This “Western Residence” features houses in one of five themes: the standard Arabesque “Moroccan Mansion,” the pan-Spanish conquest “Andalusian,” which integrates both southern Spanish and Pre-Columbian styles, the Eastern Seaboard-inspired “New World,” the crisply incongruous “Aegean” and “Santa Fe,” which vaguely gestures at both adobe and Minions. The as-yet unbuilt Eastern Residence villas and Saam Vega, a pyramid of hotel apartments—”an ancient wonder, rediscovered for a modern lifestyle” are currently being sold.
Qatar’s is called Lusail, for example, while Oman has several on the way and Bahrain plans to construct five new cities on islands dredged out of the sea, in a move that will increase the tiny nation’s landmass by 60%. It’s worth emphasizing here that “city” doesn’t connote urban agglomeration so much as a “multi-use real-estate development as masterplanned by a single firm” that blurs the difference between scales. Sometimes a city is a single building.
In The Silicon Valley of Dreams: Environmental Injustice, Immigrant Workers and the High-Tech Global Economy (2002), Sun-Hee Park and David Pellow effectively chart the environmental racism that has underwritten the area since the days of the Spanish Conquest.
It should be noted that in the UAE, the recent introduction of permanent residency-adjacent schemes like the 5-year Green Visa and 10-year Golden Visa, which allow the right to live and freely move jobs though no path to citizenship, removes this aspect for some.
See Wafi, ➝.
Scott Smith, "Ethnic Futurism In The Gulf," The Sigers, July 13, 2013, ➝.
The introduction of VAT—in 2018 in the UAE and KSA and 2019 in Bahrain, with a common GCC framework expected to follow—and of corporate tax, from 2023 in the UAE, are working to reshape the region’s image as a tax-free paradise. But the rhetoric of “welcoming everyone” is not just legal with regards to permanent residence schemes, but very much in the language and visuals of these projects too. In the UAE, the core values-to-government-ministry pipeline is especially strong. In 2016, the MInistry of Tolerance was formed, and renamed the Ministry of Tolerance and Coexistence in 2020.
It is worth noting too that in contrast to the much-publicized social liberation happening in its GCC neighbors, the more politically liberal Kuwait is on an entirely different, increasingly conservative trajectory. We might map this to its quasi-democratic model that reflects the rising tide of conservatism around the world, even as it feels like a congealing of Gulf Futurism, as if the deep trauma of the Gulf War has finally metastasized.
I think here some favourite lines from J.G. Ballard from The Atrocity Exhibition which suggest to me that the hallmark lack of context that El Sheshtawy identified is very much a feature not a bug: "Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time. Anything erected there, a city, a pyramid, a motel, stands outside time. It’s no coincidence that religious leaders emerge from the desert. Modern shopping malls have much the same function."
Fadi Shayya, “Speculations and Questions on Dubaization,” THE STATE, January 2013, p. 100–104.
See "NEOM | What is the line?," YouTube, ➝.
There is a marked emphasis on archaeological discovery and seamlessly suturing the present with the ancient civilizations that inhabited the area several thousand years ago, most notably in AlUla with its remarkably preserved Nabatean tombs and rock art. Particularly fascinating are the discovery of mustatil, or rectangular structures in northwest Saudi Arabia, which are believed to be remnants of a prehistoric cattle cult.
Gareth Doherty, Paradoxes of Green (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017).
Fumihiko Maki, Nurturing Dreams: Collected Essays on Architecture and the City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008).
Doherty.