The Icon Project: Architecture, Cities, and Capitalist Globalization by Sklair Leslie

Author:Sklair, Leslie [Sklair, Leslie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2017-02-27T05:00:00+00:00

Table 5.1. Ten tallest completed buildings in the world (2014/15)

a Often counted as two buildings.

Source : Adapted from Wikipedia lists for 2014/15.

While most contemporary research on Arab urbanity has focused on the Gulf, there is also an expanding literature on what Yasser Elsheshtawy and his colleagues (2011) call the ‘Evolving Arab City’ outside the Gulf. 32 Reflecting on geographies of inequality and urban disparities in Amman, Rami Daher tells us: ‘During a visit to Rabbat [in 2009], the author was astonished by the similarities in terms of investors, developers and even the rhetoric and discourse around development between neoliberal investors in Beirut, Amman and elsewhere in Mashreq and those in Rabbat. This global city is definitely circulating not only surplus capital from oil, but also images and models of neoliberal development’ (2013: 100), including ‘prioritization of iconic buildings’ (108).

A similar story emerges from two prestige projects in Morocco (Tanger-Med and Casa-Marina), where Valyans Consulting—a Casablanca-based firm created by the financial services conglomerates Ernst & Young and Andersen—developed the ‘brand’ with an international expert group independent of the Moroccan authorities. The researchers quote an executive: ‘To gain media-space for large projects internationally, planners attempt to bring in famous foreign architect-planners’ (Barthel and Planel 2010: 183). This gradual privatization of city planning in Morocco tends to squeeze out any remaining democratic controls, an apparently universal consequence of UMPs anchored by iconic architecture. Analyzing what they see as a ‘Glimpse of Dubai in Khartoum and Nouakchott’, Armelle Choplin and Alice Franck (2010: 74) argue that the new architectural styles evoke Arab influences, noting that project names often have Arabic signifiers. The end result is an ideal and simplistic picture of these ‘iconically pharaonic projects’. In a particularly interesting study of al-Saha Village in Beirut, Mona Khechen shows how this revenue-generating restaurant-hotel, owned by the controversial al-Mabarrat charities of one of Lebanon’s leading Muslim Shiite clerics, has become an exercise in hyper-reality. The restaurant-hotel embraces ‘market aesthetics and image-making strategies, and packages itself for visual consumption’ in Beirut and also in new restaurants in Sudan and Qatar (Khechen 2007: 19). All this research lends credence to what Elsheshtawy (2013: ch. 9) has labelled ‘Dubaization’—raising questions as to what extent this obscures the ‘reality’ of Dubai or anywhere else.

Artificial islands (as in ‘The World’) are special cases of UMPs (and often Dubaization), and there are plans to build various types of islands, for example off the coasts of Korea, The Netherlands, Spain, Pakistan, Slovenia, Singapore, Venezuela, and Russia (Federation Island in the Black Sea off Sochi, site of the 2014 Winter Olympics). There is also a substantial literature on the saga of Tokyo Bay. Lin (2010) locates the ongoing Tokyo Bay story within the context of the metabolist movement in Japan, seeing it as part of the visionary, often utopian, movements of the 1960s in which architects and futurists all over the world imagined sites of future human habitation in the sea and up in the sky, features of some contemporary megastructures. In Singapore a

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