(translated from german, published in the scientific book "Umbau 25", Technical University Vienna, 2010)
This essay should be understood as one which looks into the wide field of the “sustainability discussion” from a slightly different point of view, an architectural and socio-cultural one, less then a technical one. To reach this outstanding goal of a sustainable UAE, we have to start to analyze the condition of the entire society, its tradition, its culture and its challenges in a multicultural environment. We have furthermore to look into a future, which can not be compared with developments in the past in other cities worldwide.
Until 2007 it was unthinkable for all people living in Dubai that the development of the city would soon come to a sudden breakup, like it happened midyear 2008. The vision
of the ruler, HH. Sheikh Mohammad bin Rashid al Maktoum and the executives of the Emirate was, to get Dubai to the top of the most attractive cities worldwide .
Real Estate Industry and tourism served as a drivetrain. The real estate renting and selling prizes went up quarterly to about 25%. In 2008 Dubai climbed from position 56 to position 20 in Mercer’s cost of living survey of the most expensive cities in the world ahead of mega-cities like Los Angeles or Shenzhen in China. From 1998 to 2006 the number of tourists increased from 2 millions to 8 millions. Some experts questoined the economical sustainability of the “System Dubai”, whereby real-estate projects sold multiple times before they were even built and warned of the bursting of the real estate bubble.
Mid of 2008 the global financial crises reached Dubai with all its power. Cranes stopped to move. The majority of large scale projects had been put on hold.
A city, pretended to be able to operate independently from global context and confident of the sustainable structure of its vision, had suddenly to learn being a part of a greater whole called global economy.
A brief look on the history of Dubai
Before 1833 Dubai was a small fishing and pearl-diving village. 1833 some 800 members of the Bani Yas tribe, led by the Maktoum Family settled next to the existing village at the mouth of the creek in Shindagha.
1908 Dubai had around 10.000 inhabitants and 3 areas of settlement:
Bastakaya the original part of Dubai with approximately 200 houses and a souk with 50 shops.
Shindaga, the residence of the Maktoum Family and around 250 houses with an exclusively Arab population.
And Deira, , at the opposite side of the creek with 1600 houses and souks with 350 shops. The population in Deira was predominately Arab, Persian and Baluchi.
1950 Dubai was with around 20.000 inhabitants twice as big, but basically still consisting out of the three parts.
When oil was discovered in 1966, His Highness Sheikh Rashid bin Al Maktoum (1958 – 1990), utilized the oil revenues to spur infrastructure development in Dubai and the city started to grow fast.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, Dubai took a strategic decision to emerge as a major international-quality tourism destination. Accordingly large-scale investments in tourism infrastructure had been encouraged and financed.
In the result Dubai quickly became a business and tourism hub far beyond the Middle East region.
Worldwide the 80s and 90s have been characterized by tremendous political and social changes. In the western society started a process of individualization, which was supported by politicians.
In Eastern Europe political and military organizations had been terminated, countries frontiers changed. Capitalism was no longer an abusive word, the equality of classes was not desirable anymore. The way from planned to market economy was paved. One of the most important results of this development was that the people suddenly had the possibility to travel, eager for new cultural experiences, leisure and business. The theories of "Karl Marx" regarding his statement about the class-society was questioned.
Simultaneously to these developments “the Hype Dubai” arose.
The Vision was established in the “Dubai Strategic Plan 2015”, which was published 2007.
To accomplish these objectives the main concern was not to complete, to densify or to restructure the existing city. A new city had to be built on a land, which not had been settled before. The old Dubai with the settlements at the creek principally would have been adequate to develop the urban fabric around this area. But economical, short-termed goals, prevented such a healthy development. This goals have not been oriented towards a city as transformer and catalyzer of humane coexistence. Rather the goal was to create a mega resort and to apprehend the city as a theme park.
A question is, if Dubai can serve as an example for a new urban development in an era of globalization. A difficult approach, due the lack of historical and contemporary models of comparison.
The Status Quo
In Dubai a homogeneous density like in a traditional Arab city does not exist. The City of Dubai consists of clusters, which constitute the city. The location of this clusters had been chosen exclusively by the expected economical success.
There is no spatial coherence between these clusters. The spaces in between these clusters are filled with subsidiary functions like industrial areas, small recreation facilities etc. It is interesting to see, that especially the clusters with residential uses show infrastructures, which serve the wish of the inhabitants to live in a city on a very small scale. Leisure and recreation facilities, high-quality shopping, international dining etc. are offered, so the life in the cluster becomes a hybrid between city and village life. A structure of a village integrated in a structure of a city, leads to a contradiction, which obstruct urban identity.
This understanding of urban development is based on economical goals of developers and their political commitments rather than on real urban planning. No density is needed, when the city operates as a resort.
The concept of segregation of functions in a traditional Arab and oriental city, is transformed into a segregation of spatial incoherency. The link between the clusters is not really physical, it is immaterial, which makes this city fascinating. This density of Dubai is not reflected by the spatial structure of the city, it is reflected by the identification of the inhabitants with “the situation Dubai”, determined by the number of different nationalities and the multicultural experiences of the daily life.
The spatial connection / non connection between the clusters have no impact on the “feeling Dubai” only on the traditional meaning of urban development. The nice, smooth, luxurious, clean, iconic an surprising conditions on the one hand side and on the other hand side the tough, poor, dirty and foreseeable city as an object of utility.
Dubai was able to manage that these poles are almost never colliding, although the spatial transitions are fluent.
The cultural clash / gated communities
The architectural and spatial message of a gated community is the conglomeration of petit bourgeois structures, implying the feeling of “small is beautiful”, conservative and pseudo traditional. In Dubai gated communities had been built up primarily for “westerners” with higher salaries, who find in these structures an environment similar to their home countries. The architectural design is hybrid. A mixture of western style bowfronts and hip roofs with oriental ornamentation. Western village structures, with traffic-calmed and paved circulation areas.
An alleged ideal artificial world is created and one is reminded on Peter Weir’s movie (produced 1998) “The Truman Show”. Living in the gated community becomes living in a resort, the culture of the host country and therefore adequate behavior patterns respecting the culture are neglected. Integration is avoided, the inhabitants stay foreigners in a foreign world. Although these gated community clusters seem to be completely isolated from the city on the one hand side, they function as a retreat for the inhabitants on the other hand side, imparting security based on perceived own experience in a foreign world.
Population
The population of Dubai consists of approximately 13% UAE-nationals, so called “locals”, and 87% foreign workers, so called expatriates and in addition a large number of Tourists.
Referring to the theory of Rem Kolhaas about Dubai, the population is not a natural, but an assembled one. The expats, usually coming due to economical reasons to Dubai, can be basically divided into two groups. The one who are developing the city and its attraction - Engineers, physicians and economic experts and the one who help to sustain this attraction - builders, cooks and masseurs. The city is inhabited by the “pampered” and the “pamperers”.
Both groups show different identification with the city. The first group conceive themselves not as citizens rather than components of a situation. One reason is that expats have no civic rights and duties even if they live in the country since 3 generations. But the majority of this group is not interested in integration, because they only stay temporarily, usually three to five years.
This period is usually too long to keep up a provisional arrangement, but too short to contribute to a development of a polis in social and sociological terms.
Koohlhaas calls it “a provisional community of the disenfranchised….”
The other group the pamperers coming mainly from Asia. Due to the economical situation in their home countries, it is less relevant for them, where they live. Important is the amount of money they are able to transfer monthly to their families in their home countries. They are coming to the city in a large number and creating their own communities.
Isolation instead of integration? The city is capable to integrate this kind of isolation in the overall concept of Dubai. Which means no Identification, but integration as part of the “Situation Dubai”.
Family, Neighborhood and public space
The UAE-Nationals live usually in a social network, in extended families of several generations. If we consider the history of the country, most of the locals origin from bedouin tribes. Bedouines crossing the land with their tribe, do not have to take responsibility for a public space, which does not directly touches the interest of their group. Using only temporarily a small piece of land, a utilizable public space, which is usually developed for the long term, was not needed.
In Dubai usually Shopping Malls and a few parks serve as compensational public spaces. These shopping malls are completely administrated and performed. They are useable without any social responsibility and obligation.
The difficulty of the interpenetration of urban forms of settlement with nomadic forms of living during the last hundred years, influenced the urban development in this country. This mutual coexistence shaped civilizations in other parts of the world over a much longer period of time and is still effective until today.
Considering the development of the last 15 years, Dubai is of course an exception. This short period of time caused the artificial visual identity of the city, because homogeneous urban growth was replaced by short term strategies of high economical success.
In addition the master plans have been developed mainly by western consultants, oriented by western urban models. 1960 a British consultant company was commissioned to develop a master plan. The intention of this master plan was to replace the traditional structure of the city with its narrow alleys and courtyard houses by a modern European urban development plan typical for the 60s at that time, the first step for a car-friendly city with wide roads and the zoning of the city into areas with different usages (functions).
The Icon
Considering the developments mentioned above and the patterns of behavior, relate them to technical possibilities and digital networks, and relate further local regularities and global structural forms, with an superficial handling of culture, architecture and space, the contentual and conceptual debate does not take place at this place. The result is a interchangeability of projects in terms of a lacking identity of the place. The conceptual design approach as an important basis of developing form or structure, as a communicator of the idiosyncrasy of the project, has no importance.
The isolation of these buildings is the result.
This happens not because of programmatic, formal and conceptual strategies, but an arrogant, culture-neglecting, economical based approach, which creates a undefined number of iconic buildings. The term iconic in its relation to a mass of buildings is reduced to absurdity.
This is why iconic buildings are not able to generate an urban space. Basically the term iconic is often misunderstood, which is reflected in a statement of Tom Wright (Architect Burj Al Arab): “If you can draw a building with a few sweeps of the pen within 5 minutes, you have an iconic building”. Wright mix up meaning, concept and strength with effectivity and banality. These buildings are serving exclusively marketing strategies of the cities and are posing an image factor. Conversance and identity cannot be gained from these buildings. “Aliens” are created, which deny communication with their environment. They build up their own neglecting matrix in regard to the history of the place.
Maybe in no other city of the world the marketing strategy is so obvious like in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Hadid, Foster, Ando, Gehry, Koolhaas, Nouvel etc. are not commissioned because of their architectural concepts. The reason is solely the name as a branding. Image gorges content. Time for confidence-building measures based on the integration of the urban fabric and the related experiences of the inhabitants is no longer available. The spatial context does not decide about quality, but the individual product does not have the ability to create urban spatial quality.
Sustainability and Identity
As mentioned before, one of the main problems of Dubai exists in the not existing, and for that reason non-readable and non-tangible identity and related to this the problem of the identification of its citizens.
The development of Dubai in the last 15 years was subject to a process of separation, in which Dubai tried to be in contrast to its environment and other metropolitan cities. To reach this goal many things had been tried, but which could not be found or recruited in the own country. This resulted in a conglomerate of ideas and projects, implemented by other cultures which had been less interested in the development of a city, rather to participate in the wealthiness of this country.
The locals generate their identity in their origin, their family and their territorial affiliation, hence for a real, comprehensible situation. as opposed to this, the “pampered” foreigners, define their identity mostly within the economical class, hence unreal. Two worlds crash together. On the one hand side a society which derives its self-conceived supremacy not from their traditional roots, but from the monetary power of its protagonists, on the other hand side a society which claims its appreciation from their economical and educational affiliation. In contrast to locals, this society acts within the meaning of Rene Descartes who saw in the act of thinking the only remaining assurance of the uprooted individual, in a world in which the individual, the self, gets a subject-matter. Nevertheless, this process of individualization hits the wall, when identity is mediated exclusively via status symbols like fashion, cars or accessories. Juergen Mick speaks in his essay “searching for the urban identity” about the stale taste of an incontinent personality.
Very close to this problem is the item of sustainability. It is usually defined as the achievement and management of technical challenges, i.e. the use of natural resources for energy generation as a strategy of surviving. In the Emirates another issue has to be solved before the more technical approach is useful. This approach has not landed in the emirates so far. It is primarily to do with developing a society, which finds their own identity against the background of multicultural complex systems and hence develops a consciousness through education (about the value of nature, saving of energy and natural resources, waste management, responsibility in a globalized world) , which enables the society to develop a sustainable country and therewith sustainable cities. The locals as an entire body do not have this sense so far, the expats don’t feel responsible or see any need for this due to their short duration of stay in this country. Without any doubt, the local population has to make the pace in this process. This awareness for this strategy of surviving has to be roused within the families, the schools and universities, as well as in all fields of the working environment with the help of governmental rules. The expatriates, as guests of this country, will subordinate to this standards without experiencing this as new, due to their own experience in their countries of origin. The most important question within the currentness of the sustainable discussion is to arrange a timetable. The challenge will be, to run the thematic debate with the term sustainability at first, which will then have a significant effect on the society of the future. However, this could be a unique chance, which will characterize the appearance of the cities in the emirates essentially and could have an enormous effect on the marketing strategy in a positive direction on the product Dubai. Masdar City is an interesting start in this direction.
Dubai 2030
How can it look like, the new vision for Dubai ?
The prospective Dubai will be a city, which will be characterized by the protection of natural resources, which will have an direct and determinant influence on the development of the society and the appearance of the city and its architecture itself. The ruling class will rethink its strategies and will accommodate the climatic conditions: away from the artificial development of marketing- and product-orientated strategies as a tool of urban planning, towards a contentual involvement of site-specific challenges, which result from natural conditions of the place and the integration into a global context against the background of cultural input.
This scenario assumed, a future model is thinkable, which accepts the existing circumstances and facts and conceives them only as partly manipulable. The further planning of the city could be developed on abstract prototypes, which are based on the function of rules and interaction of mathematical models, to create a generic architecture and city, which rests upon a system of the abstraction of common, existing characteristics and features respectively to focus on similarities. Those will be interwoven with each other to create different programmatic standards and to achieve self-organization.
What is this mathematical model about ? We have also to understand about the field of system-biology.
Each system exists out of an interlaced network of small thinking distances with a different complexity each. The discussion is about the correlation between the components an organism is composed of. the goal is the precise development of exact, coherent models which describe all activities from the smallest, active or inactive unit up to the entire organism. For Dubai this means :
a) an entire characterization of all relevant parts (history, tradition, economy, people, structure...) and their interaction within the organism (city) and how these interaction controls the cells
b) analyzing the reaction of the organism to disturbances
c) a temporal and spatial analysis of the cells, i.e. the dynamics of different components
d) translation of this result into mathematical models
Based on this mathematical model, the behavior of a system under special circumstances can be predicted, strategies can be developed to manipulate and control cells which leads to a development, a sustainable development of a city which has an artificial, existing approach, like Dubai.
The city gets adaptive, it will adjust itself to changing climatic, economical, cultural and social changes as well as to changes in the society. The city gets the status of permanent change. This means at the same time, that the relation between subject, architecture and public space will change. In an extreme case, this will lead to a dissolution of hierarchies. Henceforth events and information, in contrast to images or established and proven configurations will determine the appearance of the space of the city. Complexity is tangible through flexibility. Dynamic fields transform to a structural form, and shape its basic within clearly defined borders. The city gets system and place at the same time. It connects its contrasts not only in a pragmatical, but contentual manner as well. The city mutates into an hybrid.
There is a big chance that the term urbanity can newly be defined, if we understand Dubai as the worldwide first globalized city. An identification not with the place itself, but with the sustainability of an event. The discussion based on this scenario could lead to a extreme interesting conceptual approach in architecture, in which the buildings and the city as well show an immaterial transparency, which then can be transformed into the materiality of buildings and cities, not considering design-determining hierarchies or predetermined procedures.
Architecture gets free. Dubai as an event will continue.
