Dubai: first telegenic city

Dubai: first telegenic city
By George Katodrytis

http://katodrytis.com/main/77/telegenic-city
 
What is magnificent about filmmakers’ perceptions of the world is that they introduce a new state: infinite perceptions, insensible differences. The visual voyage through any contemporary cityscape operates like a continuous shift between eye and mind, as though differences no longer exist between the two. The city has definitely become a condition and a non-place. On a similar note, Auge's contention about the condition of “supermodernity” is that a growing proportion of space lacks meaning in the classic anthropological sense. This phenomenon is one of the three forms abundance characterizing what he terms the super modern condition: an abundance of space, an abundance of signs and an abundance of individualization. Yet the “new” global city, like a surreal machine, reproduces its own new identity.  This is the case of Dubai. The city thrives on newness and bigness, in an act of ongoing self-stylization and fantasy. Little more than a grand-scale shopping mall, the city is comprised of 'mind-zone' spaces, and of airport-like lobbies. In this theme park oriented cityscape, there is no differentiation between old and new. Everything seems to point to consumerism and tourism.
Dubai is an extreme and complex example of urbanism. Within the urban grid, and the monotonous and predictable urban condition, the generation of prosthetic geometries and new morphologies acts as a catalyst for innovation. Maybe this is the right time, in the evolution of 21st century architecture, to study and adopt new forms and technologies. The aura of optimism and the apparent financial success of the new building boom seem to require fresh, daring architects and designers.
 
Perhaps the nearest analogy to the mode of production of this new type of city is Photoshop, which creates collages of photographs and other digitized images, combining and layering anything with anything, as though in an accumulation of objects of desire.
 

Dubai is a prototype of the new post-global city, which creates appetites rather than solves problems. It is represented as consumable, replaceable, disposable and short-lived. Dubai is addicted to the promise of the new: it gives rise to an ephemeral quality, a culture of the “instantaneous.” Relying on strong media campaigns, new “satellite cities” and mega-projects are planned and announced almost weekly. This approach to building is focused exclusively on marketing and selling.
 
Flying over Dubai, one is confronted with a new type of 21st century urbanism, which is both diagrammatic and prosthetic in the form of islands. As a tourist, there is no need to travel to distant destinations, to desolated islands. Islands are now close to shore, in a new typology of hydro-suburbia.
 
The island is the lowest form of spatial organization. Pure accumulation, it has an iconic form and a certain perimeter and location. It can be reached by dramatic arriving (compare here with Venice’s Lido and Florida’s Key West). The surface of the island reveals everything there is, all contents; islands are fundamentally consistent and predictable: they give an assurance of security. But they have potentials; they are exclusive.
 
As Briavel Holcomb points out in his essay “Marketing Cities for Tourism” (1999), in the tourist realm “it is the consumer, not the product that moves. Because the product is usually sold before the consumer sees it, the making of tourism is intrinsically more significant than the conventional case where the product can be seen, tested, and compared to similar products in situ. It means that the representation of place, the images created for marketing, the vivid videos and persuasive prose of advertising texts, can be as selective and creative as the marketer can make them – a reality check comes only after arrival”.
 
Increasingly, the kind of contemporary architecture and urbanism that simulates mass tourism has to be not only photogenic but also telegenic – buildings that look striking in a sequence of rapid-fire cuts, or that stand out in a static shot as backdrops.
 
The city of Dubai sprawls out like an exponent of an algorithmically evolving pattern: a fractal architecture with forms of increased perimeter and endless topological variations, as two-dimensional patterns, allowing very little for 3-dimensional variety.
 
Motivated by a desire for authentic experience of for exotic places, for escape or spectacle, or simply by an urge for new knowledge, the tourist leaves a familiar environment to view other locations.
 
Historically, the origin of modern vacation time can be traced back to the 1930s, when workers in France, for the first time, were given the right to twelve paid vacation days. Today, tourism has become a “total lifestyle experience.”
 
The modern tourist resort is by definition a constructed one. The tourist’s perception seems to have shifted away from the pictorial 18th century: there is no longer the desire for the panoramic view. The excessively visual contemporary culture has made everything look familiar. Contemporary tourists are looking for familiarity: they want to feel at home in a strange place.
 
This has led to concentrated tourist infrastructures and mega-structure complexes (containing hotel + apartments + mall + cinema + expo + anything goes), which are clustered together. In this sense, architecture and landscape are part of a single system, characterized by stratification and controlled spatial experience.
 
While travel does resemble this description for some of us some of the time, an overwhelming density of the unknown can also shut down our senses. It is hard to revel in a streetscape at midnight when one is desperately trying to find a hotel with a vacancy. For these reasons, many of us prefer to reduce the quantity of the unknown by booking transportation, lodging, and even sightseeing excursions in advance. Mass tourism cushions the impact of arrival and enables the visitor to negotiate larger and potentially confusing stretches of territory.
 
In Dubai there is little difference between holiday accommodation and housing. Architectural programs are becoming fused and undifferentiated. The morphology of the landscape and seascape is becoming fabricated to the point that it may soon be difficult to differentiate between the natural and the constructed. Dubai’s natural beachfront is 45km long. Artificial islands will add another 1,500km of beachfront, turning the coastline and the city into an inexhaustible holiday resort. This constructed landscape, like a stage set, provides edited scenes of adventure and entertainment.
 
Dubai is perhaps becoming architecturally the ultimate fantasy city. Mass tourism provides the opportunity to create cosmopolitan and populated open spaces, defining a new frontier of a public space.
 
Dubai is a new type of global urbanism, a trans-city, both consumable and telegenic.
 
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