Dubai-Scale Urbanism as an Indicator of Lager Shifts

What commentators on Dubai's much reported woes do not miss to notice is that the scale of the transformation it has gone through to become a thoroughly newsworthy city is and remains tremendous. Rather than an imitation of other more historically auratic cities, Dubai erases the difference between the copy and the original by building rather than signifying skyscraper skylines, professional ski slopes and luxurious mega-hotels. Especially given the modernity of what goes on in Dubai, since hardly another Western city can compete with it in terms of the scale or scope of its urbanist vision, the materials, the standards, or the aesthetics of what it offers as a built environment do not fall short of any of their historical prototypes that in terms of how modern they are may have to give way to what happens in UAE and elsewhere in Asia. The unheard-of dynamism of the infrastructural transformation that Dubai goes through in purely urbanist terms makes its urban space into a part, and probably only a small one, of a larger shift of the nerve centers of global modernity, since it is the more modern environments that have historically pulled to them people, capital and ideas. Think of New York, the historical pull of which no one, however rich, powerful or famous, could resist in the twentieth century. One can argue about whether the contemporary configuration of global modernity represents a genuine break with the historical norms or regularities of what modernity used to mean or one can relativise the perspective from which the preceding narrative of modern development has been told as some of the commentators implicitly propose by telling that world has returned some six hundred years back in terms of the configuration of its leading urban centers of power, capital and culture. Asian come-back may herald a culture and future shock of once a millennium proportions.