Jan 24, 04:18 pm
Lecture at the California College of the Arts, San Francisco
George gave a lecture, The Dubai Experiment: a Constructed Fantasy, at the California College of the Arts , San Francisco, part of the CCA Lecture Series, on January 22, 2007.
Dubai is symptomatic of approaches to development in many other regions in the world today. This ‘model potential’ makes Dubai an ideal case study of urbanization; in a sense, Dubai has become ‘required reading’. Yet, a critique needs to be articulated and new strategies proposed. The city has created an ‘urban taste’ so unabashedly emphatic, so needy for the tallest, the biggest, and the most expensive.
Beyond its apparent lack of identity, this city demonstrates a hybrid and complex urbanism, which has an invisible infrastructure of non-hierarchical activities. In an act of self-stylization, Dubai is a raw experiment in imagineered urbanism.
If Rome was the “Eternal City” and New York’s Manhattan the apotheosis of twentieth century congested urbanism, then Dubai may be considered the emerging prototype for the 21st century: prosthetic and nomadic oases presented as isolated cities that extend out over land and sea.
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