‘Projected Futures for the Commons in Dubai’ at the Seoul Biennale ‘Imminent Commons’: Considering how Dubai’s unique diversity presents both challenges and opportunities for urbanism

An installation conceived and curated by George Katodrytis, Kevin Mitchell, Maryam Mudhaffar, and Mei Chang, at the prestigious Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2017. The exhibition addresses questions on the future of the city through projects and urban narratives. Entitled ‘Projected Futures for the Commons in Dubai’ it explores the Biennale’s theme of ‘Imminent Commons’ by considering how Dubai’s unique diversity presents both challenges and opportunities for urbanism. The installation brings together emerging UAE-based architects and designers. In keeping with the Biennale’s focus on the future of cities in the face of social, ecological and technical transformation, the installation considers what is shared by residents of a city as culturally diverse as Dubai. Each of the contributors presents a proposal that addresses how parks and other amenities can be re-imagined to facilitate a sense of community among the many diverse cultures that live in Dubai. The proposals look to a future when Dubai will achieve its aspiration of reducing dependence on the automobile, allowing space currently occupied by parking to be repurposed into community-accessible amenities.

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. 

Photographs exhibited in Sharjah and Berlin

The contemporary UAE city demonstrates an accelerated form of urbanism: spectacular, telegenic, a constructed leisure land. Everything has become aesthetic. This aestheticization of the world, Baudrillard suggests, entails a collapse of aesthetic standards. Instead of aesthetic judgment, there is a fascination with excess. This acceleration leads to its opposite, a cultural meltdown and turns social space into a fetishized abstraction. Welcome to the emerging city of the 21st century. These aerial photographs are real yet uncanny like detailed models, detached from their surrounding reality. Streets are clean, figures and cars look like models, palm trees look plastic and some detail is highlighted, all like military surveillance. The fetishzed urban image in now turning blurred and melancholic, negating its aesthetic condition and pointing to a new direction: inward, small, human, neighborhood, sensuality and a kind of defiance of unwanted reality. The city’s simulated monuments are made to look artificial, in total defiance of their reality; the city is an avatar of itself. By photographing from a helicopter using a special lens and other filters chooses what one really likes. It is like text, we read one line at a time, yet the mental picture is total and is gradually fabricated.