Port proximities: severance and re-linking in UAE urban heritage

Introduction This paper proposes a conceptual and analytical framework that moves beyond existing heritage categorizations and regeneration strategies to explain what happens when historic port environments are structurally detached from the maritime, social, and economic systems that originally sustained them. These areas, defined here as “port proximities,” were historically embedded urban interfaces where maritime economies, everyday life, and heritage were closely intertwined. However, the relocation and modernization of port infrastructure have created a specific form of transformation called severance, characterized by deliberate, structural rupture and temporal abruptness that severs these historical connections and leaves behind spatial fragments that no longer serve their original functions. The study asks: How do port proximities experience distinct forms of severance, and what mechanisms of re-linking operate across material, commercial, and narrative dimensions? What is preserved and what remains irreversibly lost through these re-linking processes? Methods Through a comparative landscape deconstruction of five UAE case studies (Old Dubai, Heart of Sharjah, MIZA, Al Jazeera Al Hamra, and Umm Al Quwain Heritage District), the study identifies distinct typologies of severance and examines how these sites are subsequently reintegrated into the urban fabric through three interconnected layers: material/spatial (physical structures and spatial organization), commercial/economic (economic activities and revenue models), and narrative/experiential (stories, meanings, and visitor experiences). Results and discussion The analysis demonstrates that re-linking is not a neutral process of restoration but a selective reconstruction shaped by contemporary economic, cultural, and institutional agendas. While these three layers collectively produce the appearance of heritage continuity, they simultaneously reconfigure heritage under new logics, obscuring the loss of operational systems, labor practices, and community-based social structures that originally defined these environments. By positioning the UAE as an accelerated model of coastal transformation, the study reveals what heritage regeneration preserves, what it transforms, and what it inevitably leaves behind, shifting heritage discourse from asking how to regenerate toward asking what regeneration cannot achieve.