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Sinister Paradise
Does the
Road to the Future End at Dubai?
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First Published on Thursday, July 14, 2005 by TomDispatch.com
by Mike Davis |
The Sequel to Blade Runner?
Welcome to paradise. But where
are you? Is this a new science-fiction novel from
Margaret Atwood, the sequel to Blade Runner,
or Donald Trump tripping on acid?
No, it is the Persian Gulf
city-state of Dubai in 2010.
After Shanghai (current
population: 15 million), Dubai (current population:
1.5 million) is the world's biggest building site:
an emerging dreamworld of conspicuous consumption
and what locals dub "supreme lifestyles."
Dozens of outlandish
mega-projects -- including "The World" (an artificial archipelago), Burj Dubai (the Earth's tallest building), the
Hydropolis (that underwater luxury hotel, the Restless Planet theme park, a domed ski resort
perpetually maintained in 40C heat, and The Mall of
Arabia, a hyper-mall -- are actually under
construction or will soon leave the drawing boards.
Under the enlightened despotism
of its Crown Prince and CEO, 56-year-old Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the
Rhode-Island-sized Emirate of Dubai has become the
new global icon of imagineered urbanism. Although
often compared to Las Vegas, Orlando, Hong Kong or
Singapore, the sheikhdom is more like their
collective summation: a pastiche of the big, the
bad, and the ugly. It is not just a hybrid but a
chimera: the offspring of the lascivious coupling of
the cyclopean fantasies of Barnum, Eiffel, Disney,
Spielberg, Jerde, Wynn, and Skidmore, Owings &
Merrill.
Multibillionaire Sheik Mo -- as
he's affectionately known to Dubai's expats -- not
only collects thoroughbreds (the world's largest
stable) and super-yachts (the 525-foot-long Project
Platinum which has its own submarine and flight
deck), but also seems to have imprinted Robert
Venturi's cult Learning from Las Vegas in the same
way that more pious Moslems have memorized The
Quran. (One of the Sheik's proudest
achievements, by the way, is to have introduced
gated communities to Arabia.)
Under his leadership, the coastal
desert has become a huge circuit board into which
the elite of transnational engineering firms and
retail developers are invited to plug in high-tech
clusters, entertainment zones, artificial islands,
"cities within cities" -- whatever is the latest fad
in urban capitalism. The same phantasmagoric but
generic Lego blocks, of course, can be found in
dozens of aspiring cities these days, but Sheik Mo
has a distinctive and inviolable criterion:
Everything must be "world class," by which he means
number one in The Guinness Book of Records.
Thus Dubai is building the world's largest theme
park, the biggest mall, the highest building, and
the first sunken hotel among other firsts.
Sheikh Mo's architectural
megalomania, although reminiscent of Albert Speer
and his patron, is not irrational. Having "learned
from Las Vegas," he understands that if Dubai wants
to become the luxury-consumer paradise of the Middle
East and South Asia (its officially defined "home
market" of 1.6 billion), it must ceaselessly strive
for excess.
From this standpoint, the city's
monstrous caricature of futurism is simply shrewd
marketing. Its owners love it when designers and
urbanists anoint it as the cutting edge. Architect
George Katodrytis wrote: "Dubai may be considered
the emerging prototype for the 21st century:
prosthetic and nomadic oases presented as isolated
cities that extend out over the land and sea."
Moreover, Dubai can count on the
peak-oil epoch to cover the costs of these
hyperboles. Each time you spent $40 to fill your
tank, you are helping to irrigate Sheik Mo's oasis.
Precisely because Dubai is
rapidly pumping the last of its own modest endowment
of oil, it has opted to become the postmodern "city
of nets" -- as Bertolt Brecht called his fictional
boomtown of Mahoganny -- where the super-profits of
oil are to be reinvested in Arabia's one truly
inexhaustible natural resource: sand. (Indeed
mega-projects in Dubai are usually measured by
volumes of sand moved: 1 billion cubic feet in the
case of The World.)
Al-Qaeda and the war on terrorism
deserve some of the credit for this boom. Since
9/11, many Middle Eastern investors, fearing
possible lawsuits or sanctions, have pulled up
stakes in the West. According Salman bin Dasmal of
Dubai Holdings, the Saudis alone have repatriated
one-third of their trillion-dollar overseas
portfolio. The sheikhs are bringing it back home,
and last year, the Saudis were believed to have
ploughed at least $7 billion into Dubai's sand
castles. Another aqueduct of oil wealth
flows from the neighboring Emirate of Abu Dhabi. The
two statelets dominate the United Arab Emirates -- a
quasi-nation thrown together by Sheik Mo's father
and the ruler of Abu Dhabi in 1971 to fend off
threats from Marxists in Oman and, later, Islamists
in Iran.
Today, Dubai's security is
guaranteed by the American nuclear super-carriers
usually berthed at the port of Jebel Ali. Indeed,
the city-state aggressively promotes itself as the
ultimate elite "Green Zone" in an increasingly
turbulent and dangerous region.
Meanwhile, as increasing numbers
of experts warn that the age of cheap oil is
passing, the al-Maktoum clan can count on a torrent
of nervous oil revenue seeking a friendly and stable
haven. When outsiders question the sustainability of
the current boom, Dubai officials point out that
their new Mecca is being built on equity, not debt.
Since a watershed 2003 decision
to open unrestricted freehold ownership to
foreigners, wealthy Europeans and Asians have rushed
to become part of the Dubai bubble. A beachfront in
one of the "Palms" or, better yet, a private island
in "The World" now has the cachet of St. Tropez or
Grand Cayman. The old colonial masters lead the pack
as Brit expats and investors have become the biggest
cheerleaders for Sheikh Mo's dreamworld: David
Beckham owns a beach and Rod Stewart, an island
(rumored, in fact, to be named Great Britain).
An Indentured, Invisible
Majority(Part3) | Full
Text | The
Narration Begins(Part1)
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