Fear and Money

Mike Davis’s Fear and Money in Dubai retells a story about how the “former fishing village and smuggler’s cove” has become one of the world dream city. The Persian Gulf city-state of Dubai, the planet’s biggest building site after Shanghai, is building the world’s biggest buildings, the largest theme park, the biggest mall, the largest international airport, the biggest artificial island, the first sunken hotel, the domed ski resort – the megaprojects which are being accomplished because its emir Sheikh Mohammed al-Maktoum simply wants “to be number one in the world”. Having “learned from Las Vegas’ he thinks that “if Dubai wants to become the luxury-consumer paradise of the Middle East and South Asia, it must ceaselessly strive for visual and environmental excess”.  Dubai has already surpassed Las Vegas “both in sheer scale of spectacle and the profligate consumption of water and power”. But to compare it to Rome, the “Eternal City” or New York’s Manhattan, Dubai does not represent the socially and ideologically active center with its “ unitary code or common language of the city”.

When I visited Dubai first time I remember finding myself within the multitudes of shopping malls and skyscrapers, the city’s architectural spectacle (I agree that it is “a monstrous caricature of futurism”). I had the feeling that I was playing a GTA game and was sure that there was nothing behind all these “pharaonic” decorations. But behind them there is the city which is the hyper consumer of “art”, and here the art as well as the fear (“of unexpected supply disruptions”) are used to attract money; there is also a semi-slaveholding system that as we know from the history of our culture, is inevitably wanted to accomplish the megaprojects.

Social space

Henri Lefebvre’s Social space investigates into the concept of social space based on the Marx’s theory and materialist thought. The author applies the categories of “work” and   “product” to social space and considers the examples of Venice, a city-state and Tuscany, where a new representation of space emerged: the visual perspective shown by painters and formed by architects. He distinguishes the traditional representational spaces which have special significance for the individual: the body, the house, the land, the religious place and the graveyard, and a very different representation of space emerged as “a homogeneous, clearly demarcated space complete with horizon and vanishing point”. He brought the example of the urban piazza in Tuscany as a space produced through interaction between a newly engendered spatial relationship between rural and urban (town and country). Representational spaces are given shape by everyday life (types of food, kitchen utensils, the preparation and presentation of meals, clothing, and the building of houses, the materials and materiel). 

What is a social space? Social space contains a great diversity of objects, both natural and social, “including networks and pathways which facilitate the exchange of things and information.” But it is not always visible “where, how, by whom, and to what purpose is information stored and processed?” At the same time, there are spaces such as parks, dwellings or military places   which are marked by economic, technical and political activities, and appropriate social relationships. They are the visible products of these activities and are both “natural” and artificial.

It is also interesting to trace the history of space (not the same as the history of civilization) as social reality, “a set of relations and forms”. The author relates the emergence of a new awareness of space to the Bauhaus that took into account interrelationships between things and space and developed a new conception of it.

Formal elements of space include curved and straight lines, curved and straight forms, their repetition and difference, a rhythm of a space. The connection between the form and content is visible through spatial forms of assembly and concentration. For example, a quadrangular form characteristic of town’s architecture presents different urban realities in the ancient Roman military camp, in medieval bastides, in the Spanish colonial town and in the modern American city.

The principle of “a bird’s-eye view of a rice field” is used for the organization of a space, according to the Japanese philosopher. “Every group of places and objects (the house, the city, the whole world) has a center, which may be perceived from every side, and reached from every angle of approach”, thus everything could be controlled from “any vantage point”. An important side of the Eastern scheme is “difference within a framework of repetition”. For example the Japanese garden, this remains the same in many various contexts. It exemplifies the appropriation of nature, being at once natural and cultural. An appropriated space is a natural space modified in order to serve the needs and possibilities of a certain group. It can be a structure, a monument or building, but also a site, a square or a street. Private space is always appropriated while public space is dominated such as military buildings, fortifications, ramparts, dams and irrigation systems. Dominated spaces present the realization of a master’s project by means of new technological forms introduced into a pre-existing space.