*Man, Detroit is turning into the new EVERYTHING! I may have to rush over there!
No, wait, what am I saying –Torino has been Detroit for decades now.
*I can't believe there's much wrong with these Dubai characters that another gush of oil money couldn't cure. Starchitect buildings too big and fancy? Since when was that an urban problem (except for architecture critics)?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/20/dubai-decline-middle-east
(...)
The stockmarket is down 70% on 2005's level, and construction has ceased on half the unfinished towers that stretch out into the desert. Eighty per cent of the population of Dubai are passing migrants who are there, like gold-diggers of old, only for the cash. The cash is going and so are they, leaving expensive cars in the street and at the airport, many fleeing possible imprisonment for debt.
Consider, meanwhile, the city of Detroit. Here was another that rose on the shore of an inland sea, fuelled by the cult of hypermobility. With the implosion of the motor industry it has gone to seed. Houses are pictured boarded-up or selling for a dollar. Dogs roam empty streets. Wind howls through vacant shops. The unbelievable has come to pass. The love child of America's greatest postwar passion is preparing to die.
Detroit is part of a great country that has shown itself capable of rescuing even its rustbelt municipalities. But this depends on finding people who will live in a place from which most have fled. Luckily, much of Detroit is of low-rise plot housing that could be transformed at least into Bohemian neighbourhoods, like ruined New Orleans. (((Becoming New Orleans, so 2005.)))
No such option is available to Dubai. It is the ultimate Corbusian city, rigid in format and old-fashioned in conception, based on the grids and set squares of super-planners, and on grand symbolic buildings rather than intimate streets. It cannot respond to demand and supply for land and property, let alone to the wishes of free citizens. Human scale is confined to the Las-Vegas style replicas of Florence and Venice adopted by hotels that realise guests will not come if slapped constantly in the face by modern architecture. One business that cannot afford inhumanity is a hotel. (((Wait a minute – has Las Vegas died of slappy-face architecture, too? Have Venturi and Brown been informed?)))
Such cities are like the planned science settlements of Soviet Russia or the instant downtowns of American "metroplexes", in which people do as planners ordain. There are no visual surprises, no corners of privacy away from big brother or at least big car. Buildings are exclusive and architecturally defensive, like London's Barbican.
I can only imagine that Dubai will one day be seen as a punctuation mark on the architectural follies of the past half century. This off-the-shelf city state has been built on laundering the profits of oil, drugs, arms and western aid...
(((Aw c'mon, if you can't sell oil, drugs and arms to the West, you can't sell anything to anybody.)))
