Feb 25, 07:12 pm
The Gulf First Urban Planning and Development Conference & Exhibition
February 2006: George Katodrytis made a presentation during The Gulf First Urban Planning and Development Conference & Exhibition, Kuwait, February 20-22, 2006.
Dubai: tourism and the end of public space
The “new” global city, like a surreal machine, reproduces its own new identity. This is the moment to talk about the autopoeisis of architecture and its utopian capability: the increasing autonomy and its self-referential closure. The city has become an immense theme park, utopian, repeatedly reproduced as an in endless representation and fabricated in Photoshop. The paper will use the city of Dubai as a case study, and look at the emergence of a new condition dependent on consumerism: on tourism and shopping and the end of public space. On one hand millions of tourists – like contemporary nomads flooding the city only looking for familiarity – wanting to feel at home in a strange place, inhabiting constructed landscapes. On the other hand, the contemporary shopping mall can imitate anything. It has become the only form of social space. This has lead to concentrated tourist infrastructures and mega-structure complexes (containing hotel + apartments + mall + cinema + expo + anything goes), which are clustered together. Dubai may be considered as an emerging prototype for the 21st century: prosthetic and nomadic oases presented as isolated cities that extend out over the land and sea.
Constructed Leisure-land
Flying over Dubai, one is confronted with a new type of 21st century urbanism, which is both diagrammatic and prosthetic in the form of islands. As a tourist, there is no need to travel to distant destinations, to desolated islands. Islands are now close to shore, in a new typology of hydro-suburbia.
The island is the lowest form of spatial organization. Pure accumulation, it has an iconic form and a certain perimeter and location. It can be reached by dramatic arriving (compare here with Venice’s Lido and Florida’s Key West). The surface of the island reveals everything there is, all contents; islands are fundamentally consistent and predictable: they give an assurance of security. But they have potentials; they are exclusive.
This uniqueness suits the machinery that drives mass tourism. As Briavel Holcomb points out in his essay “Marketing Cities for Tourism” (1999), in the tourist realm “it is the consumer, not the product that moves. Because the product is usually sold before the consumer sees it, the marking of tourism is intrinsically more significant than the conventional case where the product can be seen, tested, and compared to similar products in situ. It means that the representation of place, the images created for marketing, the vivid videos and persuasive prose of advertising texts, can be as selective and creative as the marketer can make them – a reality check comes only after arrival”.
Increasingly, the kind of contemporary architecture and urbanism that simulates mass tourism has to be not only photogenic but also telegenic – buildings that look striking in a sequence of rapid-fire cuts, or that stand out in a static shot as backdrops.
The city of Dubai sprawls out like an exponent of an algorithmically evolving pattern: a fractal architecture with forms of increased perimeter and endless topological variations, as two-dimensional patterns, allowing very little for 3-dimensional variety.
Historically, the origin of modern vacation time can be traced back to the 1930s, when workers in France, for the first time, were given the right to twelve paid vacation days. Today, tourism has become a “total lifestyle experience.”
The modern tourist resort is by definition a constructed one. The tourist’s perception seems to have shifted away from the pictorial 18th century: there is no longer the desire for the panoramic view. The excessively visual contemporary culture has made everything look familiar. Contemporary tourists are looking for familiarity: they want to feel at home in a strange place.
This has led to concentrated tourist infrastructures and mega-structure complexes (containing hotel + apartments + mall + cinema + expo + anything goes), which are clustered together. In this sense, architecture and landscape are part of a single system, characterized by stratification and controlled spatial experience.
Highrise Prototype: Project by GEORGE KATODRYTIS / STUDIONOVA (image below)
In Dubai there is little difference between holiday accommodation and housing. Architectural programs are becoming fused and undifferentiated. The morphology of the landscape and seascape is becoming fabricated to the point that it may soon be difficult to differentiate between the natural and the constructed. Dubai’s natural beach front is 45km long. Artificial islands will add another 1,500km of beach front, turning the coastline and the city into an inexhaustible holiday resort. This constructed landscape, like a stage set, provides edited scenes of adventure and entertainment.
No matter which part of the world, whenever architecture is built from nothingness –it seems to be fond of a universal language of spectacle and the exoticism of the new. It might be useful to look at another aspect of the exotic at this point, and ask in what ways specific examples of architecture are elusive and foreign to the city itself. This is also a way of asking how the exotic intervenes in the cultural politics of global tourism.
Escapism is an ambivalent, even negative word when juxtaposed against realism or authenticity. Yet we are inescapably escapist. Animals flee when confronted by some sort of threat, when pushed. Humans are no different. What makes us different is that we are not only pushed, but also pulled by some imagined reality that is either already in existence “out there,” to be discovered, or by the possibility of its realization and manifestation. We escape from the given into the desirable through theme parks, shopping malls, and the suburban developments.
Dubailand: Project by GEORGE KATODRYTIS / STUDIONOVA (in collaboration with M3 Architects)
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