Mar 28, 07:09 am
Harvard GSD Workshop
Dubai: Emerging Critical Themes in Urban Planning and Design
Harvard Graduate School of Design Workshop, March 2006
Organized by Ahmed Kanna, Visiting Fellow
This workshop brings together scholars from the UAE and the GSD to discuss the fascinating and conceptually elusive case of Dubai. Aside from the recent tempest-in-a-teacup over the American ports, Dubai has recently been both intriguing and vexing professionals and students of urban planning, architecture, the human sciences, and the city more generally. On the one hand, there are whole-hearted exponents of the supposed “model” that Dubai proposes. On the other, there seem to be observers who dismiss the city as, in the words of the New Yorker’s Ian Parker, simply “weird,” a case of Arabian Gulf oil modernization on steroids. In this workshop, presenters try to steer a middle ground, avoiding both the ideological position of mere celebration and the perhaps ethnocentric one of wholesale condemnation. The questions that are posed are: does Dubai constitute a novel model of urban planning and design? If so, how is this different from both regional and global precedents? If not, what commonalities with other urban and design models does Dubai draw on to situate itself politically and economically? Finally, is a reduction of Dubai urbanism to its economic logic – whether that of the “oil state” or that of neoliberalism, etc. – sufficient to a comprehension of such an urban context?
Panel 1: Structural and Contextual Considerations
Moderated by Hashim Sarkis
Stephen Ramos
Gareth Doherty
Yasser Elsheshtawi
Panel 2: Immanent Realities: Tourism, Mobility, Utopia?
Moderated by Rodolfe El-Khoury
Virginie Lefebvre
Ahmed Kanna
George Katodrytis
George Katodrytis deploys the dual concept of “Photoshop Urbanism / Constructed Fantasy” to introduce a reading of Dubai which emphasizes fiction, utopia, and fantasy.
Dubai – Palm Island Mosque and Cultural Center proposal (Project by Katodrytis, Lehnmann, Al Najjar)
Project by GEORGE KATODRYTIS / STUDIONOVA
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