This storybook traces the quiet disappearance of one of Dubai’s early worker settlements, Al Qusais Colony. Built under the vision of Sheikh Rashid to house the city’s first waves of migrant laborers, the colony once stood as a symbol of aspiration and community. Between 2003 and 2009, as Dubai accelerated into a new era of urban expansion, these neighborhoods were steadily dismantled to make way for modern infrastructure.
Through this visual narrative, the photographs capture the tension between memory and modernization—the traces of lives lived amid walls soon to vanish, and the transformation of a landscape shaped by progress.
