"IF you want to be apocalyptic," Dutch architect and theorist Rem Koolhaas writes in "Al Manakh," a new study of Persian Gulf cities and their beanstalk towers, "you could construe Dubai as evidence of the-end-of-architecture-and-the-city-as-we-know-them."
To be apocalyptic, you will probably not be surprised to hear, is precisely what Mike Davis wants. His own views on Dubai are included in "Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism," a timely if uneven collection he edited with Daniel Bertrand Monk, and they possess all the razor-sharp pessimism he's spent a career perfecting.
Davis' view of Dubai -- one of the seven city-states that make up the United Arab Emirates, and for the last decade the biggest construction site this side of Shanghai -- is marked by stories of greed, exploitation and enough conspicuous consumption to make a hedge fund manager blush. In classically over-the-top fashion, he characterizes Dubai as "the ultimate Green Zone," a fantasyland built on the backs of overworked and underpaid foreign workers who are violently brought into line every time they try to organize. It's a place, Davis says, that "earns its living from fear," with a skyline that is "a hallucinatory pastiche of the big, the bad and the ugly."
Davis and Koolhaas are two of the most consistently compelling cultural critics working, and their subject here -- the just-add-water urbanism of nations that have made more oil money than they know what to do with -- is ripe for analysis. It is a pity that neither one decided to write a full book on the topic.
But in the end, it is pretty clear that despite the vast ideological divide that separates them, both were attracted to the gulf for reasons that can only be called opportunistic. Neither is so different, in other words, from the planeloads of workers, developers and multinational corporations that flow each day into the region.
In Davis' case, "Evil Paradises" is a sign that he wants to turn his singular brand of cultural criticism, for so long rooted in postwar Southern California, into a global franchise. He began the campaign last year with "Planet of Slums," a tour of the squalid tin-roof outskirts of Lagos, Nigeria, Mexico City and other mega-cities.
"Evil Paradises" is a mirror image of "Planet of Slums," a study of globalization's victors instead of its victims. It surveys the ways that soaring oil revenues -- "petrodollars" is the catchy term of art -- and other newly acquired wealth are radically transforming urban landscapes around the world.
