Baking the global city:
notes on an Emirati recipe for global significance

Michele Acuto

* Australian National University and National University of Singapore.
PhD Candidate at the Australian National and
Visiting Fellow at the National University of Singapore's Global Cities Cluster University,
where he researches global cities from a socio-political perspective.
He is also affiliated with the University of Canberra, where he teaches sociology.

michele.acuto@anu.edu.au

Over the past few years, as I ventured in the intricacies of local government and I travelled through some of the most dynamic metropolises of our age, a recurring theme has emerged in consultations with experts, planners and politicians that shape these urban giants: there seem to be a conviction that certain elements, when carefully combined, can constitute the recipe for global significance. While some ingredients and cooking tools may vary, some specific features are recurrent in both literature and practice whether we find ourselves in the long-lived boroughs of London, on the urbanizing bays of Sydney, or in the sprawling conurbations of Shanghai and Sao Paulo.
In a time of abstraction and empirical dismantling of the metropolis as an aggregate of functions, it is my attempt here to bring us back to the bricks, highways and metallic skeleton of the city itself, sketching a few notes on how global cities become the technology of globalization in the 21st century - a technology that fundamentally rests on hybridization.

Globalization and the contemporary metropolis
Global cities are often the pinnacle of an intricate relationship: they represent the synthesis of global and local processes due to their positioning at the crucial intersection of manifold worldwide networks, thus becoming the strategic sites of globalization, to which they participate as both articulators and engines. Yet, they are not solely passive agents in the social processes that underpin this phenomenon: they are equally active in that they are constituted by vibrant communities that exert command and control functions on those very same processes, thus locating 'their' city as strategic pieces of that jigsaw puzzle (to borrow Braudel's terminology) that represents the global milieu.

Yet, the strategic position withheld by some of the world's metropolises is a "precarious, contingent effect, achieved only by continuous performance and only for the duration of that performance" (Bingham, 1996 p.647), and we must not forget that, as Roderick McKenzie's intuitively described as early as 1927, these "centres of gravity" for world affairs are "in a constant process of change and realignment" (McKenzie, 1927 p.28). In this view, global cities are far more than just urban structures: they represent hybrids constituted by the inextricable relationship between communities of individuals and technologies of globalization, which interact to create a "place" in that "space of flows" of the present global milieu (Castells 1989).

Cities, in this view, are not essentially different from many of the groups described by Mancur Olson in his seminal The Logic of Collective Action: they are expected to fulfil the demands of their members, and rest upon common, rather than individual, needs. The assets provided by the city are for the major part of a public nature: urban settlements offer services such as transportation or security apparatuses, commodities such as water or housing, as well as spaces such as public areas and streets. Numerous urban settlements also supply wider audiences, as they become central places within their regions. This is true of many historical metropolises such as Mesopotamian Babylon or the Japanese first major centre of Nara, as well as more recently developed urbanities such as Manchester or Cincinnati, born out of the industrial revolution or post-industrial financial sites, such as Hong Kong, capable of servicing wider audiences. Urban products are, especially in these latter cases, not limited to basic goods: cities also export knowledge, information, as well as culture through national, regional and global communication networks. They are, in other words, "knowledge-bases" of an urbanized humanity, representing not just economic motors, but sources of all of the processes of modernization that contributed to the great transformation of society, and possible engines of a new transition to an urban world. If this consideration applies ever since their early days of urbanization, with centres such as Athens, Alexandria or Damascus, the production, dissemination and merchandising of intellectual property, as well as immaterial financial services and capitals, has nowadays gained the status of "global public goods" giving rise to what Sharon Zukin called "symbolic economy." Due to the revolutions spurred by the new information technologies, this side of urban assets has matched (if not surpassed) manufacture in global markets. Various cities - those that attained world city status - have become providers for a public that goes far beyond their local constituency. They serve their urban community, those who travel through them, but also their national economy and, in many cases, other governments and non-state actors abroad, in an intricate web of trans-national and cross-regional relations.

In the recent decades, thanks to the internationalization and the expansion of the finance industry, several metropolises have also managed to position themselves strategically upon worldwide economic circuits, offering a plethora of services through private channels such as transnational corporations or stock exchange groups. This process, rooted in the new international division of labour, has caused a re-alignment in competencies and financial distribution, making cities "de-nationalized centres for management and coordination" and favouring the rise of a few global cities as "postindustrial production sites" (Sassen 2001). London, Singapore, Frankfurt and Hong Kong are oft-cited recent examples of this process, but Dubai has also gained increasing credit in the vast literature underpinning the global city (or "world city") phenomenon.

Hybridization: the urban technology of globalization
Global cities can exercise an enormous social influence with their physical entities. Urban settlements, through their complexes of public spaces, emblematic structures, and crossbred art, can project and redirect social relations. "The spatial structure - as Ray Pahl wrote in classic of human geography - partly reflects and partly determines the social structure" (1970, p.187). Bridges, bricks and squares have a meaning beyond their function: they symbolize concepts, represent ideologies and embody a public imagery that, in the case of many world cities (and indeed all global cities), stretches beyond their urban confines as well as across their national frontiers, imprinting meanings and images all around the globe. "Spaces - writes Paul Hirst - have characteristics that affect the conditions in which power can be exercised, conflicts pursued and social control attempted" (2005, p3). In this sense, space is not neutral, but rather a crucial component of the complex power-geometries that define the urban in an age of turbulent reconfiguration of the global scenario. As a consequence, the human ability to shape space, and give it a cultural, religious or political meaning, confers social relevance to such material structures, while also conferring power to those who craft them.� The urban structure thus transcends mere materiality, becoming object of political contention, social engineering and segregation, with iconic developments and skyscrapers leading the way in the transformation, as well as reiteration, of social relations in the globalizing texture of the 21st century metropolis (Sudjic 2005; Sklair 2006).

As Australian architect William Mitchell noted in Placing Words, the urban is nowadays the context through which social relations unravel. "The spaces and places of twenty-first century cities - wrote the author - provide contexts for communication, serving not only to shelter and protect their inhabitants, but also to ground and sustain meaningful interaction among them" (2005: 3). Symbolic interactions pervade the urban in all its layers, not just as physical definitions of the world around us but also as communicative actions that become dynamically superimposed to the material structures of the city, as well as immaterial 'virtual' worlds of networked interactions that flow through the city's infrastructures. The city has many symbolic 'voices': street signs, intertwined public spaces, gated entrances, transport systems, entertainment hubs, markets and so on, all contribute to the definition of the 'spatialization' of the city. All of these coexist in a "plurality of competing, complementary and overlapping symbolic and spatial orders" (King, 2004: 3) that defines the socio-spatial texture of the urban. These contemporaneous "city worlds" (Massey, 1999) intersect to define a complex social milieu - the 'urban' - that is increasingly home to the majority of humanity. It is not just one of them that affects individuals in the city, but the spatial relationship among them, which creates a particular symbolic system characteristic of that locality.

As we walk through the streets, the city presents us a world of images, material constructs and social interactions, which define the range of choices available to its users. It constrains (or enables) our mobility, and constitutes a multi-structured mise-en-sc�ne of built (doors, walls, bridges) as well as inscribed (signs, sounds, graffiti) forms of social coordination and communication (Mitchell, 2005: 8). The spatial organization of the city influences not only the possibilities for movement, but also the consciousnesses and social practices of those who interact with the urban environment.

To become sites of global influence, however, architectures and urban developments need to adhere to those widespread stereotypes that represent modernization and power. As the theory of symbolic power tells us, symbolic objects are significant only if recognized as such: they depend, as Emile Durkheim (1984) underlined, on a "logical conformism" between individuals who agree upon their meaning and share some basic understanding of the essential language they are expressed in. In order to create urban textures that have significance (and consequently influence) over a widespread audience, one has to relate to the symbolic systems shared or understood by as many as possible in such audience - the 'dominant' culture. Global cities need to locate themselves prominently within the imaginative geographies of the publics they try to reach, not just posturing on the map as exotic locations, but rather speaking the language of a globalization they try to master.

Skyscrapers are obviously the most common example of this, but there are other features that reify progress today: mobility hubs such as ultra-modern airports or international trade centers occupy much of the global imaginary of what 21st century globalization is. They are the "signs of modernity" (King 2004) and some of today's most "obvious candidates for housing globalized flows, whether metaphorical or material" (McNeill, 2005: 43). Similarly, first-class hotels and shopping malls denote vitality of business and tourist industries, as much as environmentally viable mass-developments are the latest in world-class engineering and urbanism. In this context, one of the crucial abilities of today's globalizing metropolises is in their mirroring and enhancing of dominant symbols of modernity. Being 'modern' is, in current global city-speak, maintaining a globalized edge that is reflected in prominent urban restructuring - mostly geared towards efficiency and sustainability - as well as in the vitality of one city's transformative and advanced producer services economy.

Iconic architecture in the global city is a case in point. As Leslie Sklair has underlined: "iconicity in architecture is a resource in struggles for meaning and, by implication, for power" (2006, p.22). Iconic buildings form since the early days of civilization the profile of world cities, as the well-known cases of the Coliseum in Rome or the Tour Eiffel in Paris testify. Architecture becomes power in that it contributes to shape the social meaning of the city, adding to this latter's symbolic capital, constructing - as Bourdieu would say - its habitus and providing a source of legitimacy through non-verbal communicative action. And iconic architecture today, is well and alive. For instance, Beijing has undergone radical transformations before, and after, the 2008 Olympics as the city's planners have engaged popular architects from around in an attempt to promote the Chinese capital as a global city in everyone's language. In order to do so, local government and enterprises have collaborated in a concerted attempt to design a Beijing capable of appealing to consumerist and capitalist audiences around the globe, using "architecture as branding" and seeking to convene a new image of the old communist stronghold. In this sense, as Deyan Sudjic (2005) has prosaically put it, contemporary metropolises are often affected by an "edifice complex" in which art and architecture morph into propaganda and public diplomacy, constructing urban spaces beyond functionality and cultural expression. In this instance, as highlighted below in the case of Dubai, the "symbolic capital of architectural design is transformed into other forms of capital in the process" (Xuefei, 2008, p.517).

The overall cityscapes of today's global cities are thus often objects of attempts towards iconicization, just like the globally recognized line of Manhattan, while the city acquires a particular (global) sense of place that detaches it from its immediate geographical proximities. Despite the increasing pace of urbanism and globalism, blurring boundaries and making towns into city-regions, global cities still stand as cathedrals of globalization where their unique mixture of social and material flows allows for hybrid social combinations of local and traditional with a multiplicity of 'foreign' elements, whose synthesis creates the urban vitality and dynamicity typical of world cities. Yet the global city's symbolic power doesn't stop to the iconic element. The whole urban structure represent a source of meaning that can inform its legitimacy, support its diplomatic activities, and orient people's perceptions toward those for whom the city acts as a mirror. Dubai, for instance, is continuous object of urban planning and architectural remodelling, as it bids for global city status in the 21st century. To this extent, ever since the days of the first Iraqi war in 1990, local government and emirate sought to develop a platform city and attracted an increasing number of private enterprises that led to the expansion of the city around iconic structure as the Burj Al Arab hotel, into one of the most advanced metropolises around the Earth.

Sampling some ingredients: the case of Dubai
The case of Dubai, a high-rise postindustrial city that emerged from a fishermen's village in the mere twinkling of an eye, can therefore provide us with several samples of the ingredients that constitute today's recipe for global significance. Lacking a strongly preconceived historical image, the Emirate allows for an easier construction of a global city fa�ade. However, while this 'historical vacuum' can offer much space for place promotion, it can also hinder the formation of a convincing brand of what Dubai is - an identity which to date remains relatively weak. In order to solve this distinctiveness puzzle, the governing elite has put much emphasis on the creation of landmarks and world-class structures capable of 'controlling' and dominating architectonically the development of a unique urban identity (Eben Saleh, 2001: 328). By doing so, the Emirate has embarked in an almost unprecedented - with the exception of Las Vegas, perhaps - attempt to create a set of predertemined "experiences to be consumed" by foreigners (Zukin, 1997). In this context, monumental developments and high-tech public spaces are supposed to rise as cornerstones of the city's symbolic system by creating an instantly-recognizable skyline, with a boosterism-ridden architecture concerned with making "nowhere suddenly in somewhere" (Sudjic, 1996). Dubai, in this sense, has been deeply seduced by the so-called "Bilbao effect" and the potential of 'wow-architecture' of defining a city's image in the eyes of foreign audiences (Rybczynski, 2002). It has learnt that, in the present "society of spectacle" (Debord, 1994), audiences can be captivated through a proficient usage of symbolism. In this sense, Dubai is a startling case of a globalizing technology, which is perhaps best embodied by some key ingredients of global city 'baking' - skyscrapers and mobility hubs.

In a 1997 article published on the Scientific American, Australian architect William Mitchell asked: "Do we still need skyscrapers?" In the age of IT and locational flexibility, the need for hyper-concentrated office buildings in the midst of the key cities of the globe seemed to him questionable at best. However, Mitchell warned, high-rises are not yet dinosaurs: their symbolic value goes far beyond their function. Dubai seems to corroborate this assumption, as its sandy plains are rapidly substituted by the glassy verticality of its corporate centers. Here visionary architecture melts into instant urbanism in a risky business that raises many questions.
As the city has quickly grown in both regional importance and urban extension, Dubai embarked in what Mike Davis (2007) termed a "frantic quest for hyperbole" that has symbolized its attempt to ascend to the Olympus of global cities. Function is not the primary concern in a land of endless horizons and seemingly bottomless financial availability. Form is the prime focus of today's architecture in Dubai, whose fundamental criterion is globality. Dubai, in this sense, has been deeply seduced by the so-called "Bilbao effect" and the potential of 'wow-architecture' of defining a city's image in the eyes of foreign audiences. As the Burj Khalifa (or "Burj Dubai" as it is known to the popular media) opens, the world is reminded of Dubai's ambitions.

Yet, the Emirati fixation with the iconic is not simply a whim of its multi-billionaire leaders, as many Western commentators have wrongly argued. Dubai is trying to be, in the worlds of Emirati development tycoon Mohammed Ali Alabbar, "New York in the making." Iconicity is, in Dubai, a crucial pillar of the entrepreneurial narrative that seeks to assert the Sheikdom's vibrant presence in world affairs. It is a testimony to the city's dynamism and a proof of its attempt to become the central place of the Middle East and one of the top urban settlements of the globe. However, icons don't just sprawl out of the desert sands. The social process behind the emergence - and indeed establishment - of an icon is inevitably nested in a logical conformism among individuals who agree upon the meaning of a symbol. In order to create an icon that has significance (and consequently influence) over a widespread audience, one has to relate to the symbolic systems shared or understood by as many as possible in such audience - the 'dominant' culture of that group. To put it simply, the icon needs to be recognized as such, and 'speak the language' of those to whom it is targeted. If Dubai seeks to seduce the world to become a widely recognized 'global city' then it needs to speak the language of globalization. High-rises, shopping malls and state-of-the-art mobility hubs are - indeed - the most common representations of such global-speak. They embody modernity and progress, and illustrate power by evoking the successes of metropolises such as New York, London and Tokyo.

This high-rise symbolizes Dubai's quest for uniqueness and primacy in the hierarchy of cities around the globe. In the context of this race, the building also shows concerted effort of all the key players of the Emirate: Sheik, local government, major stakeholders and transnational capitalist elites. To these latter Emaar - its constructor - has targeted the marketing of the Burj, which offers a multifunctional hub pinpointed on its Armani Hotel & Residence that will house 160 suites and 144 cutting-edge apartments. Moreover, the building is just the pinnacle of a much wider Emaar development know as "Downtown Burj Khalifa" that spreads over 500-odd acres of Dubai's CBD, alongside Sheik Zayed Road, with an estimated US$ 40 billion capital investment. Of course, the development does not stop to the Burj in terms of world-class standards: the site houses, immediately below the tower the world's largest shopping centre the already operating Dubai Mall, circled by a boulevard that in Emaar's vision should rival with the Champs-Eysees in width, length and prestige. Adorned with a Guinness-record aquarium and an ice hockey rink three times thicker than those in the National Hockey League, the Mall boosts fountains, pools and paddles of all sorts. As the progressively dazzled shopper makes his way through the Mall towards the Burj, the top-ranking boutiques leave the center stage to another urban champion occupying much of the adjacent 30-acres lake- the Dubai Fountain. Designed to replicate and, needless to say, amplify the Bellagio Fountain of Las Vegas, this gigantic water spectacle is supposed to spray an average 22,000 gallons of water at 150 meters in height at any given moment, with multiple cycles of color-shape combinations.

The iconic becomes, in this Emirati slant for global notoriety, a trampoline for the wider world: it is the means by which Dubai seeks to persuade of its progress and its participation in the 'international' whilst also trying to seduce the global audience through the soft power of its symbols. Although Singapore is often referred to in Emirati planning circles as the meter of comparison, Dubai is not looking for a cosmopolitan melting pot. Rather, the Burj is nothing but one of the latest ingredients of an elitist 'salad bowl' where every state-of-the-art development is distinct, detached and potentially independent from all the others, and all is meant for the transient.

Beyond architectural talent and glittery branding, there lies a crucial risk: as vertical cities sprawl upon Dubai's landscape, less and less urbanity, in the neighborhood sense so popularly campaigned by Jane Jacobs, is left. As Nicholas Ouroussof (2008) put it on the pages of the New York Times, each iconic development runs the risk to become a "gated enclave, architecturally stupendous yet profoundly exclusionary." Rather than becoming a vibrant and cosmopolitan hub for global mobility, Dubai might be on track towards mutating into a 21st century Las Vegas built of inward-oriented exclusive attractions that few can afford, void of any urban community, and much closer to a gigantic theme park than to the global cities of our present age. For instance, customers of the Burj al Arab hotel are already able to reach it directly from the airport via private, anonymous, air-conditioned shuttles that bypass the other suburbs and deposit them right in front of the super-exclusive lobby. Non-resident visitors, on the other hand, have to pay a 40 Dirham tax to enter the premises, and are constantly surveyed as they goofily move where access is granted. A similar fate (between 100 and 500 Dirham) awaits tourists at the entrance of "at the top" - the opening exposition of the Burj that takes visitors to the 124th panoramic floor of the tallest building in the world.

This trend should, however, remind us of an inherent problematique of today's globalizing cities: along with exponential growth and international connectedness come the problems of social polarization, exclusionary ghettoization and spatial contrast. The trouble with Dubai is in fact not in its skyscrapers per se. Yet, it is a question of privatization of public spaces, lack of universal right to the city and splintering nature of the conurbation in a system of "modular liberties" (Davis 2007, p.62; Graham 2001) and privileged access.

The interesting aspect of the Burj is, in this sense, not its disproportionate and inhuman dimension. Rather, it is the attempt to create a city within a city - an almost independent structure that demands little external plodding for its inhabitants. All of these developments are indicative of a worrying trend in the Emirate: as the city seeks to market its unique melting pot of cultures and nationalities as a catalyst for global expansion, its urbanism has turned into a demand-oriented planning that aims at creating comfort zones for all of its wealthy expatriate and short-term visitors. The city has thus embarked in an attempt to satisfy the many different appetites of very different global elites, ranging from those in search for extravaganza to those in need for anonymity and privacy. In this sense, the Emirate has avoided targeting any specific group, rather 'going with the flow' of the international jet-sets and putting up an almost unprecedented multifaceted offer: entire themed quarters are now burgeoning across the urban landscapes, from the Harvard co-sponsored medical village, to Dubailand (the world's send-largest fun park, of course), to OMA's plans for a Manhattan-style islet that was meant to replicate a block of the Big Apple, before being benched by the current crisis.

This latest Emirati fantasy, embodied by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas's Office for Metropolitan Architecture recent proposal for the masterplan of Waterfront City, illustrates the exclusionary spatialization of the Emirate. Before being benched - and probably discarded - by the financial crisis, the plan was meant to be realized by Nakheel next to the site of the new Al Maktoum International Airport, set to become the largest of its kind by 2017. The proposed 1.5 billion square foot artificial island at the core of this development is to be divided in 25 identical city blocks and supposedly replicate the urban fabric of Manhattan. The hinges of this visionary experiment are at its northwestern corner: on the coastal side an 82-storey coiling tower named The Spiral, and on the island's side a gigantic 44-storey sphere conceived as a self-contained and three-dimensional gated neighborhood. The concept underlying this multi-billionaire construction, which should cover a total area twice the size of Hong Kong Island, is meant to be a practical application of Koolhaas's famous call for a "new urbanism" against an expanding phenomenon - the "generic city" - that, in his words, represents the contemporary "death of urbanism" and our "refuge in the parasitic security of architecture" (Koolhaas & Mau, 1995: 970). What OMA was proposing to achieve in Dubai's Waterfront City is a synthesis of generic (New York-style symmetrical blocks) and iconic ('Sphere' and 'Spiral') that should inspire 21st century urbanism.

However, Koolhaas's vision, if ever realized in the current economic downturn, might easily become a hallucination. The island, just like the Burj Dubai, Nakheel Tower and the numerous thematic developments planned across the Emirate, can morph into a self-sufficient community with little or no connection with the rest of the city. As it already happened in a smaller scale with the Burj al Arab hotel, the Waterfront might turn into a "gated enclave, architecturally stupendous yet profoundly exclusionary" (Ouroussoff, 2008). Customers of the hotel are already able to reach it directly from the airport via private, anonymous, air-conditioned shuttles that bypass the other suburbs and deposit them right in front of the super-exclusive lobby. Non-resident visitors, on the other hand, have to pay a 34 Dirhams tax to enter the premises, and are constantly surveyed as they goofily move where access is granted. A similar fate might await Koolhaas's island and the kilometer-high towers. Indeed, much of the city's viability is strictly dependant on taxis and private limousines that congest the main streets with almost no pedestrian in sight. The chaos and heterogeneity of the few remaining suburbs that are not construction sites or guarded malls and hotels is often fenced off from the visitor's eye. Newspapers and tourist guides regularly portray areas such as Sabkha, Satwa and Deira's Suqs like "exotic locales, places where one can find some sort of authentic living" (Elsheshtawy, 2008: 984). Moreover, thanks to the Dubai Metro opened in 2009 and to the infinity of taxis invading the Emirati metropolis, tourists and businessmen are able to transit across the high-speed viaducts built along Sheik Zayed Road, reaching the Burj or Dubai Mall from the airport in a matter of minutes, and virtually never exiting anywhere else than in their comfort-proof enclave.

Baking the globalizing metropolis: preliminary notes on the margins of an Emirati cookbook
Looking at Dubai's attempt to bake a global city in the contemporary scenario, without relying on pre-existent long-lived structures such as in the case of London, or on colonial heritage of Singapore and Hong Kong, we can draw some very preliminary notes on the recipes of city-making and its core ingredients.
Globalization, as we I underscored above, is the prime mover of hybridization, both social and physical, as it is constituted by a multiplicity of transnational forces capable of redefining the parameters of the present conditions of humanity, which created the impetus for globalization in the first place. Consequently, globalizing processes are the necessary domains of the modern metropolis, which can no longer be governed and sustained as a separate entity from the ever-changing sets of worldwide networks articulating human society all over the globe.

Perhaps, it might be useful to indulge one last time in our cooking analogy, and in the crucial lesson underpinning the correlation between the art of cuisine and the craft of the urban. Let me start from the beginning: in a series of lectures on the birth of modern India, from which I respectfully borrowed this manuscript's title, Australian anthropologist Robin Jeffrey used to illustrate how assorted 'components' came (on not) together to constitute that produce we nowadays associate with modern India. Yet, neither the ingredients, nor the recipe or the outcome - be it a cake, a nation or a city - are the crucial facet of this story: it is the process that matters most. Certainly, parts, instructions and result are all necessary segments of the story of the global city, but we should not over-represent them, nor draw far-reaching conclusions that they do not express. Rather, it is in the process that, perhaps, we can find two crucial lessons for global city-making. Firstly, baking takes time. Baking metropolises requires patience and careful long-term planning because social and material ingredients need to amalgamate and develop into a flexible-but-solid form capable of both being fluid articulators of global flows as well as withstanding sudden hits.

Similarly, process allows for some modifications, but there has to be some coherence with the underlying recipe, which cannot be repeatedly modified to satisfy everyone's demands. A cake is a cake is a cake, and at some point in its making no Michelin-starred chef can turn it into a salad. There is, as Latour (1985) would put it, a "mindless power" in artifacts that outlasts human control. We can construct technological assemblages that have particular built-in users, and we can apply specific devices for specific functional purposes, but the will inevitably acquire social features - and thus consequences - of their own as they become embedded in the symbolic systems of our societies. Cities become technologies of globalization and the engines of social hybridization partly separated from their creators, as their structures develop meanings beyond their original design, and informal urbanism transform the usage of space.

Obvious as these two reflections may sound, super-fast growth, instant planning and excessive demand-oriented urbanism have come at the expenses of many cities, and Dubai shall serve as poster-child for this. Basing its imageneering and masterplanning on an attempt to satisfy extremely mobile elites, transient users and varying customers, the Emirate has targeted its development not solely to too many audiences - thus making its development extremely vulnerable to abrupt global fluctuations such as the 2009 financial crisis - but also to a social process almost antithetic to the social rationale of city-making.
A focus on the unfolding of city-making also highlights this latter and oft-underplayed consideration: the urban process that leads from settlements to metropolises requires participation. Individuals, local communities, immigrant groups and small entrepreneurs of all sorts stand at the core of the development of a city beyond and across its material skeleton.
If Dubai has committed a fatal mistake in its original inception, that is to be found in the belief of the possibility of erecting a city without building (or better allowing for the development of) a community of individuals that underlies it. Despite the chronic search for novel icons that can distinguish the Dubai's sheikdom from its 'opponents' in the world city hierarchy, the real urban order of the Emirate - a conurbation of construction sites and soon-to-be gardens - and its urban lifestyle - a quickly monotonous set of hypercomfortable and hyperexclusive spaces - struggle to seduce beyond visual fascination. The manufactured landscapes of the city certainly attract and captivate the visitor's eye, but struggle to communicate any sense of urban cohesion and vitality of that horizon of meanings that is often fundamental in rooting one's attachment to places such as Paris and London. Metropolises such as New York, San Francisco and Sydney endeavour to offer a "package of pluralism" that attracts people from around the globe and constructs a cosmopolitan image of the world city as a composite of "cultural diversity, varied cuisine, ethnic carnivals [and] alternative lifestyles" (Short 2001, p.144) All of these add to the symbolic capital of the global city when an urban order can be maintained, and the city does not succumb to the multiple forces that traverse its conurbation.

However, as a final cautionary note on this brief commentary, it is important to underscore here that the reader shall not mistake critical inquiry for criticism: some of today's globalizing metropolises - and I can indeed speak for Sydney and Singapore - are wonderful and vibrant places to live in. They constitute global gateways for the ordinary man and woman who participate in the daily unfolding of worldwide process across their urban essence. They embody the evolution of our societies in an age of interconnectedness and paradigmatic shifts, while constantly producing and reproducing the world we live in. Along with segregation and exclusion, they also represent sites of opportunity and loci of civilization, and the likely theatre in which social relations - increasingly hybridized beyond local identities and national divides - will play out in the next century.

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