Apartheid Urbanism in the Middle East; A Feminist Critique of The Urban Artificial Intelligence

An alarming number of cities in the middle east are susceptible to systematic violence against women and ethnic differences. How AI facilitates these hegemonic ideological goals and how oppressive regimes use corporate and state digital data sets (that traditionally, reinforce gender biases) to design exclusive urban environments; subjected to surveillance, political control, ethnic separation and in extreme cases, ethnic cleansing. This paper is an interdisciplinary work that looks at the principle of apartheid urbanism through a feminist lens by criticising the use of digital urbanism in the middle east for maintaining separation and exercising control over the urban population. In so doing, the paper will look at three case studies as follows: the use of urban software agents against the female body amidst the struggles for democratic rights and liberation in today’s Iran, the “smart city” project in UAE amidst the crisis of labour exploitation, and the Israel’s AI urbanism in Gaza Strip amidst the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It aims at showing how oppressive systems create fear and repression through data-driven digital apparatuses. Using a feminist lens, the paper concludes that digital urbanism under the rule of apartheid regimes can dictate specific functions in public spaces, handle uncertainty where intense and manifold human activities occur, and separate/marginalise/remove different ethnicities. This is to say that governments, corporations, startups and thinktanks in the middle east govern digital services in an anticipatory manner that proliferates control and surveillance over the future of urban conditions too.