1. Accelerated Urbanism

New building developments in Dubai, especially high-rises, are linked to the global network of trends, forces, finance and trading rather than being related to their locality and community. As such they are alienated from their geographic and physical location. Therefore a dose of self-stylization is necessary, like a surreal machine that reproduces its own identity. Buildings are self-referential and they are held together by virtue of proximity. On a barren landscape anything goes and anything is new. This condition is reminiscent of early modernists’ utopian visions where the new city refers to the present and projects to the future. The desert is not the killing field we are accustomed to see in newsreels in the last decade, but the setting of slick developments. There is a new urban and spatial perception of the desert, a renewed mirage, not unlike Las Vegas in Nevada. The new global city is developing ‘from scratch’: a real tabula rasa, the dream of any urban designer and architect as well as a real estate investor. This is about newness, clean, fresh with little residue of anomaly and deterioration. Buying architecture is like buying a product. Living in it is like acquiring any lifestyle you can afford.

Like any new city, Dubai has no density, no layering. Buildings are detached and isolated, and some communities are gated. Even though architecture appears homogeneous its social reality is heterogeneous. This paradoxically becomes a haven for upper class buyers, seeking exclusive retreats.

Almost overnight, the city has become a juxtaposition of barren desert, 21st-century skyscrapers and extravagantly optimistic construction sites. The visual voyage through the city, like in any contemporary cityscape, operates like a continuous shift between eye and mind, as though differences no longer existed between the two. The city has definitely ceased to be a site: instead, it has become a condition. Perhaps it has even lost its site: it tends to be everywhere and nowhere. The urban setting as a large construction site is unique as it can always keep the promise alive and prepare itself for new users, the incoming international nomads: settlers, laborers, consultants, traders, in-transit business travelers and tourists, all seeking and challenged by newness.

This is an accelerated urbanism like none before; it is immediate in its pictorial seduction. The urbanization process is streamlined, effective and fast. Dubai is the largest architectural experiment in progress, soon achieving a critical mass of mega expansion. This is symptomatic of approaches to development in many other regions in the world today. This ‘model potential’ makes Dubai an ideal case study of urbanization; in a sense, Dubai has become ‘required reading’. Yet, a critique needs to be articulated and new strategies proposed.
What is interesting is that this is a new city caught up in unprecedented conditions of the new century: globalization, accelerated technologies of imaging and communication, abundance of investment and mass tourism.

2. Tourism and Constructed Leisure-land

Dubai thrives on consumerism. This is a city that owes its early survival and its current momentum to trading. Everything points to consumption. This turns any city into a theme park seeking to sell the arabesque, tropical, oriental and international, all in one. Tourism and shopping is the new pastime of the middle class, associated with leisure, the resort and the lifestyle experience. We work more efficiently nowadays, and have more free time. Dubai is a constructed leisure land. It is more like a diagram, a system of staged scenery and mechanisms of good time.

Flying over Dubai, one is confronted with a new type of 21st century urbanism, which is both diagrammatic and prosthetic in the form of islands. As a tourist, there is no need to travel to distant destinations, to desolate islands. Islands are now close to shore, in a new typology of hydro-suburbia.

The island is the lowest form of spatial organization. Pure accumulation, it has an iconic form and a certain perimeter and location. It can be reached by dramatic arriving (compare here with Venice’s Lido and Florida’s Key West). The surface of the island reveals everything there is, all contents; islands are fundamentally consistent and predictable: they give an assurance of security. But they have potentials; they are exclusive.

As Briavel Holcomb points out in his essay ‘Marketing Cities for Tourism’ (1999), in the tourist realm ‘it is the consumer, not the product that moves. Because the product is usually sold before the consumer sees it, the marking of tourism is intrinsically more significant than the conventional case where the product can be seen, tested, and compared to similar products in situ. It means that the representation of place, the images created for marketing, the vivid videos and persuasive prose of advertising texts, can be as selective and creative as the marketer can make them – a reality check comes only after arrival.’

Increasingly, the kind of contemporary architecture and urbanism that simulates mass tourism has to be not only photogenic but also telegenic – buildings that look striking in a sequence of rapid-fire cuts, or that stand out in a static shot as backdrops.

The city of Dubai sprawls out like an exponent of an algorithmically evolving pattern: fractal architecture with forms of increased perimeter and endless topological variations, as two-dimensional patterns, allowing very little for three-dimensional variety. Dubai’s recent development has put it on the map of iconic projects, of real estate prospecting and holiday dream destinations.

Motivated by a desire for authentic experience for exotic places, for escape or spectacle, or simply by an urge for new knowledge, the tourist leaves a familiar environment to view other locations. Today, as places increasingly get restructured as spaces of consumption, tourist activities merge with other mass-consumption practices.

Historically, the origin of modern vacation time can be traced back to the 1930s, when workers in France, for the first time, were given the right to twelve paid vacation days. Today, tourism has become a ‘total lifestyle experience’. The modern tourist resort is by definition a constructed one. The tourist’s perception seems to have shifted away from the pictorial 18th century: there is no longer the desire for the panoramic view. The excessively visual contemporary culture has made everything look familiar. Contemporary tourists are looking for familiarity: they want to feel at home in a strange place.

This has led to concentrated tourist infrastructures and mega-structure complexes (hotel + apartments + mall + cinema + expo + anything), which are clustered together. In this sense, architecture and landscape are part of a single system, characterized by stratification and controlled spatial experience.

In mass tourism, a dose of familiarization is required. Whereas it was once uncommon to shop for ordinary clothing items while on vacation, brand-name stores and outlets mall have popped up all over the world. Similarly, with the spread of franchised restaurants and hotels, it is possible to eat and sleep in circumstances that are remarkably alike, and tune into the same TV channels almost everywhere.

Mass tourism is indeed like mass media. The lure of the new works best when the new is both anticipated and well-packaged. In 1925, in his essay ‘travel and dance’, Siegfried Kracauer already remarked that tourists are prepared for foreign places though the perusal of illustrated magazines. Nowadays, through coffee-table books, television and movies, tourists are well-prepped for on-site architectural experiences. A profusion of tour guides, and especially Internet sites, launches the tourist into touring weeks or months before the actual trip begins. What is striking about this body of preparatory information is the degree to which issues of touring comfort and efficiency take precedence over historical information about archi- tecture or place.

From the airport to the air-conditioned bus to the four- or five-star hotel, package tourists spend much of their time within a cocoon. They might as well be at home, or at the mall. This tropical but not so dangerous adventure appeals to millions of tourists.

Dubai there is little difference between holiday accommodation and housing. Architectural programs are becoming fused and undifferentiated. The morphology of the landscape and seascape is becoming fabricated to the point that it may soon be difficult to differentiate between the natural and the constructed. Artificial islands will add another 1,500km of beachfront, turning the coastline and the city into an inexhaustible holiday resort. This constructed landscape, like a stage set, provides edited scenes of adventure and entertainment.

No matter which part of the world, whenever architecture is built from nothingness, it seems to be fond of a universal language of spectacle and the exoticism of the new. It might be useful to look at another aspect of the exotic at this point, and ask in what ways specific examples of architecture are elusive and foreign to the city itself. This is also a way of asking how the exotic intervenes in the cultural politics of global tourism.

Jean Baudrillard has analyzed contemporary culture through the model of Disneyland, thereby inserting a form of simulated architecture and tourism into the heart of his definition of hyper-reality. Disneyland is presented as an imaginary kingdom, set aside from the values of everyday. As such, it serves as a ‘prop’ to make us believe that the world outside is ‘real’. For Baudrillard, however, the world outside is not ‘real’ but ‘hyper-real’, and Disneyland is no different. The logic of role-playing and theming is not limited to Disneyland. It has permeated the whole of the Western society.

Everyday life is colonized by fantasy, dominated by escapist dreaming. Both the ‘authentic’ architectural icons, and the simulated architectural icons, such as Disneyland or Las Vegas, are inscribed within the same logic of escapist dreaming.

Escapism is an ambivalent, even negative word when juxtaposed against realism or authenticity. Yet we are inescapably escapist. Animals flee when confronted by some sort of threat. Humans are no different. What makes us different is that we are not only pushed, but also pulled by some imagined reality that is either already in existence ‘out there’, to be discovered, or by the possibility of its realization and manifestation. We escape from the given into the desirable through theme parks, shopping malls, and suburban developments.

3. Transmitted Imagery

Architecture serves emergent economies to express the fascination for symbols of economic development, national progress in a context of inflationary globalization and international economic competition. In the first half of the 1990s, several countries in Asia invested much effort and ingenuity in the construction of skyscrapers, which not only challenged the legendary supremacy of the American high-rise, but were also meant to represent these countries’ new role on the international stage. The Middle East and Gulf states have been slow to take on the construction of high-rises, despite abundance of land and investment. This is not the case anymore. Dubai has surged into the global market of finance and fantasy and is now expressed in the construction of hundreds of high-rise buildings. International architectural firms have found an expanding and profitable market. Transnational practices place their designs within the more general framework of globalization with speed and easiness. The simplicity of transmitting digital documents of both building imagery and specifications allows for complex designs to be prepared in New York, outsourced and detailed in Mumbai, and delivered to a project manager in Dubai within days. The universality of curtain wall detailing allows for a ‘common architectural language’ without barriers to be constructed and delivered on site equally fast. Furthermore, the speed of transmitting the image of the building itself allows for a chain of global real estate networks to sell the product, i.e. the architectural space, long before its completion on site. Dubai’s heavily invested digital and telecommunications infrastructures allow its continuous presence in the Internet and electronic space. This is the city of transmitted imagery.

Urbanism as an art form in the Arab World has an interesting precedent. The Muslim Middle Ages was marked by the formation and development of new art style, which found its reflection both in the art as well as in architecture and city planning. Abstract geometric forms and woven urban spaces have been established very early on in the Arab World. Cities became basic generators of new art styles, and the urban culture of this period obtains the role of a system forming factor. It was a period of self-identification of urban mentality and formation of new aesthetic of Muslim Urbanism. Grunebaum wrote: ‘From its birth Islam, by its spirit and main centers, had urban character’. This tradition is carried on. Urbanizing large areas and introducing a new aesthetic and ‘art’ is very much inherent in the creation of the contemporary Arab city.

The earliest stage of urbanization was connected with the transition of the nomads to the settled life way and cultivation of fertile lands which goes back to the 2nd millennia B.C. The unification of the aesthetic principles in the Muslim world as a whole had become a new cultural dogma – a period of universal aesthetic canon had started. Therefore, some generalized and standard vision of the oriental city as a composition of blue domes and slim minarets has some basis to be reasonable. The universal style spread over not only over plastic forms of culture, but verbal ones too. Ornament and words’ ligature became a distinguishing feature of new aesthetic. Even though this is a case of complex art forms and craftsmanship, it was rarely exported or exploited in the west, except in the case of Orientalism. This imagery was exported, exhibited and eventually bought by wealthy Europeans in the form of exotic decoration. Nevertheless the Arab urban form and art was unique and unified.

This urge for unification and expansion as a cultural need is now changing. The fast transmission of architectural imagery is now part of everyday advertising marketing practice. The sky is the new medium of Satellite Urbanism. This turns the land, desert and water via military technology into spectacle and consumption. GIS and reconnaissance technologies turn into telegenic (as opposed to photogenic) postcards for selling real estate markets as well as mass tourism destinations. Satellite imagery of unfinished projects gives rise to the exciting promise of the future. Satellite technologies used to monitor wildlife development, hydrography, and land drought are now a tool for global transmission of projects under construction, reconnaissance tourism advertisements and construction theatre.

Dubai and the UAE Ministry of Labor currently use the Swiss-based firm Informap and high-resolution satellite technology to monitor construction sites and projects. Using high-resolution photography a team monitor the minute details of construction sites beamed back to the ministry by Digital Globe satellite technology, also used by the US military.

This is the new global capital of the world in the making. Its imagery is transmitted long before its reality. It is therefore not surprising that all the housing on Dubai’s Jumeirah Palm Island was sold out in fifteen days. Virtuality dominates over reality. Eventually, 70,000 islanders on Jumeirah Palm will be privileged in that their neighborhood will be clearly visible and identified in Google Earth.