AN-ARCHETYPE DUBAI.

An interpretation of a global city.

Paper presented at the PCHE6 Preventive conservation of the human environment 6 Architecture as part of the landscape, Warsaw, Poland 2016

Romano Martini, Unicusano, Italy , Cristiano Luchetti, American University of Sharjah, UAE

Abstract

Dubai, spatially grown at an impressive speed onto the "tabula rasa" of the desert, imposes its emergence in the world in a "regime of competitiveness" with the new global metropolis. The city depicts itself through iconic and excessive buildings, a wide range of exclusive areas, luxury hotels and shopping centers, crowded infrastructural networks, corporations, and growing multi-ethnic demography. Not differently than another contemporary world metropolis, the Emirati city shows a spectacular peculiar urban landscape in permanent expansion. Is there, therefore, a "unique model" of modern urban expression that manifests itself all over the world?

The new post-industrial metropolis tends to homologate themselves in a representation of the city as "non-place" (Auge' 1995), or perpetual oscillation between being "a-topies" and showing built "utopias." It is their form, in the ongoing transformation to appear as the central figure of places and regulating vectors of possible (or impossible) construction processes of a collective urban identity. This is an issue that exceeds the boundaries of architecture and urban planning, and it plays a full part in themes and issues addressed by philosophy, social/political sciences, and aesthetics. The complexity of the subject has imposed a multidisciplinary approach to this work.

Speaking of urban space in the contemporary world, we notice how one comes, very often, across paradoxes. On the one hand, the world is never as urbanized as now it appears on the whole planet. On the other hand, by analyzing a reality like Dubai, with its specific characteristics, the real image of the city seems more and vaguer and devoid of meaning. Being aware that referring to the notions of "city," "metropolis," and "urban space," we refer to the concept of "forms of life," we proceed to try to verify to what point the classic definitions may still be usable. Like any new generic city, Dubai had suddenly appeared out of nowhere. Its history was too "weak" to provide the foundations for a distinctive local identity. However, like every urban context, Dubai remains a space of relations, informal gatherings, and unexpected encounters. As a living form, it is defined as a network of social ties between the speed and slowness of movement of goods, money, and labor. Indeed, it is the existence of these immutable human bodies that might produce resistance to the domain of the generic city as a-topical space. In this paper, we will explore these issues by analyzing several different variations and possible uses of the concept of "Heterotopia" (immanent "product" of Dubai and counter-discourse between Foucault and Lefebvre). Finally, we will introduce the hypothesis of an "Anarcheotopia" (and Anarcheotopology) as a tool of critical analysis to review the changes taking place in the urban development of Dubai.

Keywords: Dubai, Metropolis, Urbanism, Identity, Architecture, Heterotopia, Philosophy

Born on the tabula rasa desert and grown at an impressive speed (vertically and horizontally), Dubai imposes its presence at a global level. It occurs in full harmony with today's regime of neoliberal competitiveness. At the same time, while the city expresses its singularity, it is still similar, in many ways, to other aspiring world-class cities. The very same human settlement, which, a half-century ago, was a tiny fishermen village, nowadays manifests itself as a nouvelle Ville Lumiére in permanent expansion.

With its wide range of exclusive areas, gated communities, luxury hotels, skyscrapers, and huge shopping malls, the metropolis of the Gulf is a large ensemble of enclaves for different social classes and, at the same time, a crossroads of growing multi-ethnic demography. All of this only recently occurred with an apparent absence of social conflicts. Like other contemporary world-cities, the Emirate seems to turn the current urban condition into a majestic "Debordian" spectacle. Has Dubai realized a postmodern dream? Is this "Globalizing-City" an Eden for "archistars" and hungry urban developers? In the global mainstream, many "experts" have celebrated their virtues in this sense.

According to Henri Lefebvre, buildings and the urbanity of the modern world are no longer matching the "human scale," because «man" has changed scale and the measure of yesteryear (village and city) has been transformed beyond measure» (1996:83). Thus, urbanism becomes the new ideology of formal/abstract and hierarchical rationalization of space: That is simply an exchange value imposed by capitalism versus a social use-value of the everyday city. About thirty years later, Koolhaas depicts this trend by using the "Big Large" as the constructed «thoughtless energy of the purely quantitative.» Furthermore: «Bigness is where architecture becomes both most and least architectural: most because of the enormity of the object; least through the loss of autonomy –it becomes instrument of other forces, it depends.» He proceeds from photography to cynical recording operations of an automatic control, a sort of procès sans sujet: «Bigness is impersonal: the architect is no longer condemned to stardom. [...] Bigness no longer needs the city: it competes with the city; it pre-empts the city, or better, it is the city [our italics]. If urbanism generates potential and architecture exploits it, Bigness enlists the generosity of urbanism against the meanness of architecture. Bigness = urbanism vs. architecture. » (Koolhaas, 1995a)

Bigness «is» a "Generic City" (Koolhaas, 1995b): it stands for the principle of identity: "A=A" of the logical form, translated into sheer tautological quantity, as a void essence[1]. It is all that remains of spatiality as residue, once freed from "context" from which identities were originated. It is Junkspace. A lack of foundation and form, without the need for mediation with "content". Space today «is sealed, held together not by structure but by skin, like a bubble. » (Koolhaas, 2001:176). Its style is the transparency (lack of differentiation between "internal" and "external", "private" and "public"). Its design concept and construction specifications are less and less "authorial." Its primary medium is the void, impalpable, and invisible as air conditioning. Authoritarianism without author: «Fascism minus dictator.» (Koolhaas, 2001:181). Could this concept define a new form of metropolitan identity?

Lefebvre was writing about the crisis of the "industrial city," mainly referring to the Western-European context. Koolhaas seems to provide a theory about the current global governance over the development of post-industrial metropolis: «a large proportion of Generic Cities is Asian […] One day it will be absolutely exotic again, this discarded product of Western civilization, through a re-semanticization that its very dissemination brings in its wake». The purely quantitative (Bigness), cannot define a specific "original model" or a real shape to provide Identity (Koolhaas is obvious: «Identity is like a mousetrap,» 1995b: 1250,1248).

Dubai has not experienced any "industrial revolution" as the leading force for urbanization -Lefebvre's central thesis-, but it has hastily jumped to the current state of post-industrial world-class-city. Thence: is Dubai a "Koolhaasian" Generic City? Does its urban space, on the broader Middle-East, act for a majestic «discarded product of Western civilization, through a re-semanticization»?

Architecture is not confined to drawings: Firstly, it is linked to the project; and secondly to the building of forms and images. A totality, as the urban space imagined with its places, voids, and buildings, is well represented and articulated in its constructability: between «Physics and the Logos, between theory and practice and, in practice, the separation between Praxis (action on human groups), Poiesis (creation of "oeuvres"), Techné (activities endowed with techniques directed towards productivity). » (Lefebvre, 1996:87).

In this light, architecture had close relations with the Logos of philosophy and with the artistic Poiesis (production/creation of works/oeuvres). Moreover, it has always maintained a close relationship with Praxis (when the human action is the final goal) deployable in a well-defined Topos, which was precisely the city ideally conceived. (see Lefebvre, 1996:101).

Dealing with the Praxis requires the analysis of trajectories and carriers, histories and anthropological geographies that have characterized urban developments: we should draw a diagram about the complicated relationship between speed and slowness (see Deleuze, 2003:99-110). The human experience that ties architecture and urbanism is undoubtedly that of spatiality: It refers both to physically existing bodies and ideas. Urbanism ideally transmits/expresses an order of space (both as arrangement, either as a command). The order of space refers to an order of times of life. Imagined lines and paths, materialize in construction of buildings and infrastructure, where complex social relations can take place. Forms and order dialectically interact, mediating between real space and concrete living experiences. A city is a place where spatial, social relationships occur, it is the "place" of the implementation of "rational" orders (economic, legal, and political): «The city is a mediation among mediations. » (Lefebvre, 1996:101).

The city remains -at least ideally- linked to a form and a function to create a possible urban identity. In this sense, the city has been a model for the realization of works and buildings, as well as for the formalization of social relations. It is a prototype functional to the ordination of social space. In ancient Greek philosophy, the term Archè (αρχή = "principle; origin") refers to the "primordial substance" from which all other substances derived. Archè is both chronological principle (time priority) and the principle of value (axiological priority). Furthermore, such origin/principle ended up also showing the "foundation" or the "raison d'etre" of a "true" thinkable reality compared to which all unique and sensitive things are nothing more than "transitional appearances "(Archè as an ontological-epistemological priority). An archetype is therefore bound to Logos, Form, and Discourse: it is an order which gathers and combines a multiplicity that arises primarily as materiality. It is both mean and goal, a mediation among many (it's "qualitative" rather than "quantitative").

If the quantitative becomes the only mediation which operates as a pure dimension of space, and if there is a process that apparently can operate without subjects, is it possible to find an identifying "archetype" (quality)? Like others, "Generic cities" Dubai does not show (on its surface) any physical organizing center, nor an urban center which could be identified as "public space" (showing the same crisis of the concept of "center" as historical cities in the western world). Like each global new city or post-city, Dubai pops out from a tabula rasa, imposed "from above." In this sense, its urban form seems to be the main subject/object of a continuous transformation that reaches the formless: It appears as an a-topical city (is that a city with no places?). The constantly-quantitative-changing form becomes the regulatory of collective identities and social relations. Compared to traditional European cities, modern metropolises are characterized precisely by this lack of foundation, by the inability to grasp the origin, the identity, the history (and the "fabric"). Everything appears to be a particular outcome of an arbitrary political decision which it is imposed from above (fascism without dictatorship?).

Perhaps, the uncanny as "dislanding" (Unheimliche, in Freud's Lexicon) is the aesthetic sense (image + sensory) that can better describe the first experience of a visitor to Dubai. At first sight, it is impossible to identify a sort of Archè, able to explain Dubai's "non-foundations": How could we understand its volumetric explosion, or being the meltdown of the modernization by traditional/modern categories? Therefore, the Anarchetype-Dubai does not only indicate the absence of a tangible principle/model: as a supernova, one is unable to clearly understand how Dubai has suddenly arisen and how it has been able to develop so quickly. The "roots" are not to be found in the desert. What appears is a continuous movement of dislocation that implies a "form" (unformed) of urban development. It overcomes the notion of being rooted in one place. The sheer spaciousness is a free land of conquest, in which the imagination or the virtual representation of the "project" can unfold without brakes, being freed from the straitjacket of Identity, History, and Centre (see Koolhaas, 1995b). It is not merely a "non-place" (atopy or utopia). With its continuous vertical and horizontal displacement, the anarchetype-Dubai is primarily a heterotopia –in reverse, yet immanent- that is realized in speed: the imagined/represented elsewhere, product-made (Brand) and then indefinitely reproduced (consumed) in its trans-formations.

It would be misleading to analyze Dubai today from an archaeological approach and resurrect models from the past. The an-archetypology invites us to detach ourselves from an order of discourse constructed through a traditional way to understand history, guiding the eye towards an ideal model of "linear" and "progressive" development, on the crest of a dialectic between continuity and discontinuity. (see Lefebvre, 1996:105). Michel Foucault stressed the need for an archeological gaze. The action of digging under "stratifications" of discursive formations, could tell about a "history" and arrange archives of événements (differences and ruptures that occur as "isolated incidents") excluded from the ruling "Ordre du discours." However, Foucault himself detects the limits of such a method. An archive remains a collection of speeches. It remains the separation and the detachment of a "Logos" that merely "describe-photograph" what it collects. Nevertheless, which movements have produced a "fact"? To archeology must then be sided a genealogy able to cast doubt on the "Need to Belong" (Identification). The descriptive analysis of the past must be prolonged through a problematization of how "we become who we are." (i.e., a genealogical approach)[1]. In this perspective, the Archè would not coincide with the genesis, but rather with the origin. It is a swirling point that defines the historical course of what is born and of what is present. Thus, the source is not a precise traceable moment between sedimented layers, but a flashing point of intelligibility of each historical phenomenon, graspable even at the end, or even after the end of it. In this sense, perhaps, the image/representation of modern Dubai will probably survive his continuous trans-formations. From Anarchetypology to Anarchaeology?

Against reality conceived as a one-dimensional sphere, based on ascending or descending chronological coordinates, Foucault opposes a geometrization of a dynamic field of forces: relationships between knowledge and power in a particular space. It is within these relationships that "social order," is formed and establishes itself topologically through the exclusion/inclusion of another variable regulatory order (the "inside" and "outside" Logos-Topos). The utopia does not exist somewhere, in a real place: one has to invent it. Its privileged position is that of language; it is mostly the space of the story: words can be located in a place that "does not exist," a different one from the experienced. Utopias always refer to "places without place," and they replicate in an unreal space (ideal or mythical), the same real space. In other words, utopia is not different from real space. Instead, it is its extension, its double which is imagined and represented through its potential perfectibility or perfection.

Heterotopology pushes thinking in terms of space. Freeing it from the cage of an epistemological temporality interpreted according to forms of "evolution," "continuity," and "organicism." Thinking in terms of "other space or "counter-space" -Heterotopologically- means to refrain from specific order-imposed regimes as a discursive formation. Heterotopias outline a possible "counter-history." Every human experience does not occur in blank spaces. Heterotopias are localizable. They define real places: they materialize in the area of the relationship between "words" and "things." In a designated space, a code of formalization and standardization of behaviors is challenged. Heterotopization means to elaborate on other practices (individually or collectively): Heterotopia is a counter-space that produces another relational experience. Heterotopias change the intended use of the place: they are a «sorte d' utopie réalisée. » (see Foucault, 1984)

While Foucault thinks of a space of relationship, ultimately "metaphorical," between words and things, Lefebvre identifies a dynamic-dialectical relationship between heterotopias and isotopies: «Isotopies are defined at each level: political, religious, commercial, etc. space. About these isotopies, other levels are uncovered as heterotopies. Meanwhile, at each level, spatial oppositions are uncovered which enter in this relationship of isotopy-heterotopy. […] Only the analysis of the relationship of inclusion-exclusion, of belonging or non-belonging to a particular space of the city enables us to approach these phenomena of great importance for a theory of the city. » (Lefebvre, 1996:113). In this relationship are at stake issues of identity, inclusion/exclusion, as well as practical constructions of real differences that can "take place." The concept of heterotopia here indicates possible alternative trajectories from shared experiences of urban space.

The "non-places" by Marc Augé designate interchangeable social spaces, in which individuals would not do any experience of the self since they find themselves immersed in anonymity: the "non-place" is the topological outcome of mere passive consumption. Nevertheless, the "non-places" refer to a relational dimension of space: They merge, especially in areas of transition, into a representation of everyday life, defined by codes of formal behavior ("normality"). Even heterotopia refers to one relational dimension: It is a space editable in other, not pre-seen nor represented; it is practicable and in close dependence on relationships and behavior not formally codified.

Heterotopia is as symbolic as it is real: it is always tied to a transformation of the self through lived space. According to Foucault, the human body defines an objective assignment of the self into a specific space: the "I" as the body is an accurate allocation of the self as a place with no depth. The "I" cannot avoid identifying itself: one cannot leave the body "where it is" and go somewhere else. The body is a "Topia" that restricts the "I." On another hand, heterotopia expresses and represents a promise of escape, of rootless mobility, with no identity bounds or "laws" (as it would happen on pirate ships or places of transit).

Dubai is filled with places of transit (busy streets, hotels, malls, amusement parks, etc.): it is space in-betweenness. It is undoubtedly a "brand"-world-city devoted to consumerism. Its land area is almost entirely dedicated to an immense and perpetual movement of material and immaterial commodities (products, services, Labour-power, and human relationships). Its infrastructure (real and virtual) innervates an urban area in permanent expansion. Dubai is an urban spatiality where excessive local and global "wealth" can be multiplied, impoverished, or continuously reinvested. In its being iconic, it reflects the desire (not so much the need) to be connected with the "rest of the world." With its spectacularity, Dubai leads one to be watched, especially from the "outside," as part of "what might happen" in the global world at a later time. The city does not respect a principle or an exemplary model: Dubai is a not-original archetype. The particular places and frequent "big events" allow us to find and experience what "should or could happen" elsewhere. Moreover, everything "is happening" here and nowhere else: Dubai as immanent heterotopy in reverse.

The Orientalism of the new millennium emerges as Westernism that one looks through a mirror: the East is no longer the other non-Western, "mysterious," "traditional," and "timeless." Suddenly some Arab societies are no longer described as "traditional," "regressive," and unable to walk in the path of "Civilization." With its spectacular buildings, its resorts, its thematic architecture, and enclaves (gated communities or camps for foreign workers), Dubai shows in its morphology an idea that is almost lost in the Western world: The absolute trust on projects and their ordination/rationalization/division of urban space. Dubai builds the dream of a hyper/postmodernism. The spectacular Dubai is "future-oriented." It is a global de-territorialized metropolis, combining '"exoticism" and "traditionalism" with global trends. It gathers well managed and governed ethnic-social differences, each living in their spaces and their "places" of residence and transit (=reterritorialization of bodies in different enclaves). Stories become gadget-souvenirs in luxurious souks juxtaposed (as "picturesque") to restored traditional neighborhoods (Bastakiya). As "urban space," Dubai is invented, and it is always re-inventable. It is not a space that rotates around a center or one that crashes against an insuperable limit. The urbanization of Dubai proceeds according to a logic of obstacle vs. space: its development undergoes "something" that is, ideally, to be crossed. Dubai is a space-threshold continually passed by volumes of quantitative dimension. It can expand according to a reason that remains "invisible," and that can assimilate and reproduce the exception and the event as a rule of order.

What identity shall we attribute to a perpetually mutating reality? What stratifications and historical information may we collect in logos from a continually reinvented reality from the "origin" as Dubai? Archaeology works by diggings: layer after layer, it gives light to a Civilization, to the history of a "city." Which "History" could we find in Dubai? The nouvelle Ville lumière is blinding. Perhaps one should think of an-archaeological approach tied to experienced places: an an-archaeotopology as a cartography of changing relationships between topies of moving bodies and the space around them: «Only the diagram gives a bearable version […] no "original" condition»(Koolhaas, 2001:182).

[1] «It is therefore not an empiricism that runs through the genealogical project, nor does it lead to a positivism, in the normal sense of the word. It is a way of playing local, discontinuous, disqualified, or non-legitimized knowledge off against the unitary theoretical instance that claims to be able to filter them, organize them into a hierarchy, organize them in the name of a true body of knowledge […]. Genealogies are therefore not positivistic returns to a form of science that is more attentive or more accurate, Genealogies are, quite specifically, anitisciences. » (Foucault, 2003:9)

[2] «It is therefore not an empiricism that runs through the genealogical project, nor does it lead to a positivism, in the normal sense of the word. It is a way of playing local, discontinuous, disqualified, or non-legitimized knowledge off against the unitary theoretical instance that claims to be able to filter them, organize them into a hierarchy, organize them in the name of a true body of knowledge […]. Genealogies are therefore not positivistic returns to a form of science that is more attentive or more accurate, Genealogies are, quite specifically, anitisciences. » (Foucault, 2003:9)

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