Dubai

In Dubai, the towers stand like giant insects, eerily aware of their spectators, but silently aloof, with their sparkly exoskeletons, multiple eyes and crane antennas.  Are you watching the towers or is it the other way around?  Their scale dwarfs the older, established city center in Deira and makes the human practically obsolete.  It feels empty even where people congregate, but somehow it seems appropriate.  It is as if there should be no people at all.  A city designed to be abandoned?

I stayed in Deira, a short distance from the recent developments near the marina and Palm Island, across town from the Jebel Ali free zone, where the Al Maktoum airport development is underway.  The location required me not only to cruise the labyrinth of highways in a taxi to get around town, but also to not fully absorb myself in the new Dubai delirium.  In Deira, English is less frequently heard, and the faces on the street are regionally local, as opposed to the international ex-pat population of the newer areas.  The old spice and gold souks inhabit the narrow streets along the creek, which you can cross by boat for 1 dirham each direction.

I took a city tour by car which stopped for photo-taking of the 25-year-old Jumeirah  mosque (surrounded by a picket fence and parking lot), the sail-like Burj Al Arab tower which appears to float on the sea just off Jumeirah beach, Palm Island, the ridiculous Atlantis hotel, and the Deira creek.  These icons represent the postcard image and identity that the city seeks to portray.  They draw maps with nonexistent developments clearly defined, and sell postcards of buildings that after the crisis will probably never be constructed.  Dubai is a sea of half-constructed buildings, that send a confused message, is the city coming or going?

A friend drove me out to the edge of the city, where we hoped to find the proclaimed Global Village and International City (both marked on the city map), which turned out to be a ghostland theme park and a development of identical, mundane apartment buildings with faux architectural ornamentation indicating their nationality of origin.  Traveling along the road to Academic City, we stumbled upon the 4-day line of trucks waiting to dump their contents: the city's sewage, at the one sewage treatment plant.  Dubai has no underground sewage pipe system so, like water they truck into the city, all of the sewage produced by the city's one million inhabitants is trucked out.

On 09.09.09, the city's metro system will open for use, on the same day as the grand opening of the Burj Dubai, currently the world's tallest building.  For a city with an approximate 5 million capacity, the lack of infrastructure and poor planning would pose a huge delinquency if tested to accommodate such a population.  It is a city designed for the car, for the tourist, and most definitely for the sedentary nomad.  The international ex-pat population is assimilated into a singular culture of consumers, as opposed to the native Arab population and custom.  The underlying political structure of nobility dominated by the sheikhs, is on display of wealth and power throughout the city.  Just as numerous as the billboards of Sheikh Maktoum's portrait, however, is the branding of developers such as Nakheel promoting their extravagant projects, both existing, planned and obsolete, along the dusty highways of a city not yet, and perhaps not ever fully arrived.

The Al Maktoum airport development, at one time posed to be the world's largest aerotropolis upon completion, is also in a questionable state.  Originally planned to be a large cargo terminal, then planned as an Airport City development in complement to the existing Dubai airport, already impressive, but now another uncertain future for the city.  The transient state of a city built for temporary residence, tourist indulgence, and instant gratification, is articulated by the ever-present air traffic in the sky above, reminding those on the ground that this place is less a destination, than a hub of coming and going.

Taxi drivers are nervous.  There has been a huge decrease in the number of commuters on the road since the economic crisis stimulated a mass exodus out of the city.  Like the skyline of partly constructed towers, cranes frozen in perpetual flux, Dubai's future is uncertain.  You wouldn't read it on the surface, but cracks exist that suggest a shallow future.  Maybe even a past future.

To quote from JG Ballard's "High Rise", which I so appropriately began reading while in Dubai: "Part of its appeal lay all to clearly in the fact that this was an environment built, not for man, but for man's absence."