s to the 1980s, in particular photographs, correspondence, articles, and other media in the National Archives at Kew and the British Library. In addition to these sources, he has collected previously undocumented fragments of information as part of what he describes as “a complex and ambiguous field of hints, snapshots, and occasional documents” (17). Reisz’s efforts in this regard are noteworthy: the book offers a wealth of information that otherwise would have been left unrevealed, presenting a carefully composed and relatively unbiased view of Dubai and its historic development.This book offers a valuable, introspective look into how architecture and urban design operated as globalized practices in the Gulf over time, through political changes, shifts in interests, and multiple forms of British representation. Throughout the study, Reisz points to the critical role of British architect John Harris in shaping the city’s architectural and urban development. Although Harris is perhaps best known for the drafting of Dubai’s first town plan, the book sheds new light on his prolonged, albeit intermittent, contributions to the city’s growth during the 1960s and 1970s, when many negotiations took place between Dubai’s leaders and a number of financiers, contractors, consultants, and other architects regarding the proposed timeline and forms envisioned for the city’s development.Chapters 1 through 3 cover the 1950s and reveal the extent to which most of the key forces and events shaping cities remain largely invisible to common observers. In Dubai, for example, the interplay of mutual as well as competing interests among British political agents, the local rulership, and powerful local merchants resulted in a power struggle that in turn contributed to the specific nature of Dubai’s urban development into what would become one of the most prominent cities in the Middle East. A distinctive and early form of urbanity emerged, supported by a reliance on external consultants and guided initially by relatively humble aims, including the prioritization of public sanitation and the provision of basic municipal services. At the same time, and as vividly chronicled in these chapters, emphasis began to be placed on Dubai’s international promotion through new forms of media, such as a video that contributed to both the physical and the conceptual construction of the city’s identity. It was in part this distinct identity that attracted a growing influx of migrants in the 1960s, including traders from Iran as well as workers from India, Pakistan, and other parts of Asia, who sought to take advantage of the emirate’s early oil concessions and the jobs these created. Population growth led to a series of infrastructural improvements centered on Dubai Creek and initiated by the multinational engineering consultants Halcrow and Partners. Such work, as Reisz argues, epitomized the complex forms of multilateral partnerships between governments and private enterprise that would characterize Dubai’s physical development moving forward.Chapters 4 through 6 address Dubai’s accelerated urbanization amid the gradual decline of British influence and the rise of major international oil companies attracted by the potential oil reserves located in proximity to the city. Reisz notes numerous influences here: for example, a flourishing gold trade contributed to Dubai’s transformation into a regional financial center, leading to an increase in the number of regional and international banks maintaining offices in the city. The design evolution of these bank offices, initially housed in a series of humble buildings along the creek before eventually relocating to more extravagant, glass-glazed towers, coincided with the city’s first real estate boom in the late 1950s. Such speculative market activity has become quite common in Dubai over the past fifty years and is indicative of the conflict between regulation and liberalization that became synonymous with Dubai’s early approach to attracting foreign investment. Reisz engages each of these influences in a thorough account of the making of Harris’s Dubai town plan, meticulously describing how the architect’s own perceptions of the region played a role in his transformation of a near wasteland into the foundation of a modern city. Numerous other key development projects in Dubai are also described here, including the multiple expansions of Dubai Creek to enhance its maritime trade capacity and the development of Al Maktoum Hospital during the 1960s. This wave of development required a level of financing that was initially difficult to secure, and Dubai was nearly pushed to the verge of “collapsing in its own frenzy” multiple times (82). This history offers a surprising comparison to—or perhaps a sobering warning about—the city’s current impulsive, risk-taking reality.Over the course of the 1970s, as Reisz discusses in chapters 7, 8, and 9, Dubai’s leaders invested in more advanced health care facilities, shopping centers, and municipal services, as well as an international airport, all of which were aimed at attracting more investors to what was described as the “Pearl of the Arabian Coast” (161). Harris was again commissioned, this time to produce an expanded city plan to accommodate Dubai’s growth, and this section of the book introduces readers to his efforts to maintain the historical essence of the city despite increasing pressure to modernize in ways that privileged models of economic growth dependent on foreign investment. With the formation of the United Arab Emirates on 2 December 1971, Dubai gained a new level of international recognition and new opportunities for financing, which drove further aggressive economic and physical growth. These chapters make an important contribution by chronicling the social disruption that paralleled the city’s unprecedented expansion, including the forced reduction of high-quality municipal services as well as the failure to plan or provide for vital civic and recreational facilities such as schools, fire stations, and cinemas. Over time, such shortfalls produced a situation in which, as Reisz notes, Dubai risked “fast losing the simplicity and harmony which used to be one of its main attractions” (194).The book concludes with an overview of the design and construction of the World Trade Center, one of Dubai’s most iconic landmarks and yet another design contribution to the city by Harris. Completed in the late 1970s as the tallest tower in the Arab world at the time, the project embodied Dubai’s complex international character—a building that was a match for the showy architectural developments taking place in other so-called global cities, such as New York and Tokyo, while also aiming to address a basic need of the city by providing its first dedicated exhibition space. The honorary opening of the building by Queen Elizabeth II provides a poetic end to the book, marking a shift in British influence over the emirate from a relationship of complete protection-based governance to more balanced political representation and, eventually, economic advocacy.Ultimately, Showpiece City weaves together political, economic, and social history to create a compelling assessment of Dubai’s architectural and urban development. In tracing the city’s history from its origins as one of several undeveloped Trucial States under British governance into a metropolis internationally associated with rapid growth and change, the book provides a helpful overview of the development of Dubai’s key architectural landmarks and its first town plan, and should appeal to all readers with an interest in how this Middle Eastern city achieved its present, glamorous iteration. The book’s reliance on a wealth of previously unexamined primary and secondary sources extracted from British archives is its major strength and perhaps also its primary weakness, insofar as its narrative may be overly influenced by the views of various British agents involved in the city’s growth. One wishes that the text provided more equitable acknowledgment and discussion of local efforts, particularly the contributions made by the members of the emirate’s leadership who were primarily responsible for transforming an urban ideal into physical reality. Nevertheless, this book effectively chronicles the history of Dubai’s architecture, its plans, and the many entanglements and associations that both facilitated and impeded its development over time.