Content uploaded by Fadi Shayya
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Fadi Shayya on Nov 10, 2016
Content may be subject to copyright.
101
Speculations and Questions on Dubaization
100
Speculations and Questions on Dubaization
Fadi Shayya
We can’t begin with nothing because, logically,
nothingness is the culmination of something 1
— Jean Baudrillard
When architect Yasser Elsheshtawy introduced the term Dubaization in 2004, it
was meant to highlight both the “allure and the pitfalls of Dubai’s particular mode
of urbanism.”2 The term became associated with building tall, big, and thematic
architectures3 such as Burj Khalifa,4 Dubailand, and the World Islands. But,
building tall, big, and thematic is not a new phenomenon, although its association
with Dubai has been intensied by the contemporary circulation of urban images.
What distinguishes the city, however, is a twofold model of rapid urbanisation
coupled with agglomerated symbols of capital and power. This has led Dubai to
function as a synecdoche for the oil-driven cities of the Arabian Peninsula aspiring
to compete in the global neoliberal marketplace. Its continuous making, processes,
and products, meanwhile, have given birth to a new terminology: Dubaization.
This term has since become an indispensable signier of a certain bombastic
architectural production,5 and the world it translates.6
So, can we think of Dubai with a fresh perspective, perhaps through
Baudrillard’s assertion that “it is the empty space that should increase the symbolism in
architecture?” Can we perceive Dubai as an object in empty space, a something that is
not possible without its binary nothingness? Can we attribute the semiotic etymology of
Dubaization to the symbolic nothingness of its desert and sea landscapes?
There is undoubtedly an idiosyncratic satisfaction resulting from
lling surplus space. Dubai, however, hosts its different architectural and urban
experiments in a rather concentrated area. The trifold spectacle of its experiments
occupies part land (the horizontal expansion), part sea (the reclaimed Islands),
and part air (the sprouting towers). I would argue, however, that the scale and
density of this clustering—the entirety of Dubai—against the once empty desert
and seascapes—the much cited nothingness of Dubai—is what gives meaning to
Dubaization. There is room to reconsider Dubaization as an act of creation and
not just a mode of production. A closer look at landll engineering in Dubai sheds
some light on this matter.
Modern land lling, or land reclamation, started in the rst half of the
20th century in the Netherlands. The twofold mission was to protect existing land
from the sea, and to increase urban land area. This grand project, including the
Zuiderzee and Delta Works, is today considered a wonder of modern engineering
which helped support the growing density of the Netherlands. Over half a century
later, Dutch dredging and marine engineers were called in to design the reclamation
of Dubai’s articial islands, this time purely for the sake of real estate. The process
of designing and building the remarkable Palm Islands quickly became part of the
new language of Dubaization. This term would soon expand to describe similar
projects across the globe, from Federation Island Sochi (designed in the shape of
the Russian Federation),7 to the mushrooming malls of Turkey,8 among others.
But, why had we never heard of Netherlandisation or Dutchisation?
Firstly, the new projects took place in Dubai within a global context of media
dominance, which was not available half a century ago. In Dubai, reclamation was
part of a greater visionary project to become ‘a world class city’—a newsworthy
process of exceptional magnitude that repurposed oil revenues to build a more
sustainable service economy. Reclamation in the Netherlands, meanwhile, was
spatially more functional than extravagant. Last is the quasi-xenophobic discourse
that employs Dubaization to orientalise, exoticise, and pathologise Dubai’s relative
upstart status against the normativity of the Old World.9
But, let us consider Dubaization as textual semiosis, as language. Grand
plans to build cities have been, and will remain, a prime human endeavour. What
makes envisioning Dubai different is inherent in what Slavoj Žižek identies as
the violence of language:
103 102
FADI SHAYYASpeculations and Questions on Dubaization
Language simplies the designated thing, reducing it to a single
feature. It dismembers the thing, destroying its organic unity,
treating its parts and properties as autonomous. It inserts the
thing into a eld of meaning which is ultimately external to it10
In this context, Dubaization can be understood as a semiotic reduction.
It is the urban fantasy of spectacular development in post-oil Dubai which
nevertheless requires the spatial vacancy of pre-oil times to exist. Anything can
be imagined and realised in the fertile nothingness of the desert, from palm and
world-shaped islands, to mega theme parks, the world’s tallest building, snow in
the desert, golf courses under the burning sun, and all types of ‘free zones.’
The requisite vacant space recurs in almost all rendered visuals of the
city’s architecture. New buildings are always portrayed against a vacant horizontal
desert, and reclaimed land against a vast blue sea. At Ski Dubai, meanwhile,
nothingness operates with a scalar hierarchy; the indoor ski slope exists within a
sea of sand, and Dubai exists within a desert. Unreal building projects are portrayed
against the real landscape until they become one and the same, a Baudrillardian
hyperreality. However, it is essential to read the development logic of both city
and idea apart from the reductiveness of language. It is essential to read beyond
the binaries of desert and seascapes against a mega urban centre; the stereotype
of Third World against a state-of-the-art city; the disparity of Bedouins against
Forbes billionaires and Fast Company CEOs.
From space, an astronaut’s photograph captures Dubai’s night lights
against a landscape of darkness, which fades into the nothingness of an absolute
desert. The brilliant lighting of the city contrasts sharply with both the dark Arabian
Gulf to the northwest, and largely undeveloped and unlit areas to the southeast.11
This nothingness ostensibly functions as a tabula rasa, enabling the creation of
something new. Yet the desert and sea were never empty parcels, just vacant land.
The former is what Julia Cezrniak describes as the complex landscape with all its
nonliving and living components, while the latter is the “building lots—available
parcels bound by legal demarcations driven by property ownership.”12 From
this perspective, Dubaization-as-reduced to a spectacular deed departs from the
premise of lots—the very logic of Dubai’s becoming, and not its formation.
Dubai’s relatively recent emergence denies it the credibility of history,
while the agglomeration of high-end, high-rise and high-price tag development
grants it reputations such as junkspace, non-place, theme park. Beyond the
different descriptions, however, how can Dubai prompt us to critically think about,
and react to meanings and possibilities for future growth in non-Western spheres?
.
Fadi Shayya is an urban planner, architect and writer. He is the editor of At the
Edge of the City and coordinator of discursiveformations.net.
105 104
FADI SHAYYA
1 Baudrillard, J., & Nouvel, J. (2006). Absolute Architecture. In F. Proto (Ed.), Mass. Identity.
Architecture: Architectural Writings of Jean Baudrillard (pp. 19-35). Chichester:
Wiley-Academy.
2 Elsheshtawy, Y. (2012). Dubaization: Reections on Middle Eastern Urbanism, Inspired by
Dubai. Retrieved Jan 8, 2013, from http://dubaization.com/dubaization
3 Alraouf, A. (2006). The Emergence of a New Urban Brand “Dubaization”.
Kulturaustausch(3), 25-31.
4 The 828m-high Burj Khalifa ignited regional competition in Jeddah’s 1007m high Kingdom Tower, due to be completed in 2018. Of the
2013 arrivals, New York’s highest 541m One World Trade Center, lags behind, while Chinese Changsha MN’s Sky City proposes to do
only slightly better at 838m. See Skyscraper Source Media. (2013, February 19). Diagrams. Retrieved from
SkyscraperPage.com: http://skyscraperpage.com/
5 Elsheshtawy, Y. (2012). Dubaization: Reections on Middle Eastern Urbanism, Inspired by
Dubai. Retrieved Jan 8, 2013, from http://dubaization.com/dubaization
6 Baudrillard, J., & Nouvel, J. (2006). Absolute Architecture. In F. Proto (Ed.), Mass. Identity.
Architecture: Architectural Writings of Jean Baudrillard (pp. 19-35). Chichester:
Wiley-Academy.
7 Federation Island Sochi. (2007). Retrieved from Erick Van Egeraat: http://
www.erickvanegeraat.com/static/projects/federation_island_sochi.htm
8 Temelkuran, E. (2012, May 11). ‘Dubaiziation’ versus... what? Retrieved from Al-Akhbar
English: http://english.al-akhbar.com/node/7252
9 Gill, A. A. (2011, April). Culture: Dubai on Empty. Retrieved from Vanity Fair: http://
www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/04/dubai-201104
10 Žižek, S. (2008). Violence. New York: Picador.
11 NASA. (2012, March 8). City Lights of Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Retrieved January 8,
2013, from Visible Earth: A Catalog of NASA Images and Animations of Our Home
Planet: http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view.php?id=77360
12 Czerniak, J. (2006). Looking Back at Landscape Urbanism: Speculations on Site. In C.
Waldheim (Ed.), The Landscape Urbanism Reader (pp. 105-123). New York:
Princeton Architectural Press.
