New piece in Tank AW 2014 on Dubai as a solar-sintered, 3D-printed shanzhai city. Available online here!
And yes, to these external, overwhelmingly Western, observers, Dubai is all of these things and not much more. At a recent writer’s salon in Abu Dhabi, an audience member compared the way that the city is written about to Europe’s derision of early American boomtown culture as lowbrow, vulgar and unrefined. For these journalists Dubai can be understood only through hyperbolic similes – “like Las Vegas but on steroids, no, wait, on Viagra” – all wrapped up in thinly veiled Orientalist fantasies. As a phenomenon that feels entirely new on the world stage, there is not yet a robust framework for understanding a place like Dubai. It looks retro-futuristic, and kind of sounds like Dune, but has that dark underbelly, so let’s call it dystopian. If there was a DSM-V manual for cities, you can be pretty sure where you would find Dubai. Except that’s not what the future looks like anymore.