Steroid Cities

French novelist and critic Marcel Proust best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu once said “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."

For me the voyage is only one ingredient to an encounter and encounters are key to remember and returning an experience or for that matter storing it as a memory. Everything in live will always be an encounter. The ethics of an encounter helps us to understand something central to the analytical experience be it a city or not. The potential for reaching out and across to the other. The potential for reaching out from Las Vegas and across to Dubai as a comparison.

I’m sure we can draw many similarities between Las Vegas and Dubai but these superficial similarities will be as unreal as the symbol itself. Instead of drawing on physical properties I believe we have to look at it from psychoanalysis point of view in terms of a sense of place and why. We need new eyes as all that seems real is nothing but a hyper reality.

Prior to its physical existence the urban plan dictated Dubai to be a super city. Today it currently holds true to exactly that. The world largest artificial islands (seen from space) in addition to the largest waterfront, tallest hotel (Burj al-Arab hotel), the first underwater hotel, towers three times the height of the Empire State Building in essence to clear all competition in order to hold the title of the tallest structure in the world. Currently, the Walt Disney World Resort is the number one tourist destination in the world. Once fully completed, Dubai land will easily take over that title since it is expected to attract more than 200,000 visitors daily. Something the Greeks aspired to but have failed miserably lately.

Learning from Las Vegas, 1972 under “Directional Space” Las Vegas was diagrammatically represented with pure images highlighting Las Vegas elements as” space, scale, speed and symbol “all of which forms part of the modernised American dream at the time. Although Las Vegas happened a lot quicker than most other new cities it was the idea beyond “encounter” and commodity that drove the energy within these desert sands. If you look at Las Vegas today it’s only the thriving areas that are still driven by the original idea of an encounter which remains successful. Everything else have been faded in grey, now displaying a huge neon sign to highlight it’s understated iconic status which never was never fully realised to these urban parts to a true symbol or myth within the grain.

The Las Vegas urban grain consist of grids with several civic buildings in it and therefore contain the object/icon building which displays a jewel/neon like quality in contrast with the city backdrop (may I add a backdrop with a secured infrastructure), meaning its framing the vista in addition to the object building terminating the vista at a pedestrian level. This was one of the points highlighted in Complexity and Contradiction.

Dubai’s grain is treated as a serious of jewels, in contrast to Las Vegas. This makes the city layers almost impossible to read and the building fragments become clusters of what a super master plan demands rather than what a city demands. 

However it remains a hollow city of what appears to be a serious of iconic landmark buildings without an emphasis at ‘underpinning infrastructure"...For all we know the backdrop could be in slum status with dressed up surrealistic facades of make believe…similar to the american dream. So as a superficial comparison it might appear to be similar but it's not...its the security in the infrastructure that will always remain one of the biggest differences between the two cities. Dubai will realise this at some point...and spend the next 20 years working on what’s been forgotten in the 1st place and if Venturi could...a book wouldve follwed named "What weve forgotten from Dubai"

Las Vegas cannot be compared to Dubai. They’re not the same. How can one love a place with no history? Dubai is an instant super which becomes an imperative for destabilising illusions of understanding, mastery and the individual agency of one city obsessed with itself….the instant aiming at creating a history and overthrowing all other foundations around the globe in order to become the world’s biggest commodity. It’s selfish but driven by reasoning true to a capitalists system on every level perceivable. Then again even capitalism have become a hyper reality for destabilising illusions of society.

Dubai left me with the sensation of having “your spine plugged into” a second hand account of yet another grand finale performance by a bully. Performances that typically involve an exposition of vulnerability to question what reality is? Where Las Vegas forges a meaning from their anecdotes which sees a conjunction between the analytic session and the theatrical performance with foregrounds of what society coins in terms of “liveliness” associated to each encounter, Dubai aim to be of a challenging and over-turning of such idealized urban forms of human history which shapes the human encounter to a capitalist encounter without remembrance or true renaissance.