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SLEEPWALKING THE STARS
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by Nick Rose

You are in a movie, you are in the moment, you are in flux. Make no mistake: You are in Dubai. The burgeoning city isn't just any old metropolis by the sea; no, it is, to all who visit and have money to burn, a private studio set. At least, that's Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum's vision. And, it seems, that's what "Sheikh Mo" has gotten. Under his guidance, the city has been transformed from a sleepy pearl-diving town to a paragon of transnational architecture, capital, and, ultimately, desire.

Forget the indoor ski slope, forget the palm islands and the world's tallest skyscraper. Forget, even, the underwater hotel that soon will be built. These are bricks and mortar -- or, in some cases, sand -- and will become obsolete in their time. The point, in Dubai, is imagination.

Architectural innovation and capitalistic ambition have collided on an unprecedented scale in Dubai, that much is certain. But buildings alone cannot explain why the city has so quickly captured the global imagination (and Dollar). Buildings are material, and what is driving Dubai is much more fleeting: Dubai is less a state than it is a state of mind. Propelled by petrodollars that are burning holes in the pockets of a transnational elite, Dubai navigates the intersection of East and West; dream and reality; civilization and its ultimate, pampered discontent.

Success is feeding off of success in what Mike Davis refers to as "the global icon of imagineered urbanism," and now it seems that for every native Emirati still in Dubai there is a corresponding construction crane. This has proved a boon for architects, both local and imported, who are lucky enough to find themselves with the carte blanche that the business climate is able to provide. Every day another fantastical structure reaches its impossible limbs into the desert sky, providing one more image-ready icon for the city to boast.

And where better for today's new Byzantium to flourish than on the blank canvas of desert, sea, and sky? Set against such raw nothingness, the show-stoppers that Dubai's architects create draw tourists and investors from far and wide, offering to plug the pilgrims in to their own 5-star fantasy. In Dubai one can stroll among the postcards and revel in a sensibility that is truly transnational in scope, the language of escape the only one that holds currency. The vacationers arrive with an appetite for hyper-luxury and when they go leave nothing but SUV tracks in the desert sand. In this theme-park of the self, anything is possible: With a little luck the sail-like hotel will take to the placid seas with you aboard, blown by global trade winds in a movie starring you.

Rather than a celebration of humanity, however, what we are witnessing in Dubai is nothing short of the leveling of human concerns. Dubai's short and explosive narrative occludes the people who make it work, the geo-political climate that legitimates the obliteration of human rights and human scale. Dubai's service orientation places the consumer at the forefront, but they consume only themselves, a world made in their own image. To borrow an idea from George Katodrytis, they "Photoshop" themselves into a vacation that is over before it began. The extreme lifestyle the area offers is made to be seen from above, standing over a scale model of a new development or riding a helicopter over the palm islands.

Fed by the fires of optimism and escape, Dubai is a crucible of wealth-creation that represents a Frankenstein-like urbanism. In an impossibly short amount of time the city has developed the problems of overgrowth seen mainly in cities four times its age: killer traffic, wanton sprawl, and blatant misuse of resources. If having a lawn in Las Vegas is an affront to nature, then skiing in Dubai is a veritable sin. Yet concerns such as these have proved irrelevant because Dubai has also surged to the forefront in technological, infrastructural, and commercial development.

As a means to an end, reality has been kept behind an opaque curtain, where environmental abuses are hidden alongside the indentured laborers who raise the city's mighty monoliths. And though, as Davis notes, "Dubai… has achieved the state of the art in the disenfranchisement of labor," who can fault the city's decision-makers? The global dollar, it seems, would have it no other way.

Dubai has tapped into the mother-lode of global culture, proving that the lowest common denominator of global consumption is the desire to see oneself in a flattering mirror. For that is essentially what Dubai has made of itself: an idyllic global mirror that reflects only the best. An ever-revolving door of image-production, this new Byzantium cannot look back, for its past is nothing but undeveloped sand-scapes and a world that didn't know it's name. Then again, nobody goes to Dubai to experience history. They go for ephemeral reality. They go to have the present downloaded to their existential hard drives. They go to see hope at its zenith.

References
Davis, Mike, (2005) “Sinister Paradise: Does the Road to the Future End at Dubai?”, essay, www.tomdispatch.com
Katodrytis, George, (2006) "Dubai: Photoshop Urbanism", essay, www.layermag.com

About the Author
Nick Rose is a freelance writer based in the Midwestern United States. He has published previously on Utne.com.