THE CITY RISES. oN DUBAI AND GLOBAL CITIES

In ARCHTHEO'15 IX. THEORY AND HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURE, 379. Istanbul: Dakam, 2015.

[ISBN: 978-605-9207-10-2]

Abstract

The Global/World City of Dubai appears as a reified stream of perceptions and representations (“Spectacle,” in Guy Debord’s words). To highlights its suitability for being a real Global/World City, the Emirate fosters hyper-modernist urban aesthetics and majestic architecture through the agglomeration of urban events such as Skyscrapers, Shopping Malls, huge residential developments, and massive infrastructures. Among the most iconic, those buildings and structures, more than any others, are representing the dynamics of general global capitalism (implementing themselves in a particular “place” at the same time). Is the “Natural” becoming, more and more, a fake “Artificial”? Sense or Nonsense? Buildings and structures can accumulate and concentrate productive networks of social times of life in a massive area of available space (i.e., the Tabula rasa desert of the UAE). Transnational companies require “places”; venues for gathering their production and consumption needs to sustain and promote their business. Are these “places” the new World/Global Cities? Indeed, they get into the global Arena, which is the race of capitalistic competitiveness.

Then, for whom modern Dubai is built? In the historical mainstream of Western Thought, Mundus revealed a given purpose: a narration aimed for the making of a certain perceptible and communicable sense. That sense relies upon acting subjectivities and their works: the human praxis and opus. The notion of Globus would seem to indicate a more “neutral” term. One imagines it just like a volumetric sphere, covered by vertical and horizontal lines, which are indefinitely traceable (like in a quiet space, as the desert). Globalization’s dynamics and subjectivities materially push over traditional limits. Many modern ideas as “boundary” and “people” (ethnical or cultural identities based) appear currently overtaken in reality. These same notions have characterized current developments of the “State-nation.” Nowadays, the newer Cities-state - the Global Cities- are imposing and showing themselves as the peak of a “future” which is the “present” of now (and in the western tales of the “historical improvement”; although it occurs mainly in the Eastern side of the World: for instance Dubai). Eventually, World Cities display themselves as an urban landscape of consumption. In this “world,” Dubai is both City-state and Global-City, but Global/World Cities look like Metropolis rather than the ancient Polis. Metropolis means dislocation/displacement: by establishing colonies and conquering newer territories. However, the “colony” is not appearing as such.

Moreover, the “center-periphery” model has been reshaped. Every outskirt could be a center in a Global City. However, it will be an enclave (or gated community) outlined by a specific and different, ethnical or social, class identity above all. Global cities only seem to be polycentric; instead, they are hierarchically laid out. Many stories, so many ethnic groups and many places = no history, no ethnicity, non-place. Spaces rather than Times. Dubai seems a realized postmodernist and globalist dream in its paradoxical way. The western neoliberal-capitalism implements itself in the Arab Sheikdom. Without apparent historical origins (in the Western sense of the term), the Gulf Emirate is an An-archaeological city. We will proceed through a diachronic and synchronic consideration about Metropolis and Global City notions, to emphasize standard features and current Dubai singularity compared with other World/Global Cities.

"Tutta l'arte sta nel far sembrare che tutto sia vero quando invece tutto è finto" (G.L. Bernini).

An objectified vision of the inverted world. A real city as a moment of the false

1. The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation; 2.Images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream, and the former unity of life is lost forever. the reality unfolds in a new generality as a pseudo-world apart, solely as an object of contemplation. The tendency toward the specialization of images of the world finds its highest expression in the world of the autonomous image, where deceit deceives itself. The spectacle in its generality is a concrete inversion of life, and, as such, the autonomous movement of non-life […]; 4.The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images; 5. The spectacle cannot be understood either as a deliberate distortion of the visual world or as a product of the technology of the mass dissemination of images. It is far better viewed as a weltanschauung that has been actualized, translated into the material realm a world view transformed into a physical force […]; 9. In a world that really has been turned on its head, truth is a moment of falsehood." (Debord, 1992, our translation). Debord was an obscure prophet of the contemporaneity. His first thesis, in The Society of the Spectacle, is articulated from a logically-abstract position. However, those formulations build a critical point of view, which is very penetrating, even today. An effective way to sort data and experiences of reality. A reality that increasingly moves away from the concrete into dominating abstractions. To quote Karl Marx: "real abstractions." By its nature and dynamic, the city is the principal place where real abstractions on our daily lives can be implemented. The city is the dwelling space. It is also space of the possible configurations and modulations of the complex relationships that build social living (textures and compositions, or divisions and separations). Needs, desires, passions, and tastes can be satisfied and fulfilled -abstractly or concretely- in a city. It would be enough to walk around the glittering Dubai, a real Global City and nouvelle Ville Lumiére, to understand how the reality of the "built," and its style, are blatantly detached from the tangible and possible experience of living and of dwelling in this world. As Rem Koolhaas wrote in his famous essay: "Bigness transforms the city from a summation of certainties into an accumulation of mysteries. What you see is no longer what you get." (Koolhaas, 1995a). The iconic nature is one of the hallmarks of the city, and it appears to assume its independent existence. In the Gulf Emirate, the spectacle looks achieved (Debord), as a "social relationship between people that is mediated by images." His mega buildings, huge shopping malls, and hotels (up to seven stars) bear witness to this, and they remind us. However, the viewing angles through which one can frame and read the city of Dubai are various. There are not only archistars points of view to read Dubai. They are celebrating the dynamism of the hypermodern, and the magnificence of its facilities and buildings. As a Filipino girl (one of the many immigrant workers, the vast majority of the actual population of Dubai) confided to a "The Independent" reporter: "Everything in Dubai is fake. Everything you see. Trees are fake, the workers' contracts are fake, the islands are fake, the smiles are fake - even the water is fake [...]. I think Dubai is like an oasis. It is an illusion, not real. You think you have seen water in the distance, but you get close, and you only get a mouthful of sand" (Hari, 2009). Nevertheless, this is not sufficient to understand why Dubai is today there, and it is as it is. A testimony, even if sincere and real, is not enough to explain the reasons why Dubai has fully achieved the status of Global City. In front of the buildings that make up the landscape of the Gulf emirate, one feels already pointless, wondering, "how was it possible to do all this?" Rather, one acknowledges: "They have done all this!" with a mixed feeling of wonder and bewilderment sometimes pushed to the limit of the uncanny (a sense of familiarity that is perceived as alien). Nevertheless, Koolhaas writes in the Generic City: "Compared to the classical city, the Generic City is sedated, usually perceived from a stationary position. Instead of concentration -simultaneous presence- in the Generic City, individual "moments" are spaced far apart to create a trance of almost unnoticeable aesthetic experiences [It] acts like a potent drug; it induces a hallucination of the normal." (Koolhaas, 1995b: 1250). It is not a potentiality, but an already completed act. It is almost a mystical experience: "Impossible, yet it happens; it is there, and I can get through!" In one of the vast lobby of the numerous malls or hotels or one of the many high-rise buildings, we feel like in a big incubator. Those who enter seem fascinated by a sudden awakening. Almost as if they were suddenly taken away from an empty life that can now be filled with "new dreams" (to admire, to enjoy, and to even buy). The freezing air-conditioning sharply defines the perception of entering into a different zone that seeks "inclusivity" by portraying "exclusivity." It is the transiting of a non-stop movement of goods and people: from the car to the scorching outside hot temperature, then again into an indoor, more welcoming environment. A cool dream of consumerism in another internal space. Therefore, it does not belong to an imagined or imaginable "future," getting rid of the heaviness of the tradition. It is not a "story" to revive. Among the enormous streets weaving through clusters of skyscrapers and parking areas (like a sort of Ferris wheel placed on the ground and spinning as a spiral), we are always internal to a reified symbol. An endless circulation that does develop the idea of a worldwide universality: a city to be observed through its melting/meltdown. It is a photographic city that freezes everything in an instant. It is a moving image of the eternalized "present." It comes true and paradoxically fixing moments by encompassing every possible experience. It is the experience of a great commercial and present consumerist time. Dubai: it is a city that rises and simultaneously "falls from the sky" as a postmodernist "no-narrative."

The City Rises. On the notion of future

The parable undertaken by modernity can be read as progressive development and expansion of power, and the governance of speed, as argued by Paul Virilio (1977) in his studies on the Dromocracy rate, abolishes time and space. Italian Futurists, at the beginning of the XX century, were very well aware of it. In their diverse theoretical and artistic productions (from Marinetti's "Manifesto" to other literary works, from paintings and sculptures to music and film), Futurists enhanced speed and celebrate movement. The "real" is made of action, relationships, and therefore must be thought in the instant that passes. This means that we need to perceive and grasp the "hic et nunc," the whole in motion, in every facet. From this point of view, to represent a running horse, it does not mean to paint it with four legs, but with eight or twenty of them. Keywords of Futurists will then be simultaneity and synesthesia, and syntropy. Each of these terms refers to the possibility of aesthetic experiences and, therefore, the potential practices of thinking, feeling, perceiving, living, and so on. They are all in an instant and the instant of the whole, at the same time in the same space/place.

The thought of an elsewhere - as space or as time - must, therefore, be able to reveal and express the "here" and the "now" (heterotopia). The City Rises is a painting (1910-1911) by Umberto Boccioni, one of the greatest exponents of the Italian Futurist movement. It reproduces the vision of the artist, from his apartment surroundings, of dynamics and changes: buildings under construction in the suburbs of Milan. In the background, emerging smokestacks and scaffolding are depicted. In the foreground, horses are running. It is a celebration of the modern dynamic industrialization that invests the urban reality. The industrial city is expanding and "rises." Light, representing dynamism, dissolves forms and shapes. The speed of light changes the properties of bodies and matter (the "relativity" of time and space by Einstein). Figures blend with the surrounding environment, as invested by the thrust of the industrialized movement and contemporary urbanization. The futuristic imagination is the highlight of a perception of time as a deep core of Western modernity. Traditional cultures perceived in their traditions (or, at least, in the "History") as a solid foundation, or at least a reference, to the present life. "Modernization," with its speed, celebrated by the Futurists, searches, and find its energy in the future intended as possible expansion. This tendency toward development is mostly based on the idea (illusion?) of unlimited energy resources in every corner of the planet and the exploitable human creative power. Creativity and planning - nerve, physical, and aesthetic resources of human beings- are, in fact, in this perspective, parts of that energy to be released. To destroy the past and to turn to the creation of the future. However, what happens when all or many of these resources are limited or less and less available?

A city that falls from above.

The development of the city of Dubai has benefited from the relative vagueness of the available space. An indefinite land, with few boundaries, where the city can expand by keep building on top of it. The tabula rasa of the desert is, in many ways, an Eden for the imagination of architects and urban planners that has almost no obstacles in archaeological sediments or historical buildings one can feel nostalgic about (i.e., through "monumentalization" or "museification"). Everything can be renewed, actually unprecedented. Thus, a city fully vertically rises and expands horizontally. As written by the reporter of "The Independent": "Sheikh Maktoum decided to use the revenues to build something that would last. Israel used to boast it made the desert bloom; Sheikh Maktoum resolved to make the desert bloom. He would build a city to be a center of tourism and financial services, sucking up cash and talent from across the globe. He invited the world to come tax-free – and they came in their millions, swamping the local population, who now make up just 5 percent of Dubai. A city seemed to fall from the sky in just three decades, whole and complete and swelling. They fast-forwarded from the 18th century to the 21st in a single generation." (Hari, 2009) Dubai is a "heavenly city" that not so much "rises," but instead, it appears to fall from the decisions made by the ruling dynasty. Problems arise through the energy and resources needed to make such a city alive. First, the water: scarce and precious resource, especially in these lands. However, water is everywhere: circulating in fake Venetian canals and human-made lagoons or gushing in huge fountains as decoration for places of consumption of the urban spectacle. Second, finance and money needed to carry out these projects (as opposed to the neighboring emirate of Abu Dhabi, Dubai does not have excessive oil resources).

Last but not least, the human resources, physical, mental, or emotional, needed to build and make habitable such spaces, also pose a problem. How many people are required? How to govern them to get a city, which wants to be World City, growing? The climate and environment of the hostile deserted lands of the Gulf must also be governed to make them touristic attractions. These are all issues that the Global City of Dubai has faced -and it is still facing- in a certain way. Like any global city of the millennium, Dubai aspires to live the "totality of the moment." The Sheikdom promotes and organizes many international events, especially related to art or sport but also fashion, real estate, etc. In the numerous and vast spaces at its disposal, every creative imagination is easily and happily hosted and displayed (a permanent EXPO). Usually, the event has a limited - short-term - duration.

Nevertheless, it is instrumental in soliciting ambitions and dreams; to embark always forward, toward the near further development, larger and more "world-class" of the previous one (ever already old and outdated). The major international events are needed and nurtured to create a positive perception of the city and attract significant financial investments — the event as an image of a moving time that fills a gap in the eternal present. Futurists thought about modernity as speed and movement but, if considered together, even as violence. It is well known their exaltation of the "war as the hygiene of the world" and their resulting enthusiastic promotion of and participation in the "First World War." Touring around by car (almost exclusive mean to survive and circulate) along the vast roads of Dubai, we perceive many construction sites, working 24/7. It is a typical image in the social and urban landscape of the Sheikdom. One can feel the same, putting the glittering component of its urban model aside for a moment, crossing a city struck by war, always in reconstruction (or renewal) as if previous bombings had soaked it. A state of "permanent exception" (Agamben, 2003) for global competition, chasing the new, or the "unprecedented"... In the event, there is not a future in which you can imagine something else or a past of which being nostalgic. The only bridges, in the flow of time, between past and future, are eterocronichal projects like the "Global Village," a vast amusement park, and condensed image of the reified '"universality" in the global sauce. The only temporal ecstasy is the one concerning the realized present in front of us: the World City. Time does not pass in a city that does not want to grow old, nor does it need to remember what has already passed. The time always escapes. Minutes and hours pass by only in traffic jams or queueing up to join ceremonies offered by various attractions in Malls or the significant events. The time is repeated in the moments of an eternal present. No more modernization, but "post-modernization" and "pseudo-narrations."

Spatial Turn

So far, we have talked about the time dimension linked to the idea of modernism. However, considering the disciplines of urban planning and architecture, one must at least raise the question of the intelligibility of space or where it produces the experience of living and dwelling. The American geographer Edward W. Soja, the author of the book Postmodern Geographies (1989), was considered to be the initiator and leading promoter of the need for a spatial turn. The process of building spatial thinking finds solid bases and valuable sources of inspiration in even more "ancient" the researches. Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre elaborated, albeit from different points of view, the notion of heterotopia and heterotopology, as early as the sixties-seventies of the twentieth century. Foucault's heterotopology is a perspective of analysis and research that can describe (and rewrite) the spatial structure of the social order, including the dominant order of discourse and symbolism related to it. While XIX and XX centuries were influenced by the western historicist perspective on the representations of "proximity" and "timeline," "our time," will be marked by the primacy of spatiality. "We are in the age of simultaneous, of juxtaposition, the near and the far, the side by side and the scattered." (Foucault, 1997:330-italics ours). A "social order" is formed and topologically established through the exclusion/inclusion of variable otherness, which cannot merely be grasped or assimilated by a pre-existing discursive order. Thus, heterotopias define places that are paradoxically and simultaneously located "inside" and "outside" of a, particularly ordered society. Heterotopias are places in connection with every other place. However, through such a relationship, they have the specific ability to suspend, neutralize, or even reverse the setting of social relations that they -themselves real places - are to outline or reflect. In this sense, heterotopias can be found both in practical and actual places (clinics, mental hospitals, prisons or gardens, etc.) and in transitional regions (e.g., trains, subways) or spaces devoted to transitional halts (i.e., the "non-places," see Augé, 1992). Heterotopias constitute a sort of counter-space, like located utopias. In them, free subjectivity can be produced, capable of behavior fleeing from the dominant and enslaving norm. Disputing through their effectiveness, the order of other spaces, heterotopias can be practiced either creating an imaginary, which reveals the illusory nature of the rest of reality encompassing them; or creating a more effective real space, as perfect and ordered. Heterotopias are never stable and fixed spaces: they are somewhat continually redefined spaces. One could describe the heterotopias of Foucault as functional hybrid spaces, suspended between imagination and reality. The possibility of social production of space is a cornerstone of the research proposed by Henri Lefebvre. It is all directed to the potential of the social-spatial practice. According to Lefebvre, space should not be considered a container or a small frame within which historical events are held. Instead, space should be designed both as part of the means of production and as a product of social practice, which is increasingly associated with established power relations. Thus, space does not only play a substantial role. Space holds together a social potential tied to the ability to escape from the times of social production, controlled by the capital in specific work, consumption, and social reproduction places. Edward Soja begins with a critique of the historicist approach, which has persistently dominated the fields of cultural researches. Such an approach would have unilaterally exalted the supremacy of time over space. One consequence of this emphasis on time is the construction of narratives and philosophies of history, all modeled on the representation of the central rationality (and, ultimately, on its supremacy) of Western-European civilization. The latter are the two vertical lines converging towards the idea of "historical progress" and allegedly claimed to be universal. Soja needs to get out of the "cage of Time." He seeks his way out of the grip of a false debate between the "old ideology looking toward the future" (linked to the project of modernity) and the supposed anti-ideology and anti-narrative of Postmodernism. Both options are stretched to make eternal and serially repeatable a fragmented "present" (Anti history). Freeing ourselves from this sterile dichotomy between "modern" and "postmodern" means then, according to Soja, to change the viewing angle and start thinking in topological terms. The space factor produces cultural processes, and it is also the basis of relevant social and political facts, as much if not more than time. Space, then, cannot be conceived only as a mere "container" or static and unchanging "frame" of history. Thus, to counter the "temporal master narratives," Soja (1989: 11), vindicates the need to reorient our thinking in a topological sense. However, he does not propose a simple exchange or a mechanical reversal in the hierarchy between the categories of space and time. It would be a mere cosmetic and a unilateral operation. Soja is well aware of the constitutive and necessary interdependence between the two dimensions. The core of his theory is, therefore, critical to the proposal of a balanced connection between historical developments and the social production of space to build and configure human geography. In other words, Soja is not proposing an "overcoming" of time in the area. Instead, he suggests the thesis of spatial thinking as the capacity of thought to move sideways going into the concrete forms of life through which the real subjects produce and configure as many specific areas of social life. Soja's spatial thinking is tributary of Foucault and Lefebvre heterotopologies. Mundus and Globus. Orientalism and Occidentalism in the mirror We live in the global. In a globalized world. It is a simple statement, yet not without radical implications for thinking and practicing. What image do we perceive or build of the world and the global? In a global city like Dubai, there are reified representations available: Among all others, the most representative, "The Global Village," "The World," and "The Atlantis." Artificiality is built over a deserted space. Nature, culture, sense, or nonsense. Constructions on available spaces, accumulating working hours, production, consumption, and traffic networks. Mundus should designate a communicable narrative and a structuring perceptive with a sense that evokes temporality related to acting and producing subjectivities. Globus appears more "neutral." We could imagine it as a volume which on the surface, is covered by indefinitely visible lines between parallels and meridians (see Marramao, 2003). It is an image that is more closely related to the distance of space, reproducible in maps and "sea routes," on a Mare magnum open but with choppy waves (folds). Geography of horizons along or over vertices of a History. Those very same vertical lines of a "History" narrated and arranged in a particular hierarchical order of discourse. The spatial thinking initiated by Soja has met "postcolonial" criticism, proposed by scholars such as Said, Spivak, Babbha, and Appadurai. Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference by Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000) is the most radical and far-sighted critical perspective to break the western imperialist and Orientalist discourse. The counter-narrative here measures the distance between the West and non-West. Edward Said (1978), with a pioneering study, about 40 years ago, has demystified the category of Orientalism. it is known, the military occupation of Napoleon Bonaparte in Egypt in 1798 is at the origin of the "European image of the orient," which also goes by the name (in disciplinary terms) of Orientalism. That date marks the return of the West in the Arab world since the time of crusades. Orientalism would not only correspond to a particular form of knowledge of a specific subject. consequently, to alterity compared to the Western-European identity. Instead, Orientalism would be configured as a handy device of production of its specific object, by and through its representation. The Orient, the "exotic" is therefore created by a particular order of discourse. Thus, the Orient is represented as a single homologated whole. Its space extends over an area considered "homogeneous," stretching from the Maghreb to India, where it would be given a unique and distinctive identity, without time or history. The East is not a real "empirical object" subject to research and analysis. Instead, it would represent a dimension that was "Orientalized" as the subject of a (colonial) European specific discourse: Orientalism is created by a discourse made in Europe and then exported to the East. At the western look, the Gulf continues to be imagined and narrated, highlighting "typically oriental" aspects of regression. Elsewhere (in India and the Far East), they seem to occur less and less. Even today, GCC countries represent an exception, uniqueness of an "exotic," ancient world, tribal and primitive. On the other hand, it is emphasized, however, another singularity of the Gulf States. They are (ambiguously) judged be "moderate Islamists," especially for (or despite) being ruled by "visionary and forward-looking pragmatic" dynasties. By accepting the" help" of well-meaning Westerners, those same ruling dynasties would be able to develop significant projects of modernization in the desert, thereby providing to their populations the "gift of progress." Some privileged enclaves like Dubai or Qatar would seem to offer a guiltless counter-narrative to the persistent orientalist gaze of the West. The UAE, for instance, is now represented as very "dynamic," forward-looking, and therefore hypermodern. Because of their ability 'to assimilate the traits of capitalist modernization, these Arab countries are judged by the Western mainstream as "good Muslims" and their leaders as "wise men," although not yet "democratic" by Western standards. The Orientalism of the new millennium seems to turn into a Westernism that one looks through a mirror. Metropolis and cities: the need for a distinction In a short but dense text, Giorgio Agamben (2007) differentiate notions homologous such as City and Metropolis. In ancient Greece, the term metropolis meant "mother-city," and it was used to indicate and identify the "territory of the country" (metropolitan). It was distinguishable from the territories of the colonies. Thus, Metropolis does not specify purely and simply the "city." Instead, the notion of Metropolis defines a relationship between the Polis (city-state itself, with its own identity) and its colonies (its differentiation as dis-locations). For these reasons, who founded a colony outside the Polis' territory found themselves in a state of Apoikia. Literally in a state of being "away from home" or the city. "The term metropolis implies maximum territorial dislocation and, in any case, an essential spatial and political inhomogeneity, which is what defines the relationship between the city and colonies. This raises more than a doubt on the current idea of the Metropolis as continuous, relatively homogeneous, urban fabric. The spatial political "isonomia" that defines the Polis is, at least in principle, foreign to the idea of cities. "(Agamben, 2007– our translation) The Metropolis appears then as a concept to emphasis a distinction-separation-spatial differentiation, which is, still, a condition of experience that is primarily topographic and topological (hetero-topological compared to the city-polis). As Agamben notes, Metropolis indicates, a relation of "maximum territorial and political dis-location." (2007) According to Massimo Cacciari (2008), the idea of the Greek City-Polis is opposite to the Roman-Latin concept of Urbs. The Greek city refers to an "organic whole," and it is geographically organized: the Polis is the place of ethos and ethnos as it provides a home to "people," home to a stock. The inhabitants of the Greek city are called therefore polites. Radically different are Roman notions of Urbs and Civitas. A group of people who have gathered and agreed in wanting to follow the same laws form, for the Romans, a cives which in turn devotes to the god Asylum (god of hospitality and refuge/shelter) the establishment of a City (Urbs and Civitas). Unlike the Greek Polis, the Roman Civitas (at least since the Edict of Caracalla of the 212 A. C., which gave citizenship to all inhabitants of the Empire) completely ignores ethnic and religious affiliations of its inhabitants. Its policy is entirely independent of natural ethics. It is also for this substantial difference between Roman cives, "uprooted" or freed from their territorial, ethnic, and religious affiliation, and Greeks polites, territorialized in "islands" of the Greek Polis, that the Roman model will prevail and it will spread throughout the Mediterranean and beyond. The Urbs, contrary to the localized Polis, is mobile and carries a form of dis-location (the same as the metro-polis, indicating a colonial relationship), which is permanent and potentially sine fine (endless). As Cacciari states, Rome is Urbs who want to impose laws on the whole world (Orbs); it is the city that claims to become world: Urbs-Orbs. The Civitas is always "augens," which means that it continuously "grows," expanding to all, since all are potential cives. The Urbs-Civitas (Metropolis) crosses and over determines all places of the Orbs: "dis-loca" (deploy/displace), "de-lira" (beyond/over the "limes"); It is out of proportion and excess to all forms and all sorts of borders. This a-polarity between Polis and metropolis/ Urbs Orbs may be useful to understand Dubai as a Global City? A postmodern Arab city-state and its postmodern de-liberare (perhaps absorbing the concept of heterotopia)? 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.

Global-World City

The Globus is now mainly dominated by the system of the world economy, with all its ramifications (indefinite circulation of people, goods, money, political-legal status, brand, symbols, etc.). Building a Global City means entering the elite of global capitalism. For this reason, the competition to obtain the degree of Global City is ruthless. As Saskia Sassen (1994, 2001, 2011) argues, the more capital goes international, the more it becomes necessary to order economic transactions in specific spaces. More transnational companies expand, more is the need for places to meet production with consumption (that is where to circulate goods and create values). A Global City is at the intersection of the extensive international economic system and the territorial nation-state. Being a Global City means supporting a role and act as a center of control of capital flows and values that become profits. It means to have significant financial institutions and headquarters of transnational corporations, developed business-service sector, extensive range transportation network, dense population.

Moreover, global cities as consumption mobilization centers give direction to production. The rise in worldwide competition and profit maximization race cause a decrease in salaries in the Global City. Urban aesthetics and planning are also essential to perceive a city as a global city. To emphasize its suitability for being a global city, the architecture of the city is essential. For instance, to have an extensive transport network in which a wide range of subway systems or international airports is an indicator of the global city. Agglomeration of skyscrapers is another symbol of being a global city. Hence, the appearance and land use planning of the city is significant to perceive it as a global city (see Seckin, 2015)

Neo Urbanization and Architecture

A Global City is, therefore, a specific mode of production of space embedded in the needs of today's global capitalism. The Sheikhdom is not, in this case, an exception to this logic: "Dubai is Market Fundamentalism Globalisation in One City" (Hari, 2009). What happens then more specifically in the disciplines that most directly deal with spaces and cities? Echoing Lefebvre's thesis, 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: the "rationality" of capitalist accumulation space. With its provocative and controversial thesis, Koolhaas offers a triptych of theoretical essays on architecture (Bigness, Generic City, and Junkspace), which cynically, but clearly, outline the "state of the art," or rather the state of contemporary architecture. The Archistar provides us with an almost cinematic way to conceive and build the Global City of the new millennium. We can find in these writings an efficient synthesis of many of the issues raised so far. According to Koolhaas, the "Big Large" as the constructed "thoughtless energy of the purely quantitative." Moreover: "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 an instrument of other forces, it depends. [...] 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). "Voids are the essential buildings block of Generic City. Paradoxically, its hollowness ensures its very physicality, the pumping up of the volume the only pretext for its physical manifestation." (Koolhaas, 1995b:1262). Adding merciless judgments: "The built (more about that later) product of modernization is not modern architecture but Junkspace. Junkspace is what remains after modernization has run its course, or, more precisely, what coagulates while modernization is in progress, its fallout. Modernization had a rational program: to share the blessings of science, universally. Junkspace is its apotheosis or meltdown […]; we do not leave pyramids. According to a new gospel of ugliness, there is already more Junkspace under construction in the twenty-first century than has survived from the twentieth [...] Architecture disappeared in the twentieth century […]; our concern for the masses has blinded us to People's Architecture. Junkspace seems an aberration, but it is the essence, the main thing... the product of an encounter between escalator and air-conditioning, conceived in an incubator of sheetrock (all three missing from the history books). Continuity is the essence of Junkspace; it exploits any invention that enables expansion, deploys the infrastructure of seamlessness: escalator, air-conditioning, sprinkler, fire shutter, hot-air curtain ...It is always interior, so extensive that you rarely perceive limits; it promotes disorientation by any means (mirror, polish, echo)". Space today "is sealed, held together not by structure but by skin, like a bubble." Eventually, "Air-conditioning has launched the endless building. If architecture separates buildings, air-conditioning unites them. Air-conditioning has dictated mutant regimes of organization and coexistence that leave architecture behind […]. Because it costs money, is no longer free, conditioned space inevitably becomes limited space; sooner or later, all conditional space turns into Junkspace ...When we think about space, we have only looked at its containers. As if space itself is invisible, all theory for the production of space is based on an obsessive preoccupation with its opposite: substance and objects, i.e., architecture. Architects could never explain space; Junkspace is our punishment for their mystifications. […] Junkspace is the body double of space, a territory of impaired vision, limited expectation, and reduced earnestness. […] It replaces hierarchy with accumulation, composition with addition. […] A fuzzy empire of blur, it fuses high and low, public and private, straight and bent, bloated, and starved to offer a seamless patchwork of the permanently disjointed. Seemingly an apotheosis, spatially grandiose, the effect of its richness is a terminal hollowness. It is a vicious parody of ambition that systematically erodes the credibility of building, possibly forever […] Junkspace is additive, layered, and lightweight, not articulated in different parts but subdivided, quartered the way a carcass is torn apart-individual chunks severed from a universal condition. There are no walls, only partitions, shimmering membranes frequently covered in mirror or gold." (Koolhaas, 2002: 175-190) It is enough to draw some partial conclusions to our discussion. The fundamental architectural elements -as Koolhaas insists- have become essentially machines (air conditioning systems, elevators, escalators, etc.) that organize our everyday life, interpreting the needs, desires, and imaginations but in a maximally abstract (spectacular) form and, above all, commercialized. Space becomes more and more invisible and intangible (and "it is never free"...). It produces its control as a Panopticon: not observed, nor observable. The authentic experience of living and dwelling becomes form, "like a bubble." However, it produces a value subject to extractivism of capitalized value (as David Harvey says). If the architectural elements are resolved in machines, then the city and its functional living spaces become places of a postindustrial "assembly line" widespread throughout the territory of a metropolis. A portion of a huge global capitalist cycle of production-circulation-consumption. With all its infrastructure, its contradictions, and divisions of a classist society. The news today is that the capitalist system involves not only the bare biological life. Through the configuration of spaces and the indirect and invisible control of the daily times, capitalism gets to work an entire form of life: that is –Global- City. Koolhaas: "Babel has been misunderstood. Language is not the problem, just the new frontier of Junkspace. Mankind, torn by eternal dilemmas, the impasse of seemingly endless debates, has launched a new language that straddles unbridgeable divides like a fragile designer's footbridge ... coined a proactive wave of new oxymorons to suspend former incompatibility: life/style, reality/TV, world/music, museum/store, food/ court, health/ care, waiting/lounge. Naming has replaced class struggle, sonorous amalgamations of status, high-concept, and history […] Junkspace knows all your emotions, all your desires. It is the interior of Big Brother's belly. […] Emissaries of Junkspace pursue you in the formerly impervious privacy of the bedroom: the minibar, private fax machines, pay-tv offering compromised pornography […] It creates communities not out of shared interest or free association, but out of identical statistics and certain demographics, an opportunistic weave of vested interests." (2002: 183) Thus, architecture increasingly depends on urban planners (in a sense to be understood between Lefebvre and Koolhaas). A Global City expresses the point of realization of an invisible mechanic command. Space where traditional distinctions such as public-private, indoor-outdoor, center-periphery, which one could find in classical cities or industrial cities (certainly not idyllic and free of contradictions themselves), would fall. The melting, the multi-ethnicity - another hallmark of a Global City- becomes a pretext for an internal division of spaces, based on ethnic lines, of the classist society. This fusion between absolute liberalism and rigid hierarchical political structure finds in the sheikdom of Dubai a harmless and "sedated" spectacular expression. A horizontality of the relationships among people and maximum verticality of the inhabitants of the "Citta' celeste" - "forbidden city" for much of the contemporary newly immigrated workforce -. A city without history and identity can continuously be built and rebuilt. Beyond the "exclusive" identity of the ruling dynasty and the original natives (and down toward the bottom of the social hierarchy, from ex-pats to the South East Asia workers), the static view of the city of Dubai is a buttress for his ambition of being a specific World City. Tautologically: "Dubai is Dubai," a novissima and specific geopolitical no-identity.

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