Since the end of the 20th century the governments of various Gulf States have been attempting to diversify their oil-dependent economies. This has resulted in a new type of urbanism, often referred to as post-oil urbanism. The first model of post-oil urbanism was the Emirate of Dubai due to its pioneering efforts during the 90s when it initiated its economic transformation into a global service hub by introducing open market policies. This liberalisation included the local real-estate market, which opened up for regional and international investment. The big success of this new strategy, which has been mainly driven by speculation, has made Dubai a role model of exponential urban growth in the region. Hence, there has been widespread imitation of its development strategy by other GCC countries such as the Kingdom of Bahrain. In the case of Bahrain the liberalised real-estate market has led to the transformation of its built environment due to the construction of several mega-projects and hundreds of high-rises along its coasts. Subsequently, the population has grown from around just 660,000 inhabitants in 2001 to more than 1 million in 2008. In order to attract investment and sustain the speed of development, restrictions have become more and more relaxed, leading to a new form of urban governance in which private investors have become the main driving force. Thus, a growing number of developers have gained the right to design the individual master plans of their projects, leading to an urban development that is not guided by any overall plan but is instead the accumulation of individual case-by-case decisions. The speed and size of recent projects in combination with shrinking restrictions have resulted in a decreasing quality of the built environment in certain areas, particularly due to a deficit of technical and social infrastructure. The recent development of Bahrain's capital Manama and its three main expansion areas is an example of the current urbanisation in the Gulf, where speculation-driven development has led to fast urban growth without sufficiently integrating the needs of liveable cities. Today, the establishment of an integrated development strategy in order to encourage balanced and consolidated urban growth has become the biggest challenge of urbanism in the Gulf. While restrictions on the private sector would be necessary for this, the pressure to attract investors forces a continuation of de-centralisation and liberalisation. Subsequently, a major challenge for urban governance in the Gulf is to elaborate a comprehensive plan that integrates various development strategies in addition to a system of implementation providing flexibility and effectiveness. Thus, urban planning in the Gulf has reached a turning point in which the outdated preparation of master plans is being replaced by city visions based on economic diversification strategies and thus the interests of the private sector. The recent outbreak of the global financial crisis has put additional pressure on current post-oil urbanism to define its way between "event urbanism" and "sustainable urbanisation".