Dubai: Very Visible City
One thousand and one declensions of the perpetual city
Dubai: Palm development, courtesy of MIT, center for Real Estate
In 2005, the Nakheel development corporation opened the Ibn Battuta Shopping Mall in Dubai. As they proudly announced in their promotional literature: “The architectural inspiration behind the distinctive design of the shopping mall is based around … six distinct zones, representing key destinations visited by Ibn Battuta”.
Ibn Battuta was the Arab’s Marco Polo. He set off in 1325, aged 20, to go on a Pilgrimage to Mecca. Ibn Battuta didn’t return to Morocco for another 29 years, having covered 75,000 miles, visiting the equivalent of 44 modern countries which were then under the governments of Muslim leaders. Upon his return, Sultan Abu Inan ordered that Ibn Battuta “dictate an account of the cities which he had seen on his travels, and of the interesting events which had clung to his memory”.
Lifestyles, architectures, symbols: all appear as resurrected and genetically revivified statements of noble heritage entirely absent from actual history. Here, history runs forwards, not back
If Ibn Battuta had lived today, there is little doubt that he would add Dubai to his already considerable itinerary. Perhaps Battuta would start his voyage at his eponymous Mall, at its geometric centre, where a Starbucks concessionary is perfectly aligned under a Persian dome. Years later, when he’d be asked to recount his expedition through the early 21st century city of Dubai, Battuta would recollect the following …
Cities and desire
In the Burj al Arab, famous for its billowing Hi-Tec 200m sail-silhouette, Cedric quickly marches you from the planetary carpeted restaurant down to the submarine accessible aquarium-restaurant. Each floor of this hotel has its own butler, and every master bed has a mirror above on its ceiling. You lose count of the number of things you are reflected in. Silver and gold wraps every surface. Cedric, the hotel’s best known relations manager, tells you that Michael Jackson visits here at night, but doesn’t stay over. He’s hugged Cedric each time. Brad, Angelina, Naomi, the Beckhams: the world’s most visibly wealthy as well as the more anonymously rich descend here in droves. Dubai has become one of those urban stations in the world predicated on the desires of the ultra-affluent. It fantasizes about the rich, and wants to fulfil the fantasies of the rich. Such is the logic of its body. And soul. “Money is the international language here,” confides a hotel receptionist, “not English”.
Cities and memory
At Al Qasr, history is laid out like the finest confectionary. The Sheik’s 18 winning steeds, cast full scale, greet you at the entrance. In the hotel lobby, a chandelier, like cumulus of crystals, mirrors a distant Christmas tree set to the side of the swimming pool. This whole complex – that includes luxury hotel, shoppers’ covered Souk and a sprawl of Arabian villas you reach via electric buggy – is based on the Royal Summer Palace, where generations of monarchs have grown up. Castellated crowns form a roof-scape Medieval in association. You can navigate, like the finest seafarers, from one part of Al Qasr to the next via an internal canal way and electric Abras. The Chicago Pier has remained intact from former times. It is said the Sheik used to fish here with his father, making it a relic saved from re-creation. Though opened in 2005, Al Qasr shares with other new developments The Lost City, Bastakiya and The Old Town the desire to reclaim a memory of the past that never actually existed. Lifestyles, architectures, symbols: all appear as resurrected and genetically revivified statements of noble heritage entirely absent from actual history. Here, history runs forwards, not back.
Cities and signs
If you drive down Sheik Zayed Road, which connects the older Bur Dubai out to Jumeriah’s new super-developments, you notice that there are two kinds of time in two kinds of view. Firstly, there’s the view that speaks about 24 hour construction sites, concrete carcasses and a chthonic constellation of cranes. Between the sites of incessant industry, the staccato rhythm of gigantic billboard-signs punctuate that space with 3D computer generated views of future buildings, future developments, and future lifestyles. They announce: “Our Vision. Your Future.”; “History Rising”; “The Next Generation Destination”; “Live the Future.” It may be 3.12pm now, but another time exists in parallel here. It’s the assured time of a projected future. Look, these images are saying, this is what will be, what will become. All this dust, this entire desert: all you see is a temporary visage, awaiting completion. Look into the perfectly rendered signs. For this is the inevitable time you do not yet know of. But you will.
In a place that declares itself so palpably visible, you search out the invisible
Cities and the sky
A pull between the lateral surfaces of the desert, to the east, and the sea, to the west, has seemed to generate a perpendicular movement towards the sky. At Dubai Marinas, 180 skyscrapers are simultaneously rising from the ground, like a ghostly army whose corporeality is mute concrete in nature. At night, when workers are not permitted to stop building these foreboding silhouettes, the outlines and the lights invoke an uncanny fragment of Manhattan, as seen from Brooklyn or Queens. But these are minion dwarfs to the Burj Dubai. Here will soar the tallest building in the world. Its ultimate height remains cloaked by secrecy. A mock-up elevator in the Emaar showroom gives you the hint you want: a button to floor 189. You wonder who eventually will reside here, some 700m up in the clouds, as the tower pinches to a needle point. Ah, you remember, surely: the Sheikh. For isn’t it he who flies over Dubai, surveying the present, and proclaiming the positions of future augmentation? From the weightless gaze of the sky, Dubai’s symbolic shapes can be comprehended as a symphony of elements: three palm trees, The World as a map of islands, a Falcon with the Eiffel Tower in its eye. The sky is the mirror that instructs the city on what it must become as an entity worth beholding.
Hidden Cities
In a place that declares itself so palpably visible, you search out the invisible. A taxi driver takes you away from the constructed histories and sites of construction clad with their projective signs. He drops you off in a place that doesn’t appear on any of the maps you use. And suddenly, you’re in the midst of a scene composed of thousands of men who have travelled from Bangladesh, India and Pakistan.
A long, straight road extends into the desert. You’re not sure where it ends. On both sides are buildings, each one a compound, demarcated by high walls, and signs that say ‘Labour Camp’ and the name of company that has brought these young men over from their homes thousands of miles away.
Queues form at the telephone boxes, each caller eager to contact their loved ones, to tell them they’re fine. The buildings, you realize, are homes to the men, the men who are building Dubai every single day of every week. There’s no Arabian Summer Palace style here, no English neo-Tudor thatch. In fact, these are some of the only buildings you’ve seen that could be described in the Modern vernacular. You realize that ornamentation and allusion belong only to the zones that appear on the maps and in the brochures. Here, in this hidden hive of labour flux, where buses ride in and out exchanging shift workers like the mechanics of a massive abstract machine, there are no paeans to the future. In the hidden labour camp, it’s the very present of this very minute that dictates time. You work. You pause from working. Tick. Tock.
Some of these men, it dawns on you, must stay here all the time, since this place too is under construction, expanding like a diagram that testifies to the growth of Dubai as a whole. As you leave, you imagine that perhaps there is another map of the city that shows all the hidden things you’ve already not seen, again and again.
Cities within cities
“Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expedition, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his.”
(Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, Harvest Books, 1978.)
So begins Italo Calvino’s famed, lyrical story, Invisible Cities. Khan is mesmerized by Polo’s recollection of floating cities, cities spun entirely from string and a city split in two identical, though morally opposing, parts.
If Venice was the ruse that inspired Marco Polo’s evocations, then Dubai would be Ibn Battuta’s. Like Venice, Dubai is a work of human imagination and ingenuity at war with what nature originally bestowed upon such a place. And, if Venice crystallized the economical and aesthetic mores of Western mercantile culture eager to express its effete affluence, power and inimitability, perhaps Dubai too shall become the distillation of today’s dreams as they move eastwards. A dream that desperately hopes it won’t one day find itself sinking from its own success.
