Presentations titled ‘Roaming Trans_cities and Airborne Fiction – click the image to enlarge and zoom in’ and at the ‘Through the Roadblocks: realities in raw motion’ conference’, Cyprus.
With Sharmeen Syed
The Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf is home to some of the world’s most controversial settlements that have grown into major economic and global hubs following rapid transformation. Urbanism in the region has a remarkable precedent. Historically, urbanizing large areas and introducing a new aesthetic and ‘art’ is very much inherent in the creation of the contemporary ‘Arab city’. New technologies and communications, regulations and infrastructures have brought about dramatic morphological changes. Westernization was interpreted as the only form of modernization. The traditional Islamic horizontal urban pattern and its direct relation to land and water have shifted to vertical and global networks of trading, tourism, fantasy, orientalism and investment generating new fractal cities, satellite urbanisms and telegenic imageries. A canvas for global and nomadic crossroads; north-south immigration patterns and east- west trading axes bisect a tabula rasa of hues, extreme climates and strange topographies, provides a complex matrix of interconnectivities. These post-colonial cities of the 21st century have grown out of new technologies, telecommunications and mega infrastructures that have brought about dramatic morphological and ecological changes. This is the future state of world urbanism – prescriptive and full of visual dramatization. The aerial view has provided encapsulations of civilization and modernization while simultaneously empowering the spectator with the omniscient gaze. The gaze of the cartographer mapping territory – territory to acquire and territory acquired – is associated to the production of knowledge and ultimately the definition of the ‘empire’, be it geographical, virtual or imaginary. The past decade has witnessed the climactic boom and collapse of urban daydreams embedded and immortalized in renderings, master plans and fictitious cameo appearances. As cities recover from hallucinated wealth, they also retain relics of the imagined/unrealized along with the histories and global references accumulated from the past. Abound with supra-spectacles, Hollywood-esque appeal and the hyper-planned, the future fictitious city has become a comment on its own urban, ex-urban and suburban realities. This form of urbanization also shows a preoccupation with the fabrication of an image. Coastal necklace settlements, sand and silicone, pixelated patterns, landscape and render farms, fractal and parametric formations, simulated SimCities, dynamic formations, master plans and speculative developments are now projecting new satellite urbanisms. This spatial and urban approach emphasizes enclaves but also exclusiveness. We are now planning and designing cities by gazing down on the action from heavens. Reconnaissance technologies turn into spectacle and ‘telegenic’ fantasies addressing mass tourism. Simulated panoramas and imagery of unfinished projects give rise to an exciting promise and fantasy. In effect digital imagery and technology is shaping the future of cities. After all we are all nomads inhabiting an image.
