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.