Masterplanning the Adaptive City

terms “the culture of congestion” is an essential precondition of metropolitan 
life. Stripped of sentimentality over the loss of the neighborhood in the “great”
American city of the mid-twentieth century, Delirious New York celebrates disorder
as a feature of saturation and the complexity of urbanity.
43
For the topic of neighborhoods to be relevant for urbanization in Asia, its
discourses need to be situated in the vast metropolis. Chicago, as we shall see,
was the “Shenzhen of the nineteenth century.”
44
The new cities of the twenty-first
century need to be conceived according to long-term rather than short-term
visions. 
4.4 THE DUBAI MIRAGE
Chicago also has parallels to Dubai, as an isolated hub which grew with great
speed out of the interchanges of global networks. Few places exemplify the model
of the instant city better than Dubai. Before the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, this
section might have had a tone of concurrent exuberance, marvel and disbelief.
Dubai’s harbor was dredged in the 1970s with the ambition of making the city a
major cargo hub. Now tourists outnumber the residential population of Dubai
fivefold, and ninety-six percent of the residential population is foreign.
45
As an experiment, Dubai seems highly unlikely to become a standard,
repeatable model for urbanization elsewhere. We will see later some of the risks of
decay, demise, and extinction caused by such fragile, and shallow, foundations for
urbanism as have been laid in Dubai. The UAE produces nothing except oil, but
this emerging economic wonder has generated enormous wealth by tapping into
the flow of international capital. Koolhaas accuses the western reading of the
“Model Dubai” as “not being immune to Wall Street’s toxic corruption” as “lazy.”
46
More investigation is needed, then, of the historical and current organizational
parallels to other cities in the past, present, and future.
Dubai, unlike many contemporary cities, is based on an “enclave-and-
armature system in its starkest form, [in which] each enclave is closed and
controlled, air-conditioned and policed, connected by the highway along the
coast.”
47
Dubai echoes another city in the desert, Las Vegas. Though not based on
the liberalization of gambling, Dubai is a vehicle-based, low-density model of
urbanization, wholly irresponsible in ecological terms, and grown out of global
networks. The American strip, celebrated by Venturi and Scott-Brown in the 
mid-1960s, represents the ultimate vehicular space—neither city nor suburb. 
In this light, Los Angeles also represents an extreme model of low-density 
sprawl, based on the private car as the prime mode of movement. Further 
parallels between Las Vegas and Dubai surface in how both cities have marketed
themselves as “leisure meganodes” in global travel and entertainment networks.
Organized on programmatic narratives related to theme parks, the urbanism of
Dubai is meant to “dazzle and awe” through media spectacle and the artificiality 
of its place-making. This model of urban development requires staggeringly high
energy inputs, as it places its quotidian survival, and more importantly its longer
term endurance, in a fragile condition entirely dependent on intense fossil fuel
consumption for its cars and air conditioners. 
Dubai’s status as a global hub can be correlated to another city of gold in the
desert, Timbuktu—the ancient, fabled city in Mali, the obsolescence of which was
brought about by the emergence of cargo shipping between coastal sub-Saharan
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Africa and North Africa during the early colonial period.
48
Timbuktu maintained a
population exceeding one hundred thousand—larger than any European city—for
nearly five hundred years, until the end of the seventeenth century. The city was
rediscovered by a European, for the first time in over three centuries, in 1826.
Timbuktu is credited with having the world’s first university, and commercially it
was the centre of the gold and salt markets. It was also implicated in transporting,
over centuries, between nine and thirteen million black African slaves to North
Africa.
49
Like Dubai, Timbuktu did not produce anything. It was a city of
contractors and merchants, serving as a node for the warehousing and distribution
of goods transferring to and from the boats of the River Niger and the camel
caravans through the Sahara. The Dubai model of the instant city follows a similar
pattern, with wealth generated from the exchange of goods and services. Both
cities risk extinction through threats from harsh climatic and geographical
environments, and the fragility and potential unsustainability of their economies.
The difference between the two cities is that Timbuktu endured as a thriving city
for half a millennium. Dubai is, in urban years, still a baby.
In what seems tantamount to a warning, Campanella has claimed that “the
only place remotely comparable to China today is Dubai . . . but China is a hundred
Dubais [in population terms], with a thousand times its ambition.”
50
In terms of
future urbanization, Dubai is not an isolated anomaly—rather it might be called
the regional edition of China’s model of twenty-first-century urbanization. Cities 
as “green” as Dubai (in the durational rather than ecological sense) often cannot
be judged, as they “need time to prove themselves as substantial condensers 
of civilization,” and are usually the result of a “coalition between geography, 
human settlement, available labour, wealth, and natural resources.” Despite the
difference in size between the Gulf and China, and between their energy-based 
and labor-based models of economic development,
51
both have great imbalances
of wealth and large populations of migrant workers. Both lack resources. The
Gulf–China parallels seem convergent on too many fronts. In the future the history
of these parallels will be told.
52
In the future, to what extent will the urban model of Dubai, and all it
represents in economic, ecological, and social terms, be revealed as just a mirage?
Can it sustain itself? Will an alternative energy source save it from extinction? 
Will it disappear as a general model if there are shifts in the global network of
consumer, financial, and travel flows? If the global demand for oil continues to
rise, as resources diminish, will Dubai, again as a general model, adapt to its
challenges, or will it perish? More than nearly any other contemporary city, Dubai
may turn out to be the place which provides clues to answering the questions
posed in this book concerning urban change, adaptation, and evolution—or
conversely obsolescence, abandonment, and even disappearance—and to ways of
meeting the urgent challenges facing urban earth.
Investigations of urban growth and expansion must also consider the long
history of abandonment of cities. The balance which must be struck in order to
maintain and sustain a city is a precarious one. We have seen how
suburbanization led to the de-densification and depopulation of city centres in the
twentieth century, and throughout urban history. “Desertification” of cities is a real
and serious risk.
53
In Reyner Banham’s 1971 book Los Angeles: The Architecture
of Four Ecologies,
54
the author’s position on the abandonment and demolition of
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