Iconic spaces, symbolic capital and the political economy of urban development in the arab gulf

Abstract

The contemporary UAE city demonstrates an accelerated form of urbanism: spectacular, telegenic, a constructed leisure land. Everything has become aesthetic. This aestheticization of the world, Baudrillard suggests, entails a collapse of aesthetic standards. Instead of aesthetic judgement, there is a fascination with excess. This acceleration leads to its opposite, a cultural meltdown, and turns social space into a fetishized abstraction. These aerial photographs are real, yet uncanny like detailed models, detached from their surrounding reality. Streets are clean, figures and cars look like models, palm trees look plastic and some detail is highlighted, all like military surveillance. The fetishized urban image in now turning blurred and melancholic, negating its aesthetic condition and pointing in a new direction: inward, small, human, neighbourhood, sensuality and a kind of defiance of unwanted reality. The city's simulated monuments are made to look artificial, in total defiance of their reality; the city is an avatar of itself. © Steffen Wippel, Katrin Bromber, Christian Steiner and Birgit Krawietz 2014.