Reaching for the sky: A look at Dubai’s architectural rise

Analysing Dubai's architectural rise, which has culminated in it winning the right to host Expo 2020.

The Burj Khalifa in Downtown Dubai. The world’s tallest building is one of a series of iconic structures, including The Palm and the Burj Al Arab, that has served as a promotional tool for the city. SShow more

For a city with self-­promotion in its DNA, what better opportunity could there be than to host the greatest exhibition in the world?

By the time the announcement was made in November 2013, there seemed to be a sense of inevitability to the vote that awarded Expo 2020 to Dubai – the pairing seemed a match made in heaven.

If there’s one thing that Dubai understands, it’s surely the curious blend of national projection, spectacle and architectural largesse that’s embodied in an Expo.

The city has, after all, almost single-­handedly proved the promotional power of architecture with a series of iconic structures such as the Burj Al Arab, Palm and Burj Khalifa, which have constructed an almost indelible image for a city that has been described as “the world’s most extreme example of a business-first, built-from-the-sand boomtown” and one of the new business, cultural and intellectual centres of the contemporary Arab world.

A poster that appeared on a large Damac Properties billboard in the days immediately after the Expo announcement seemed to capture the local mood: “Whoever said winning isn’t everything doesn’t know Dubai.”

For Kevin Mitchell, the co-editor of the recent book UAE and the Gulf: ­Architecture and Urbanism Now, Dubai may cultivate a reputation for ambition that borders on hubris, but the failure of commentators to look beyond this has resulted in a caricature of the city that masks its value and influence.

“Dubai is not a city. Dubai is cities. There are many different ways that people live in the city, and some of these are drastically different, but if there wasn’t an underlying belief in an absence of limits, that anything is possible, then I don’t think Dubai would be where it is today,” says the UAE-based architect and academic.

“I think there’s a tendency to view what’s happening in Dubai and the UAE through a singular lens that negates some of the complexity that makes this place ­fascinating.”

Mitchell has spent more than a decade writing about Dubai and the insights it can provide about the contemporary forces shaping architecture and urbanism throughout the Gulf.

“If you looked at a photograph of the skyline in any one of a number of rapidly growing cities around the world today, the appearance would be similar. Look at False Creek in Vancouver and Dubai Marina, and the similarities are there, but what is interesting are the underlying conditions that have ­given rise to Dubai.

“One of the words that is used to describe Dubai is ‘instantaneous’ and people tend to say ‘Well, this has all happened since 1990 or 1995’, but I think the city is the product of a much older and more sustained vision, one that was set long ago, when Dubai first opened its port,” he explains.

“The newness of Dubai belies the fact that there has been this strategy and that this has been carried out over time. What we see now is the rather sudden manifestation of that.”

If that vision of an outward-­looking, economically liberal and mercantilist commercial crossroads has and will continue to define the shape and character of Dubai, Mitchell also sees signs of a change in mentality that he ­believes will eventually set the city on a very different course.

“There is, if not a significant change in the manifestation of the built environment, a greater awareness of some of the issues that were problematic during the years of the boom,” he says.

That shift in perspective, which the architect has started to see in contemporary developments such as City Walk in Jumeirah, can be seen in a declining emphasis on individual, “iconic” buildings and a greater focus on achieving a more coherent urban realm.

“One characteristic of good cities is that the space between buildings takes precedence over the buildings themselves,” he ­explains.

“The buildings form a background for life in the city, rather than being foregrounded, and I think there is probably a greater awareness today of the need to treat the spaces between buildings in a way that makes them habitable than there was 10 years ago.”

Whatever its perceived shortcomings when viewed from outside the region, Mitchell believes that one of the fastest-growing. commercially successful and popular cities in the Arab world deserves to be understood on its own terms and approached without pre-judgement or prejudice.

“There are those, especially during the height of the building boom, who criticised Dubai for having no identity. That’s interesting as a first line, but that’s led me to think more carefully about Dubai’s built environment,” he says.

“You may not like it, but ultimately Dubai is what it is, and in the best cases, it presents a kind of challenge to our thinking that is only hindered when we just say: ‘Well, this is bad, or this is good.’

“Having said that and after thinking about Dubai, observing it and living in it, I still don’t claim to understand the city,” Mitchell admits. “Dubai is a very complex proposition.”