Photograph courtesy of Nick Smith.

“For somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins” (WG Sebald, Austerlitz)

In celebration of the new-year my homepage (now Clare Politics of course – apple + d for mac users) showed fresh, shiny graphics of the Burj Dubai, the world’s tallest, although still uncompleted, building.
The lake will in turn be surrounded by a shiny new city, Dubai World Central, which will in turn be surrounded by the world’s largest airport. The pearly glass façade of the central tower will reflect, the Sheikh hopes, a city based entirely on pleasure, a city that will be able to serve every high-income desire. The plan is for Dubai to survive on tourism when the oil runs out. Such epic gestures as the Burj are needed to bring investment and pleasure-seekers to this otherwise barren desert.

Images of the spectacular developments in the gulf are largely confined to the design soft-porn sites of nerdy architecture students. The mainstream media barely comments on the rapid development in the gulf; at worse it is said to be tasteless and extravagant, at best it is presented as a brave attempt at sustaining economic growth beyond the finitudes of material resources (surely the defining economic problem of the next half-century). Occasionally they report the more obvious problems, the foolishness of building such energy-intensive cities for an age after oil, and the lack of rights for the tens of thousands of impoverished workers who are constructing the city. But rarely is it viewed as symptomatic of anything more sinister.

The absurdity of the tower gave me an uneasy sense of vertigo for different reasons. It is the symbol of a  city that aims to exist without anything old and dirty, or anyone poor or needy, without history or citizens. Like the intention to build a vast lake in the desert this implies a detachment from reality on the part of the rulers of the oil-rich gulf states and the multinational firms that advise them (the same kind of detachment by the same institutions, one suspects, that brought about the world’s current financial woes). The success of this city not only implies, but is predicated upon a vast wealth inequality that will ultimately be unsustainable. As so much of our economy is underpinned by the price of oil and the trillion dollar assets that the rulers of the gulf states hold in our banks and companies, it would be foolish to think we can escape the consequences if this desert flower proves to be a desert mirage.

Filed under: environment, foreignpolicy, middle east, morganlewis on January 7th, 2009