March 14, 2006
Dubai?
If Congress’ reaction to the ports mess was any indication, we were blind-sided by Dubai. But while Congress was tearing their hair out over national security and xenophobia, the real story takes place on their shores, not ours.
Dubai is the fastest growing city on the planet. It’s not vast oil reserves that allows Dubai to bust out all over. Compared to brother-emirate Abu Dhabi, the oil reserves are actually running pretty low. The source is tourism and investment money that used to come to us.
Not finding the U.S. or our economy particularly inviting since the war on terror, many Arab investors have turned to Dubai, and the proof is in the skyline. The riviera is a cluster of cranes and scaffolding, punctuated by skyscrapers that cut impossible streaks into the sky. An indoor ski slope. An underwater hotel. The tallest building in the world, shaped like a giant lighting rod. No more room on the beachfront? No problem. They simply manufacture more.
You might have heard about Palm Island, the man made archipelago of islands that reaches out from the coastline in the shape of (you guessed it) a palm tree, its "leaves" reaching out like grabby fingers. It looks laughable from above until you realize that Mama evolution has been churning out prototypes of the Palm Island blueprint for millennia-- whenever you need a major surface area bang for your volume buck, branching is the way to go. Leaves get more contact with the air to pull water up and out, bronchioles in lungs get more of a shot to leech out more poisons from the air you take in, Palm Island realtors get 78 MILES of brand new coastline within the swanky Dubai zipcode to develop.
The Guardian’s Adam Nicolson says Dubai is “Not the modern centre of the Arab world but, more than that, the Arab centre of the modern world.”
Is Dubai the next London, the next New York? Is this the face of the empire that will succeed us?
[Check out the resultant show here]
Posted by Greta Pemberton at 12:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack