We live in an era of completions, not new beginnings. 

The world is running out of places where it can start over.

Sand and sea along the Gulf, like an untainted canvas, provide the ultimate tabula rasa on which new identities can be inscribed: palms, world maps, cultural capitals, financial centers, sport cities…

Yet, much like Singapore in the 1980s and China in the 1990s, the recent development of the Gulf, particularly Dubai, has been met with derision: Mike Davis’ damning ‘Walt Disney meets Albert Speer'[1] echoes William Gibson’s characterization fifteen years ago of Singapore as ‘Disneyland with the death penalty’.[2]

The recycling of the Disney fatwa says more about the stagnation of the Western critical imagination than it does about Gulf Cities.

To be a critic today is to regret the exportation of ideas that you have failed to confront on your own beat, dragons you have been unable to slay; the vast majority of developments that critics deplore originated and have become the norm in their own countries.

The tragic effect of architecture’s inability to recognize and think through modernization’s inevitabilities is a wistful language of perpetual disappointment with what is produced and the endless recycling of nostalgic panaceas as well-meaning but moribund alternatives…

It is particularly cruel that the harshest criticism comes from old cultures that still control the apparatus of judgment, while the epicenters of production have shifted to the other end(s) of the globe.

Is it possible to view the Gulf’s ongoing transformation on its own terms? As an extraordinary attempt to change the fate of an entire region? Is it possible to present a constructive criticism of these phenomena? Is there something like a critical participation?

(To counter the problem of the workers’ accommodation, for instance, there is now talk of three-dimensional legislation, which would define an Arab Existenzminimum and mass-produce it…)

The Gulf is not just reconfiguring itself; it’s reconfiguring the world.

The Gulf’s entrepreneurs are reaching places that modernity has not reached before…. Perhaps the most compelling reason to take the Gulf seriously is that its emerging model of the city is being multiplied in a vast zone of reduced archi- tectural visibility that ranges from Morocco in the West, then via Turkey and Azerbaijan to China in the East. In each of the countries of this Silk Belt, the Gulf’s developers operate on a scale that has completely escaped ‘our’ attention.

This burgeoning campaign to export a new kind of urbanism – to places immune to or ignored by previous missions of modernism – may be the final opportunity to formulate a new blueprint for urbanism. Will architecture grasp this last chance?