Todd Reisz and Rory Hyde, who are writing about research from Al Manakh at the Huffington Post, describe what they call the phenomenon of “Dubai-bashing”, and argue that the phenomenon reflects Western insecurities more than it does actual conditions in Dubai. While I have no doubt that Dubai is indeed a more complex entity than the articles they briefly quote allow (Reisz and Hyde’s most recent article in this series, “Two Songs, an Idol, and Some Money Transfers”, is one small piece of evidence of that), I’ll admit that I finished this article unconvinced that the bashing Dubai has received (and it has undoubtedly received a bashing) is really so unwarranted, or solely a product of what Koolhaas calls “[the need to] maintain and restore our own confidence in terms of the crisis we are now facing”. It is true that the financial crisis has as many roots in New York and London as in Dubai (easy evidence: foreclosed homes in the States), that Dubai is not exactly the only place in the world which abuses immigrant laborers (look to the States, again), and that it’s always worth examining one’s own errors before pointing out those belonging to others, but it’s not clear to me why those things, even cumulatively, make criticism of Dubai wholly dismissible as a product of a collective desire to “get [ourselves] through a hard spell”.
Regardless, you ought to read their argument for yourself.
I still think that if Dubai is still the Paris Hilton of international relations, then this HuffPo article is its “LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!” moment.
Hah.
Even after “all it’s been thru”, as it were.
I don’t know. This whole line of argument by Koolhaas and the Al Manakh folks has always seemed a little not right. Don’t get me wrong I have definitely gotten the impression sometimes that the criticism of Dubai et al delved a bit too much into the weird, otherness (ugly/aesthetic) characteristics in a sort of retreading of various colonial stances. And I also get the point about not applying our own lenses and failed frameworks to the new conditions they are creating. But i suppose one of my questions is whether or not they are really creating some new condition that hasn’t been seen before. Moreover i do feel as if some of the critiques, of are correct and topical. Particularly , those re: spectacle, sustainability and consumption etc. I also feel like some of the conundrum involves needing to actually experience/explore first hand vs just through photos etc.
Plus, i don’t think we can forget that whether it is Al Manakh or the various architectural projects they are involved in, I think we mustn’t forget that defenders 9a la Koolhaas) of Dubai are also the ones profiting from it..
Well said, Nam. That’s basically what I think, as well. I follow the points that the Koolhaas/Al Manakh gang is making, and I think there’s something to their arguments, bu t I also think there’s a lot of merit in the more common criticisms that are made (there really is an issue about spectacle, about Dubai’s place in the global financial disaster, about the wisdom of building a metropolis in a waterless desert, etc.).
Yes, all of these. The main thrust of my criticism of Dubai, other than the various human-rights issues, is that it seems to have learned all the wrong lessons from Las Vegas. Is it exceptionally hostile to sustainability? I don’t know, but it certainly has picked and chosen a lot of problematic applications and concentrated them in a rather small area that’s easy for a critic to point at.
Also, maybe “hostile” is the wrong word. I think “enitrely indifferent” would be better.
Hi all, great you’re having this discussion over here. Appreciate the interest in the piece, for better or worse!
I guess we could have made it clearer in the piece that we’re not so much saying Dubai-bashing is unjustified — clearly it is — but that our/the West’s intense fascination with it perhaps motivated by our need to maintain and restore our own confidence in how we are facing the crisis, and our own urban/political/financial models.
Yeah, we may be defending Dubai a bit — as you point out, it’s certainly not the only country with a poor record of mistreatment of a migrant labour force — but above all we’re fascinated in the idea that so much hate could be directed toward the city itself as opposed to the companies that are responsible, as we’ve seen with sweatshop labour for instance.
Of course, we didn’t make this point in the piece itself, which is why we appreciate discussions like this one. Feedback is our only motivation for this HuffPo thing (it’s not like we’re getting paid).
Cheers,
Rory
Rory sent me this discussion, and I’m glad to see it happening. It’s rare to find people not just dismissing this as a “Leave Britney Alone” moment, well almost not. If the body of our work — two publications of Al Manakh, and our internet postings — are considered in their entirety, criticism is easily to be found. But it’s a kind that weighs in issues that rarely get discussed. For instance, who’s really responsible for what is happening in Dubai, or any city in the Gulf for that matter.
There are two points I would make in response to the comments thus far.
1. Dubai is not the neo-liberal capital of the world. There’s a nice piece in Al Manakh 2 by Ronald Wall that shows the limits of Dubai’s connectedness to international financial networks. In other words, Dubai is small fry in comparison to the real forces. That doesn’t mean that Dubai isn’t mimicking or playing second- or third-fiddle to the heavy hitters. Dubai is doing everything it can to be a financial capital of the world. But it’s not going to happen any time soon. Jim Krane, in his biography of Dubai, says the city aspires more to “emerging behemoths in China and the former Soviet Union.” That would be a fascinating urban comparison.
2. Dubai has up to now been as good as its consultants. A topic that takes up a chapter in Al Manakh 2. Of course in the larger picture, a locale has to take responsibility for its decisions. But the level of input from companies in cities/countries which are supposedly top-rankers in ‘liveability’ is more often appalling than acceptable. Dubai’s failure, has to do with more people outside Dubai than within Dubai. And I’m not just talking about consultants who are architects and planners.
So how can Dubai be isolated and connected at the same time. Different levels of economy, I guess, wherein Dubai is trying to make a place so that it can exist. Many have questioned the legitimacy of building a city in such a arid place. The question is rhetorically interesting, but who would actually have the right to lay it down as criticism against another place. And, in any case, Dubai and the rest of the region is responding to criticism. How? By hiring another rounds of mostly Western consultants — let’s hope they’re even just a notch better than the previous generations…
Todd and Rory,
Thanks for joining the discussion. I think the point re: focus on the city vs the companies enabling the situation a la sweatshops is an interesting comparison. I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that in Dubai so much of the direction/planning/aspiration seems driven from one source, that of the royal family/sheik and all their various corporate entities. So perhaps the nexus of city-state/persona(l) driven development is one reason. Or is this a misreading of the situation?
Continuing this line of thought, perhaps the response to your question who’s really responsible for what is happening in Dubai, or any city in the Gulf for that matter. is that in the West we (the citizens) are at least nominally due to our (admittedly imperfect) representative nature of government whereas Dubai seems to be taking the model of Chinese capitalism wherein you get some of the market benefits without the political ones. Thus resulting in a situation wherein development is driven by the sheik’s desires and his deals with consultants vs community/citizen input?
Or do I sound too idealistic?
Rory, Todd:
As Nam says, thanks for commenting.
It is always a bit unfair to take a short piece in isolation, so I should probably be clear that I haven’t read either of the Al Manakhs. (Stephen has a copy of at least one of them, but I didn’t talk with him about this.) I’ve read Rory elsewhere (and I think he knows we at mammoth have great regard for his writing), but not much on Dubai, and not much of Todd on anything, as far as I am aware.
So I appreciate the clarifications and qualifications. I find very little to disagree with in this:
“I guess we could have made it clearer in the piece that we’re not so much saying Dubai-bashing is unjustified — clearly it is — but that our/the West’s intense fascination with it perhaps motivated by our need to maintain and restore our own confidence in how we are facing the crisis, and our own urban/political/financial models.”
The question of the responsibility of the consultant versus the responsibility of the client is also an interesting and important one. As it happens, that’s really the only angle from which I’ve commented on Dubai before — the reason for that being a belief in the importance of focusing on problems which are closer at hand and which one has a relatively good understanding of before pointing out more distant problems. It’s relatively easy for me to understand the motivations and pressures of a Western consultant working in Dubai, and relatively difficult to understand the situation of an Emirati client, which means that I’m more interested in (and capable of usefully) critiquing the former. (That is something that I was not particularly clear about.)
All that said, Nam’s questions seem like good questions to me. Not ones that I’m particularly qualified to answer, but I’m quite skeptical of the fusion of government and corporate interests in the States, and my default posture would be to think the same way about Dubai — even if alternative arrangements are somehow more unrealistic than in the States.
I haven’t commented here yet because, as Rob noted, I have a copy of Al Manakh II which I am working through and plan on considering at length in a post sometime in the future. I would note, though, that it’s clear the perception of the two Al Manakhs as a just bit of cheerleading by Rem and the gang for an economic and social system which was happy to fund architectural whimsy doesn’t do justice to the nuance shown in at least the second Al Manakh (the only one I have).
Regarding the initial point of Rob’s post, I would just agree that it’s too bad that journalists resorted to easy (and probably, as Rory and Todd argue, reassuring to western readers) critique and schadenfreude, but that doesn’t make it universally unwarranted. If the criticism in the HuffPo article of Dubai-bashing journalism is held up as something which is interesting for what it shows about the psyche of western cultures watching the emergent middle east, I would agree; if it’s to “make criticism of Dubai wholly dismissible as a product of a collective desire to “get [ourselves] through a hard spell,” then I’d obviously find that flawed and problematic. It sounds like you guys (Rory and Todd) aren’t trying to make the latter point though, so I think we’re all good here…
Well summarised Stephen! And good to hear you’ve got your hands on the book and are giving it a thorough going over. Very much looking forward to hearing your thoughts on it if/when you come up with a post (no pressure).
On Rob’s point about taking this piece in isolation, pulling out articles on their own is certainly one of the tricker aspects of this HuffPo experiment. With the heft of 500+ pages of research behind you, I feel the riskier stuff seems to be moderated by its context. Which is of course another reason to do it.
As a brief response to Nam’s point about the distinction between (to be simplistic) ‘democratic’ and ‘state-driven’ models of commissioning — at risk of opening another can of worms — Timothy Moore and I have written on this idea in the context of Qatar over here. Again, we might be playing devil’s advocate a bit, but certainly considering Australia’s complete inability to get anything of substance done, perhaps we could stand to learn a thing or two from the Gulf?
And thanks again for keeping us on our toes!
Rory,
The end point of that Australia Design Review article is interesting. Seems to line up very well with the Unsolicited Architectures project you continue to develop. I think the key point therein is that rather than allowing the Western consensus, community and stakeholder driven model to be an impediment, the architect/designer needs to interject themselves earlier into said process. By creating a narrative they can they hopefully encourage/shepherd the project from start to finish more easily/seamlessly through the perils of our less efficient model of development. A key issue with this model though is that i think the architect must go beyond simply doing researching and proposing a project. They need to actually actively engage with community (leaders, citizens and politicians) to create the demand/desire/consensus needed to move project forward. In an almost marketing/pr type manner.
That is if the goal is to actually build rather than just being a “research” exercise.
Relatedly,
Via BldBlog in NY Review of Books
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/aug/19/good-bye-dubai/?page=1
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