A fake-city. As we learned now, it is a fake Las Vegas.
In the beginning of the essay Mike Davis paints Dubai as how most of the world sees it. Starting the journey on the plane just before landing, when we can see this place from above all in one go. It is amazing, shiny, gold… enormous sizes, over 600 skyscrapers…a phantasmagoric city which claims to be the Vegas or Disneyland of the Middle East. The problem is only that it is not. They don’t understand the historical process of building, they are just taking what’s already been discovered, like a “copy-paste city”…
Most people don’t realize what’s behind it – an ex-fishing village, smugglers, as Davis wrote building on the oil, the side of warzone. Modern slavery!
The difference between the Poor on one street and on the other the seven-star hotel-Rich.. they just want to be bigger and better then everyone else, preparing themselves for the time when they will run out of oil… but in recession times, will people still go there to spend their money? What is going to happen to Dubai when no one is flying there anymore?
It’s going to be a ghost city in the desert. Nothing else.
The article was written in 2006, so most of the stuff he was talking about has been built since. I have a friend who grew up in Dubai and he said the other day quite funnily that when he is home for a bit, after a night-out he is hardly finding his way back home, as buildings are changing and rising up from the ground so quickly that he finds himself rather lost…
Sand, Fear and Money in Dubai' by Mike Davis
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