Sheikh Mohammed Centre for Cultural Understanding and its Impact on Dubai Visitors

May 31, 2024
16 min read

Updated: 2 days ago

Author: Abdulla Bin Eisa Nasser Alserkal

Affiliation: ISB Management Training Institute

Received 7 March 2024; revised 12 April 2024; accepted 96 May 2024; available online 31 May 2024; version of record 31 May 2024.

Volume 1, December 2024, (10000)

https://doi.org/10.65326/u7y566814

Abstract

Dubai receives one of the largest and most culturally heterogeneous visitor flows in the world, yet the encounters that shape how those visitors come to understand Emirati and wider Gulf-Arab life remain only loosely theorised. This study examines the Sheikh Mohammed Centre for Cultural Understanding (SMCCU) as a deliberately engineered site of host–guest contact and asks how such an institution can plausibly influence the intercultural understanding of visitors. Adopting an interpretive qualitative case-study design, the analysis synthesises peer-reviewed scholarship, institutional and policy documentation, and reputable reportage, and reads this material against intergroup-contact theory and the authenticity–experience tradition in tourism research. Rather than reporting visitor statistics, the study advances an analytical account of the mechanisms through which structured cultural programming may shift attitudes. Five testable propositions are developed, linking the structural quality of contact, host facilitation as a credibility signal, perceived authenticity, embodied and commensal participation, and the institutional scaling of contact toward destination image and national soft-power objectives. The contribution is twofold: it extends intergroup-contact theory into the under-examined setting of institutionalised cultural tourism in the Gulf, and it specifies the boundary conditions—particularly the tension between curated accessibility and authenticity—under which such programmes are likely to succeed or fail.

Keywords: cultural tourism; intercultural understanding; intergroup contact; authenticity; heritage interpretation; Dubai; soft power

1. Introduction

Cultural tourism has shifted from the passive consumption of sights toward the active pursuit of understanding, in which travellers seek meaningful contact with the people and practices of the places they visit (Richards, 2018). This shift gives particular significance to destinations whose appeal rests on encounter rather than spectacle. Dubai is an instructive case. Its population is overwhelmingly expatriate, its visitor base spans most of the world, and its destination identity has been built on a promise of openness and mobility. The same cosmopolitanism that drives the city’s economy also produces a persistent problem: large numbers of visitors and residents move through Emirati space with little exposure to Emirati cultural life, and intercultural perceptions are often mediated by stereotype rather than acquaintance.

The Sheikh Mohammed Centre for Cultural Understanding (SMCCU) was created to address precisely this gap. Operating from the restored Al Fahidi historical district and working under the motto “Open Doors. Open Minds,” the Centre organises guided heritage walks, mosque visits, question-and-answer sessions with Emirati hosts, and shared traditional meals. In doing so it does something that most cultural attractions do not: it deliberately manufactures sustained, face-to-face contact between hosts and guests for the express purpose of dismantling misunderstanding. This makes the SMCCU a theoretically interesting object. It is, in effect, an institutionalised contact intervention embedded within a commercial tourism economy.

Existing research has examined Dubai’s heritage districts as conserved environments (Boudiaf, 2022) and the emirate’s heritage-tourism strategy as an instrument of recovery and positioning (Nair, 2023), while a broader literature treats Gulf cultural investment as a vehicle of soft power (Krzymowski, 2022). Separately, tourism scholarship has shown that intercultural competence, perceived authenticity, and memorable experience shape how cultural encounters are valued (Fan, Tsaur, Lin, Chang, & Tsai, 2022; Lee, Kim, & Kim, 2024). What is missing is an account that connects these strands: a theorisation of how a single institution, designed to engineer host–guest contact, might convert exposure into understanding, and under what conditions that conversion is likely to hold. The present study addresses this gap by treating the SMCCU as a critical case through which the mechanisms of institutionalised intercultural contact can be specified.

Two questions guide the analysis. First, through what mechanisms can structured cultural programming plausibly influence visitors’ intercultural understanding? Second, what conditions enable or constrain the translation of individual encounters into destination-level and national-level outcomes? The study contributes by extending intergroup-contact theory (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006) into institutionalised Gulf cultural tourism, by reframing descriptive observations about cultural centres as testable theoretical propositions, and by identifying the authenticity–commodification boundary that conditions their effectiveness.

2. Conceptual Background

2.1 Cultural tourism and the quest for understanding

Cultural tourism is now understood less as visitation to cultural sites and more as a relational practice in which tourists pursue learning, connection, and self-transformation (Richards, 2018). This relational turn foregrounds the encounter itself—the exchange between visitor and host—as the locus of value. Intangible cultural heritage, in particular, depends on living transmission: it is enacted through people, performance, and participation rather than fixed in objects (Zhang, 2022). Cuisine illustrates the point clearly, functioning as a dense marker of identity through which destinations communicate who they are and visitors gain entry to a culture (Lin, Marine-Roig, & Llonch-Molina, 2021). Institutions that curate such living encounters therefore occupy a strategically important position in the cultural-tourism system.

2.2 Intercultural contact as a mechanism of attitude change

The most developed explanation of why contact might reduce misunderstanding comes from intergroup-contact theory. A large meta-analytic literature establishes that contact between members of different groups typically lowers prejudice, and that the effect generalises across settings and target groups (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006). Subsequent work clarified the mechanisms—reduced intergroup anxiety, increased knowledge of the out-group, and greater empathy—and showed that Allport’s classic facilitating conditions (equal status, common goals, cooperation, and institutional sanction) strengthen but are not strictly necessary for the effect (Pettigrew, Tropp, Wagner, & Christ, 2011). At the same time, recent reviews caution against treating contact as a guaranteed remedy: effects vary with the quality of contact, are weaker outside optimal conditions, and can reverse when encounters are negative (Tropp, White, Rucinski, & Tredoux, 2022; Paluck, Porat, Clark, & Green, 2021). Tourism is a natural but ambivalent contact arena. Tourist–resident interaction can build mutual understanding, yet its effect is bounded by social distance and the often fleeting, asymmetric nature of the meeting (Su, Spierings, & Hooimeijer, 2023). Whether tourism realises its prejudice-reducing potential depends heavily on how encounters are structured—which is exactly what a cultural-understanding institution sets out to control.

2.3 Competence, mediation, and the role of the host

Contact does not interpret itself. The capacity of a visitor to engage appropriately across cultural difference—intercultural competence—predicts active participation and, through it, memorable cultural experience (Fan et al., 2022). Competence is unevenly distributed, and this is where mediation matters. In heritage settings the guide functions as more than an information source; acting as a credible signal, the guide shapes the quality of the experience and, through experience and satisfaction, downstream loyalty (Alazaizeh, Jamaliah, Alzghoul, & Mgonja, 2024). A knowledgeable host who belongs to the culture being interpreted can lower the anxiety that otherwise inhibits contact and can convert raw exposure into structured understanding. The presence and identity of the facilitator are therefore not incidental features of a programme but central to its causal logic.

2.4 Authenticity and the experiential value of the encounter

How visitors judge an encounter depends on authenticity, a concept tourism research has long distinguished into objective, constructive, and existential forms (Wang, 1999). The decisive insight of recent work is that the felt, existential authenticity of an experience can matter more than the objective authenticity of its setting, and that the relationship between these forms shapes memorability and satisfaction (Lee et al., 2024). In cultural-heritage contexts, perceived authenticity feeds satisfaction through the quality of the experience it enables (Domínguez-Quintero, González-Rodríguez, & Paddison, 2020), and authenticity has been shown to drive revisit intention via memorable experience (Zhou, Chen, & Wu, 2022). Memorable tourism experiences are themselves multidimensional and consequential, linking what happened during a visit to subsequent intentions and behaviour (Kim, Ritchie, & McCormick, 2012; Rasoolimanesh, Seyfi, Rather, & Hall, 2022). For an institution that necessarily curates and simplifies culture for diverse audiences, this body of work poses a sharp question: can a managed encounter feel authentic enough to carry attitudinal weight?

2.5 Cultural understanding, heritage, and soft power in the Gulf

These mechanisms operate within a specific political-economic context. The conservation and presentation of Dubai’s historical districts have reconnected residents and visitors with a curated version of Emirati history, even as questions of technical authenticity and integrity remain unresolved (Boudiaf, 2022). Heritage tourism in the emirate has been actively repackaged as a strategic, recoverable asset (Nair, 2023), and cultural investment across the United Arab Emirates has been read as a deliberate soft-power strategy intended to project a tolerant, modern national image (Krzymowski, 2022). A cultural-understanding centre sits at the intersection of these agendas: it is simultaneously a micro-site of interpersonal contact and a node in a national project of reputation and influence.

2.6 Research gap

Three observations follow. First, intergroup-contact theory offers a powerful account of attitude change but has rarely been applied to institutionalised cultural tourism in the Gulf, where contact is purpose-built rather than incidental. Second, the authenticity–experience literature explains how encounters are valued but is seldom connected to the contact mechanisms that explain why they change minds. Third, work on Gulf heritage and soft power addresses the destination and national levels while leaving the interpersonal mechanism underspecified. The SMCCU is an ideal case for closing these gaps because it deliberately operationalises host–guest contact under conditions—equal-status dialogue, common goals, institutional sanction—that contact theory identifies as decisive. The objective of this study is to integrate these literatures into a coherent, propositional account of how, and under what conditions, an institution of this kind can influence visitor understanding.

3. Research Design and Methods

The study adopts an interpretive qualitative case-study design. This design is appropriate because the research question is explanatory and mechanism-oriented—concerned with how and under what conditions an institution influences understanding—rather than with measuring an effect size. The SMCCU was selected purposively as a critical and illustrative case. It is among the few institutions in the Gulf whose explicit mandate is to engineer sustained host–guest cultural contact, and it therefore exhibits, in concentrated form, the conditions that intergroup-contact theory treats as causally relevant. A critical case allows analytical generalisation to theory: if the proposed mechanisms are plausible anywhere, they should be plausible here, and the conditions that limit them here are likely to limit comparable institutions elsewhere.

The evidentiary base consists of publicly available secondary materials assembled through document analysis. Three source types were used: (i) peer-reviewed scholarship on intercultural contact, authenticity, heritage interpretation, and Gulf tourism; (ii) institutional and policy documentation describing the Centre’s programmes, the surrounding heritage district, and the wider cultural-tourism strategy; and (iii) reputable reportage providing descriptive context on the Centre’s activities. Sources were included when they were verifiable, attributable, and relevant to the case or its theoretical framing, and were excluded when they were anonymous, promotional in nature, or could not be corroborated. Scholarly sources were prioritised for theoretical claims; documentary and reportage sources were used only for descriptive contextual detail and were not treated as evidence of effect.

Analysis proceeded thematically. Following established guidance for trustworthy qualitative analysis, the procedure moved through familiarisation with the material, initial coding, the development and review of themes, and the mapping of themes onto the theoretical framework (Nowell, Norris, White, & Moules, 2017). Coding was organised around the constructs identified in the conceptual background—contact quality, mediation, intercultural competence, authenticity, memorable experience, and institutional scaling—allowing observations about the case to be read against, and to refine, existing theory. Trustworthiness was pursued through theoretical triangulation across the three source types, an explicit audit trail linking each interpretive claim to its sources, and reflexive attention to the difference between what the documentary record can support and what it cannot.

The scope and limits of the design should be stated plainly. The study does not collect primary data, administer visitor surveys, or estimate the magnitude of any attitudinal change. Its claims are analytical and interpretive rather than statistical. The output is accordingly a set of theoretically grounded, empirically testable propositions about mechanisms and boundary conditions, not a measurement of impact. This honest framing is a strength rather than a limitation for the study’s purpose, which is to specify a theory that subsequent empirical work can test.

4. The SMCCU as a Curated Contact Setting

The Centre operates from the Al Fahidi historical neighbourhood, one of Dubai’s conserved heritage districts and a site whose restoration has been examined for both its success in reconnecting people with the past and its unresolved questions of authenticity and integrity (Boudiaf, 2022). The setting matters analytically: the district supplies a tangible heritage backdrop against which intangible practices are enacted. The Centre’s programmes are organised to maximise the conditions that contact theory identifies as productive. Guided heritage walks and mosque visits place visitors and Emirati hosts in a shared, cooperative activity with a common goal of understanding. Question-and-answer sessions are framed explicitly as open dialogue in which no question is off-limits, lowering the anxiety that typically inhibits cross-cultural exchange. Shared traditional meals add an embodied, commensal dimension in which interaction is sustained and informal.

Read through the conceptual framework, these features are not incidental programme details but deliberate operationalisations of theoretical conditions. The Emirati facilitator embodies the credible host-mediator whose signalling function structures the encounter (Alazaizeh et al., 2024). The dialogic format invites the active participation that converts intercultural competence into memorable experience (Fan et al., 2022). The commensal meal supplies a culturally dense, identity-laden medium of contact (Lin et al., 2021). And the heritage district lends the whole encounter a sense of place that can support, or undercut, its perceived authenticity (Boudiaf, 2022). The remainder of the analysis develops the consequences of these design choices as formal propositions.

5. Findings: Theoretical Propositions

The case analysis yields five propositions. Each is stated as a conditional, mechanism-based claim that connects an observable feature of the SMCCU’s design to a theoretically expected outcome, and each is framed so that future empirical work can test it.

Proposition 1 (contact quality). Because the SMCCU structures host–guest encounters around equal-status dialogue, cooperative activity, and institutional sanction, participation is more likely to reduce intergroup anxiety and improve attitudes toward Emirati and Muslim communities than incidental tourist–resident contact of the kind that occurs elsewhere in the destination (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006; Pettigrew et al., 2011; Su et al., 2023).

Proposition 2 (mediated understanding). The presence of a credible Emirati host-facilitator mediates the relationship between mere exposure and interpretive understanding: facilitation converts contact into structured cultural learning by signalling authenticity and lowering uncertainty, such that the perceived competence and identity of the host condition the programme’s effect (Alazaizeh et al., 2024; Fan et al., 2022).

Proposition 3 (felt authenticity over objective authenticity). The attitudinal and memorial impact of the encounter depends more on its perceived, existential authenticity than on the objective authenticity of its heritage setting; a curated programme can therefore carry significant impact provided it is experienced as genuine (Wang, 1999; Lee et al., 2024; Domínguez-Quintero et al., 2020; Zhou et al., 2022).

Proposition 4 (embodied and commensal route). Participatory and commensal activities—shared meals and hands-on engagement—generate stronger intercultural competence and more memorable cultural experiences than observational activities, because they sustain interaction and embed it in identity-laden practice (Fan et al., 2022; Lin et al., 2021; Kim et al., 2012).

Proposition 5 (bounded institutional scaling). Institutionalising host–guest contact links micro-level attitudinal change to destination-level outcomes such as image and recommendation intention and to national soft-power objectives; however, this scaling is bounded by the tension between the accessibility required for diverse audiences and the authenticity required for credibility, so that over-curation can attenuate the very effect the institution seeks to produce (Rasoolimanesh et al., 2022; Nair, 2023; Boudiaf, 2022; Krzymowski, 2022; Paluck et al., 2021).

Table 1 summarises the propositions, the mechanism each invokes, and the literature on which it draws.

Proposition	Core mechanism	Principal sources
P1	Structured, equal-status, sanctioned contact reduces anxiety and improves out-group attitudes.	Pettigrew & Tropp (2006); Pettigrew et al. (2011); Su et al. (2023)
P2	Host facilitation mediates exposure–understanding by signalling credibility and lowering uncertainty.	Alazaizeh et al. (2024); Fan et al. (2022)
P3	Perceived (existential) authenticity drives memorability and impact more than objective authenticity.	Wang (1999); Lee et al. (2024); Domínguez-Quintero et al. (2020); Zhou et al. (2022)
P4	Embodied and commensal participation intensifies competence and memorable experience.	Fan et al. (2022); Lin et al. (2021); Kim et al. (2012)
P5	Institutional scaling links individual change to destination and soft-power outcomes, bounded by the authenticity–commodification tension.	Rasoolimanesh et al. (2022); Nair (2023); Boudiaf (2022); Krzymowski (2022); Paluck et al. (2021)

Note. Propositions are analytically derived from the case and the cited literature; they are stated as testable conjectures rather than measured findings.

6. Discussion

The central contribution of this analysis is to relocate intergroup-contact theory from its familiar settings—schools, neighbourhoods, workplaces—into institutionalised cultural tourism, and to specify what changes when contact is purpose-built rather than incidental. The classic facilitating conditions identified by contact research (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006; Pettigrew et al., 2011) are, in most tourism encounters, left to chance; the SMCCU instead engineers them. This reframing matters for theory because it identifies the institution, not the individual encounter, as the unit at which contact conditions are produced and sustained. It also sharpens the field’s recent caution that contact is not automatically benign (Tropp et al., 2022; Paluck et al., 2021): the value of a contact institution lies precisely in its capacity to hold encounters within the conditions under which positive effects are likely, and its risk lies in the negative or superficial encounters it fails to prevent.

The analysis also speaks to the long-running debate about authenticity. A recurrent criticism of Gulf heritage presentation is that it is curated, simplified, and oriented to external audiences, raising doubts about technical authenticity and integrity (Boudiaf, 2022). Proposition 3 reframes this debate rather than resolving it in the institution’s favour. If existential authenticity can outweigh objective authenticity in shaping memorable experience (Wang, 1999; Lee et al., 2024; Zhou et al., 2022), then curation is not fatal to impact—but it is not costless either. The same simplification that makes culture legible to a global audience can hollow out the felt genuineness on which impact depends. The contribution here is to convert a binary critique (authentic versus commodified) into a conditional relationship: curation aids understanding up to the point at which it is perceived as performance, after which it undermines it.

Connecting the interpersonal and institutional levels addresses a gap between the experience literature and the soft-power literature. Memorable, authentic encounters are known to feed satisfaction and behavioural intention in heritage contexts (Domínguez-Quintero et al., 2020; Rasoolimanesh et al., 2022), while cultural investment in the UAE is read as a project of national image and influence (Krzymowski, 2022; Nair, 2023). Proposition 5 specifies the link between them: soft-power returns at the national level are downstream of attitudinal change at the individual level, which is itself downstream of contact quality and perceived authenticity. This positions the cultural-understanding centre as the connective tissue of a multi-level system and clarifies why its design choices have consequences well beyond the individual visit.

Finally, the study contributes to cultural-tourism scholarship by treating intangible, living heritage as the active ingredient of intercultural understanding (Zhang, 2022; Richards, 2018). Where much of the field treats guides, meals, and dialogue as service features, the present account treats them as causal mechanisms—signalling, participation, commensality—whose theoretical roles can be specified and tested. This is a modest but useful reorientation: it moves the conversation from describing what cultural centres offer toward explaining how and why those offerings work.

7. Limitations and Future Research

The principal limitation is evidentiary. Because the study relies on secondary materials and analytical reasoning rather than primary data, it can specify plausible mechanisms but cannot estimate their magnitude or confirm their operation in any particular visitor. Its propositions are conjectures awaiting test, not results. The single-case design supports analytical generalisation to theory but not statistical generalisation to other institutions, and the documentary record privileges what is publicly visible over the private, possibly negative, experiences that contact research warns against.

These limits define a clear research agenda. Survey and experimental work could test Propositions 1 to 4 directly, for example by comparing attitudes and intergroup anxiety before and after participation, by varying the presence and identity of the host facilitator, and by measuring perceived authenticity alongside objective setting features. Longitudinal designs could establish whether attitudinal change persists beyond the visit, addressing the durability question that contact research has emphasised (Tropp et al., 2022). Comparative studies across cultural-understanding institutions in different national contexts would test the boundary conditions in Proposition 5 and the authenticity–commodification threshold proposed in the discussion. Finally, as living heritage is increasingly mediated digitally, future work should examine whether virtual or hybrid formats can reproduce the signalling and commensal mechanisms identified here, or whether co-presence is essential to them (Zhang, 2022).

8. Conclusion

The Sheikh Mohammed Centre for Cultural Understanding is best understood not as a conventional attraction but as an institutionalised contact intervention embedded in a tourism economy. Reading the Centre through intergroup-contact theory and the authenticity–experience tradition yields a coherent account of how structured host–guest encounters can shift visitor understanding: through high-quality contact, credible host mediation, felt authenticity, and embodied participation, with effects that scale from the individual to the destination and the nation but remain bounded by the tension between curation and credibility. The study’s contribution is to specify these mechanisms as testable propositions and to identify the conditions under which they hold. In doing so it offers cultural-tourism research a more explanatory vocabulary for institutions whose business is understanding itself.

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