The Superlative City: Dubai and the Urban Condition in the Early Twenty-First Century ed. by Ahmed Kanna, and: Dubai Amplified: The Engineering of a Port Geography by Stephen J. Ramos, and: Demystifying Doha: On Architecture and Urbanism in an Emerging City by Ashraf M. Salama, Florian Wiedmann (review)

In 1968, American architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown took their Yale students on a trip to Nevada. The group explored the Las Vegas Strip, visiting hotels, shopping malls, and casinos. They mapped the spaces of the city, meticulously documenting its parking lots and billboards. Back on the east coast, they wrote Learning from Las Vegas. In this book, they attacked modernist architecture for its belief in tabula rasa and grand authoritarian gestures. “Learning from the existing landscape,” rather than to “tear down Paris and begin again,” became the way to be innovative and revolutionary. “Fine art follows folk art” and not function. Venturi and Scott Brown had officially launched postmodernist architecture.

From Mecca to Riyadh to Dubai, commercial hubris and themed developments have often sparked comparisons with Las Vegas among journalists and researchers. Man-made islands visible from the moon, submarine hotels, and the highest towers in the world could as well have been built in Nevada, they seem to say. Ahmed Kanna and a group of researchers decided to take the Las Vegas metaphor seriously. In The Superlative City, they show that there is more to the comparison than theme park vernacular. Both cities share a similar desert ecology, experienced extremely fast growth, and have booming real estate markets. Kevin Mitchell (pp. 148–65) explains that, like Las Vegas, Dubai thrives off the fresh blood of cheap imported labor, visitors, and tourists. Like Las Vegas, it has grown out of proportion with its infrastructure. Roads, water supply, and electricity networks have had a hard time following population growth. Like Las Vegas, it consumes excessive amounts of electricity and water to repel the surrounding desert, green the landscape, and cool off inadequately engineered buildings.

The discovery of relatively modest oil reserves in 1966 put Dubai on a peculiar course. Its rulers had to invest quickly. What Amale Andraos and Dan Wood (pp. 34–47) call “peak urbanism” does not only refer to the intensity of vertical development. It also describes the belief that, oil revenues being short lived, massive infrastructures and real estate projects had to become the engine of the city’s success. Yasser Elsheshtawy (pp. 104–20) and Maryam Monalisa Gharavi (pp. 138–47) analyze the corporations that engineered this rapid growth and exported the “Dubai model” to several cities across Africa and Asia. Emaar Properties, one of the world’s largest real estate developers, is emblematic of what Elsheshtawy dubs “Dubaization.” Right before the crisis that hit the city in 2008, “Emaar recorded impressive financials,” which according to its chairman were “testament to the strong fundamentals that drive the company” (p. 145). Gharavi suggests that these fundamentals are linked to the United Arab Emirates’ extremely weak labor regulations and structural exploitation of underpaid (if not unpaid) and disposable migrant workers. She analyzes the 2006 Emaar strikes, during which 2,500 workers demanded better wages and working conditions, as an attempt to end Dubai’s unair-conditioned nightmare.

Researched before the 2008 real estate crisis, The Superlative City is still relevant for the study of an emirate that has come back full force, after having benefited from Abu Dhabi’s oil largesse and from renewed instability and wars in the region. Kanna and his team asked the question: what can we learn from Dubai? Stephen Ramos brings the most convincing elements of an answer. The book grippingly reconstitutes the story of infrastructure and power in...