GEORGE KATODRYTIS / STUDIONOVA ARCHITECTS :: article :: PUBLISHED ARTICLES :: Texts on the CITY :: HYBRID URBANISM

Trading City
In the last twenty years, and at a remarkable pace, Dubai has developed into a global crossroad, and is now thriving on a new type of post-global condition. To the visitor, this cosmopolitan city might seem peculiar: heterogeneous and hyperactive, with no apparent or clear hierarchy, with no layering or intensification. Yet everything seems to point to one thing: commerce and consumption. Here, urbanism and architecture act as interfaces to consumerism – to the act of purchasing, to ephemeral experiences. Within the city, spaces are either desolate or congested. The chaotic operations of street bazaars overtake the bland high-street blocks, especially at night, while the air-conditioned and boldly illuminated mega-malls have become the evening boulevards, where shopping is the cultural protagonist.

Hybrid City
Despite its apparent artificiality, Dubai’s hybrid urbanism has an invisible and unique infrastructure. It operates within a nonhierarchical system of activities, goods and participants. More than a static collection of buildings, Dubai could be described as a piling-up of activities that change more quickly than construction/planning can respond. The city itself could be described as a spontaneous condition, driven by an instinct for survival, by utility, finance and fantasy. In an act of ongoing self-stylization, the city has become a raw experiment in the context of this “hybridization,” where any proposed structure is ultimately measured by its ability to thrive in new and unpredictable conditions. In such a context, culture is by nature a hybrid, impure and contradictory. The city is both multi-racial and multi-cultural, with a flexible diversity, an aesthetic ‘free style’, and with many ‘mirrors’. Signs and signifiers of different cultures are emphasized and celebrated. In this “Theme Park”-orientated cityscape, there is no differentiation between old or new. Everything is recent.

Mirage City
Developed on determination and imagination in the inhospitable desert, the urban mirage continues to spread out with dynamism, both vertically and horizontally. From the current hotel-building boom, it is expected that 400 hotels will be operating by 2010 in a maze of thematic adventures. A surreal machine that reproduces its own identity, Dubai is the most successful model in the region. Yet, there is no new theory here, rather the fulfillment of commonplace potentials. More than a grand-scale “shopping mall,” Dubai is a city of landmarks of corporate culture, of concourse-like spaces where events and plug-in enterprises change and expand in volatile ways. It is comprised of thematic zones, “hyper-surface” and “mind-zone” spaces and airport-like lobbies.

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