![]() ![]() Announced in 2006, the car-free Masdar City was supposed to be constructed in eight years, before the global financial crash intervened and has since become a go-to-example of yet another failed utopian experiment. “One day, all cities will be like this”īack in terrestrial Abu Dhabi, the UAE’s banner sustainable future city has quietly been taken off ice. The entrance to Masdar City, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. It embraces technocratic solutions to ecological threats, and champions a self-fulfilling pragmatism: technology might not be able to save the world, but perhaps it can maintain life as we enjoy it in the present. Simply put, the Khaleeji Ideology is a mode of state-sponsored futurecasting that emerged from the Gulf in the early decades of the twenty-first century. 2 I’ve come to think of this phenomenon as the Khaleeji Ideology. As such, while their details differ they share a basic scaffolding: shift the extractive infrastructure from hydrocarbons to data, and build smart, nominally sustainable cities that hew as close as possible to the idea of fully-automated luxury environmentalism. And under the auspices of Mars 2117, the UAE aims to establish the world’s first inhabitable settlement on the Red Planet.Įach of these plans are consultant-driven “blue sky thinking” made into national roadmaps. As detailed on a government portal, these include the Emirati Interplanetary Mission 2028, which will explore the asteroid belt between the rocky inner planets and the gaseous outer ones the Dubai Autonomous Transportation Strategy 2030 UAE Strategy for Artificial Intelligence 2031 UAE Water Security Strategy 2031 the Dubai Clean Energy Strategy 2050 and the Food Security Strategy 2051. Not to be outfutured, the UAE-where “city” generally means “freezone”-has several such plans that chart its strategy leading up to UAE Centennial 2071. Qatar and Bahrain each have a Vision 2030 too, Kuwait orients itself towards Vision 2035, and Oman aims for Vision 2040. 1Īll of these projects pale in comparison to NEOM, one of the flagship gigaprojects (after Bigness comes Giganess) of Vision 2030, Saudi Arabia’s roadmap to diversifying its economy away from the energy sector. Thus far, only one-the “Western Residence”-falcon wing of villas has been built, but its skeletal roads outline a headless avian form. My favorite is the shanzhai fever dream called Falconcity of Wonders, which was to feature scaled-up versions of Egyptian pyramids, the Eiffel Tower, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Taj Mahal, and most pleasingly, a replica of “Old Dubai” too. There is the International Chess City, an assemblage of thirty-two monochrome towers shaped like pawns, knights, bishops, and so on. These unfinished projects include Dynamic Tower, a writhing, sinuous solar and wind-powered affair in which each floor rotates at its own speed around a central core. I imagine it’s not terribly exciting in practice, dusty maquettes swirling with unlubricated sales pitches, but I like knowing that it’s there. I’ve never been to this apocryphal warehouse I’m told they are cagey about visitors, as if the taint of unrealized projects might somehow seep out and infect the city. Here, you’ll find scale miniatures of many of Dubai’s most iconic projects, including the ones that never got built. More precisely, it’s a warehouse filled with 3D-printed architectural models. In Dubai’s industrial district of Al Quoz is a museum of failed futures. ![]()
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