Competitiveness agendas exacerbate unsustainable development tendencies, compromising future growth prospects.
Tests indicated that the proposed model did work and the study area showed different development tendencies for different desertification levels.
To this end, approaches which would make it possible to research interconnection between global processes and trends with regional and national innovation-based development tendencies become of crucial importance.
In the case of settlements, which became important centres of political power, the extensive growth and subsequent exposure to new construction materials and techniques in addition to increasing top-down political intervention led to first new development tendencies.
These areas have often been compared with the Western concept of "edge cities", although in this paper we argue that this "imported" concept, in practice, bears little resemblance to the actual development tendencies in China.
Since the Gulf region is a very particular case that integrates typical development tendencies from both the Global North and the Global South (Salama and Wiedmann 2013), this paper is based on studying housing transformations in four Gulf cities, namely Doha, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Manama.
