This fascinating book appears in conjunction with an exhibition at Jameel Arts Centre in Dubai that reveals and illuminates archival images taken between 1976 and 1979. The photographers, Stephen Finch and Mark Harris, did not intend to make pictures for commercial, documentary, or artistic purposes, but rather record visual notes of urban life in order to create designs for the city’s future. Conceived and written by Todd Reisz, an expert on the UAE’s urban transformations, the book offers an intriguing account of Dubai on the cusp of monumental change, an insignificant patch of empty sand, driven by human invention to become the exceptional nexus of architecture we know today.

224 pages, 17 x 24 cm, hardcover, Khatt Books (Amsterdam).