Introduction
The SC is a net-zero[1] energy housing development about 30 minutes away from the coast of Dubai, which places it in an area defined by other gated communities and golf ranges. It was built for $354 million dollars by Diamond Developers, who are known for other successful high-rise developments in places like the Dubai Marina.[2] The SC was opened in 2015, and has now reached 99% occupancy of its 500 villas in which 2,700 people live.[3] The SC has been widely promoted as a gateway to the green future, spawning article titles like, “The Future is Now: inside a home in Dubai’s Sustainable City.”[4]
Considering Dubai’s reputation of having the world’s second highest per capita rates of greenhouse gas emissions and the designation of “worst ecological footprint per person” in the world, this claim is suspicious.[5] These metrics can be attributed to the fact that Dubai is ecologically deprived of many vital resources, such as water, that the city intensively expends. Furthermore, Dubai is highly dependent on foreign imports for most raw materials and largely bases its economy on manufacturing and construction.[6] This dependence means that Dubai is unable to provide food and water locally and cannot sustainably support its current population. Dubai is also highly dependent on expats, tourists, and foreign laborers, other “imports” that rely on the highly polluting air transportation system.
Despite the large-scale context of Dubai, life in the Sustainable City seems quite desirable. Residents who live in the SC manage to reduce their carbon footprint by virtue of living in a place that was efficiently planned. Residents also report high levels of community interaction and closeness. The conditions within the SC in the context of Dubai creates a jarring image of a “green” oasis in a city known for extremely resource- and carbon-intensive projects such as the indoor ski slope or the indoor tropical rainforest. Projects such as these are of course not specific to Dubai, but take on a quality of exceptional intensivity given that Dubai is a desert city that depends on desalinated water for almost all of its hydration needs.
These conditions beg the question: Can a localized project of sustainability in a city such as Dubai actually be sustainable? This paper concludes that the Sustainable City represents an “island” of specialized consumption and lifestyle (such as the indoor ski resort) that does not actually take on the challenge of sustainability, given its exclusivity and reliance on highly carbon-intensive systems of resource procurement. Furthermore, these islands of specialized consumption are part and parcel of Dubai’s development and economic structure, highlighting the SC’s failure to be a model of broadly applicable sustainability.
Methodology
Given that the SC is a “sustainable” island nested within several conditions of large-scale unsustainability, I made the decision to analyze this case study at different scales. The small scale investigates the Sustainable City on its own, the middle scale investigates the SC’s relationship with the material conditions of Dubai, and finally, the large-scale looks at Dubai’s economic structure, and ties the Sustainable City to the government strategies, constraints, and opportunities by which it is characterized.
While there is a great paucity of academic literature on Dubai’s Sustainable City, there is a proliferation of news articles on the SC. The company behind the SC, Diamond Developers, has also created promotional materials through videos and social media. Given my inability to actually go and speak to the residents, or just observe, I was reliant on the social media that the Sustainable City produced for information on how residents were responding to the Sustainable City. I gathered Instagram posts from @TheSustainableCity (the SC’s official account) that I saw would be relevant to the project, especially those which shared a quote from residents. I then tagged them with letters and numbers responding to dates to create a system of informal citation.
While Instagram is definitely an incomplete source of information, it was still a useful source as I was able to glean the kind of living conditions the SC wanted to foster. Likewise, the news articles, which provided interviews with residents and managers of the SC, as well as technical information regarding the project, were great sources of information for analyzing the imagination and hopes surrounding the SC. These sources helped me answer questions related to feelings of personal security within the SC, the effects of pedestrian cities on community, and limits on lifestyle change. For example, through social media and news articles, I was able to find that some of the residents had not recycled prior coming to the SC. This allowed me to gauge not only their participation with the programs, but the extent to which residents of the SC were expected to change their lifestyle.
Dubai: Backwater or Instant City?
Dubai is a city that is defined by its pursuit for permanence in the face of dismissal and doubt in its early history.[7] In fact, the two words one comes across the most in the literature surrounding Dubai’s history is “backwater” and “instant city.” These definitions highlight twin derogatory visions of Dubai: “backwater” suggests a backwards place of no particular importance to Western observers while “instant city” gives the impression that this city is inorganic and without history. These two terms also encompass Dubai’s “legend” of development that has become an aspirational model for developing nations in Asia and Africa.[8] Dubai has diversified from an oil-based economy to one built on rabid real estate booms and a growing tourism industry, but how exactly did this happen?
Dubai’s development is a poster child of centralized state-led development—since the time of Sheikh Rashid, all the emirate’s rulers have opened Dubai to unrestricted investment. Sameer Bagaeen, the theorist who coined the term “instant city,” credits the rapid expansion of Dubai to the emirate’s decision to “allow non-nationals to purchase freehold property.”[9] Thus, the instant city is the product of “super-fast urbanism” paired with (and simultaneously supported by) its successful branding as a city of luxury and attractive investment opportunities. This separates Dubai from most Western cities who are defined by their governance histories.[10]
Access to property is not the only factor that launched Dubai into the futuristic glass city it is today. Dubai has long been known for being a place in which one could park money, invest it, earn a salary, start a business, and not have to pay taxes—thus creating “special zones”of economy which creates, as Deloitte puts it in their report, a “business-friendly legal and regulatory environment.”[11] This capitalist dream of unrestricted business (barring Emiratization and some pesky cultural demands) led to intense building of not only common real estate ventures but the creation of whole islands and other “Disneyfied” spaces for thematic consumption, from “The World” islands to the Dubai Creek.
However, this development comes at a cost. First it should be noted that Dubai has a long track record of labor and human rights abuses, as Pardis Mahdavi and Christine Sargent outline. Migrant workers are at the complete mercy of their employers under the kafala system, which dictates that every migrant must be sponsored by a UAE citizen. Should a worker face abuse and want to leave their employer, they are denied housing, employment, or legal help.[12] Moreover, migrants’ passports are often taken away upon arrival, thus preventing them from leaving Dubai.[13]
Additionally, it cannot be ignored that this development, and the population increases that have followed, is predicated on the back of desalination, the process by which the salt in seawater is removed to create potable water.[14] Without the heavy reliance on air conditioning, desalinated water, imported foods, tourists, goods, and investors, Dubai would not exist. While most metropolises are not self-sustaining, Dubai is an extreme example of technocratic dependence. Can this level of dependence on the globalized economy be environmentally sustainable? It is difficult to envision a scenario in which that is possible.
Living in the Sustainable City
The Sustainable City is surrounded by centers of incredible consumption. About 30 minutes northwest from the SC is Dubai’s coast, the center of the city, where indoor ski slopes and artificial islands define a landscape of tourist-attracting mega-projects. In its immediate vicinity, between 10 and 20 minutes away, there lies the “Dubai Autodrome,” a car racing track, “Jumeirah Golf Estates,” “Motor City,” a popular gated community that has a “green community” section, and “The Dubai Miracle Garden,” a garden of 150 million flowers that are shaped to create swans, castles, and arches in the shape of hearts.[15] However, once one has crossed into the Sustainable City, which is ringed by a “buffer zone” of trees that keeps out noise and dust pollution and blocks out the view of the desert stretching out behind it, one finds themselves in an incredibly unique place.
Not only is the Sustainable City one of the few “green” spots in Dubai, the planning that has made the community “sustainable” is also what has engendered a way of life not often seen in Dubai. Solar panels cover the community’s parking lots and sit atop each of the villas and a lake of recycled water irrigates the SC’s 10,000 trees and urban farming projects.[16] These innovations drastically reduce the SC’s energy consumption by 40-50 percent and water consumption by 40 percent compared to conventional villas.[17]
While these infrastructure projects are marketed as environment-oriented, there are real economic benefits for residents, particularly by reducing their DEWA (Dubai Energy and Water Authority) bills. The subsequent savings are large; one family saved Dh2,825 because of their reduced DEWA bills.[18] Diamond Developers also throw in a Dh40,000 dollar subsidy on an electric car once the new residents buy a home.[19] On top of this, though not connected to the ecological sustainability of the SC, the SC does not require residents to pay for maintenance or service fees. The SC absorbs this cost using the revenue from the small section of living spaces that are available for rent in the mixed use area.[20] These savings represent part of what the SC calls “economic sustainability.”
In 2018, the Sustainable City received the “Happiest Community” award by the Gulf Real Estate Awards.[21] Testimonies via the SC’s Instagram help explain why. In their #MeetTheCommunity posts, the many mothers pictured there rave about the safety of the community.[22] The city is mostly pedestrian as cars are relegated to parking lots and roads that wrap around the development.[23] As a result, people are free to walk, run, and play in the streets without fear of cars. The people quoted in these posts frequently make the connection that it is the car-free nature of the development that fosters an exceptional sense of community. As one woman says, “I love the community. There are lots of places in Dubai that are labelled as communities but it’s difficult to have community living when they’re so big. Children can run around outdoors and to the playground without worrying about cars.”[24] This is exactly the result the green urban planners hope to engender by removing cars from residential areas.
Calthrope identifies this as the “villain” of urban sustainability: low-density sprawl. Sprawl drives up fuel use (and thus respiratory problems) because of all the far distances people travel to run errands, access services, and go to their place of work or school; it sucks up open space that could be better spent for agriculture, or reserved as natural spaces for people to enjoy.[25] Sprawl doesn’t seem to even offer social benefits; in fact, it is more likely to isolate people and rid people of spaces to congregate.[26] He and urban planners like Patrick M. Condon strongly suggest condensing cities, so that products, services, jobs, and public transportation are all located close together.[27] Sprawl is also plaguing Dubai. Khaled Alawadi, in a study which compares the more traditional housing styles that used to be present in Dubai, sees Dubai “becoming less and less compact overtime.”[28]
The Sustainable City has taken on the ideal of condensing quite seriously, incurring fiscal benefits for itself and social benefits for its residents. For example, a mixed-use area in the SC is already generating revenue from the rents being collected from office spaces, restaurants, renters, and even an alternative medicine clinic. Making the majority of the SC pedestrian has also helped in condensing space. At the same time, they are also expanding their amenities, such as a K-12 school, a rehabilitation hospital with an emphasis on pediatrics, a mosque, and two “innovation centers” one of which will be “[…] the first energy positive building in the region.’”[29] These features will attract more revenue, and they will have the opportunity to sell off excess solar energy, should they wish to.
The SC’s motto is Social, Economic, and Ecological Sustainability. At the very least, the SC seems to be commercially viable, given these opportunities to capture revenues and the popularity of the community.[30] While the SC has provided the infrastructure needed to live more sustainably, its model raises several questions: Can the SC actually be sustainable while enmeshed in fundamentally unsustainable systems? Does the SC allow people to buy into sustainable infrastructure while engendering the continuation of unsustainable lifestyles?
Most of the lifestyle changes SC residents make are related to the infrastructure that the SC has to offer. For example, at least some residents had not been concerned with recycling prior to coming to live in the SC.[31] The title of an article in The National, a UAE based english news paper, reads, “The future is now: inside a home in Dubai’s Sustainable City” with the subheading “When Sarah Baerschmidt and her family relocated to the Sustainable City in Dubai, it required a change in lifestyle.” Reading eagerly for what this change could have been, I realized the author was referring to the family’s new experience recycling. Sarah says, “‘I was not a tree-hugger when I moved here… or really into recycling, but it’s completely repositioned in this community. It makes sense and is definitely the way forward.’”[32] Making sustainable practices readily available means that these practices become an automatized part of life. However, recycling is not enough. Restraining the use of resources in the first place should be primary.
Comparing Masdar, an “eco-city” in Abu Dhabi, and Dubai’s Sustainable City makes the issue of “restraint” clear. Masdar was built to be highly adapted to the heat and water issues. This city in Abu Dhabi was to be a truly sustainable city, but it was never completed. Masdar is about 13 times the size of the SC, which is 46 hectares, and was going to cost billions to build.[33] A complex set of technologies, such as wind towers, were planned to keep out heat. However, what is really interesting is that Masdar keeps intimate track of energy use.[34] If too much energy or water is used, management has conversations with residents.[35] Residents have no control over the A/C, but rather everything energy and water related is managed from a “control room.”[36] This has resulted in a lot of dissatisfaction from the students who were living there–they complained that they could not turn their A/Cs down, and that they felt they were being watched and over managed.[37] Masdar is now commonly referred to as a “ghost town”; the project failed.
In contrast, the SC does not restrain use of water or energy. Karim El-Jisr, the executive director of the SC, says, “we don’t want to overload people with information, there is too much information out there—but just the right dose of information simplified, we believe this is how we can change behaviors.”[38] Not wanting to demand “too much” of the SC residents, the SC just encouraged recycling and installed solar panels to create passive, but not rigorous, “sustainability” behaviors. No restraint in resource consumption is asked for or made necessary in the eyes of the residents.
Special Zones, or, Islands of Thematic Consumption and Lifestyle
As impressive as certain parts of the Sustainable City are, this gated community project ultimately represents a false hope of universal salvation from climate change under neoliberal capitalism. To understand this, it is important to be familiar with Dubai’s history, and the strategies it has employed over time to bring itself into being.
Dubai has used a quintessential neoliberal plan to create itself. As Todd Reisz chronicles, Dubai was a “[…] sandy emirate [that] had nothing to offer that could not be recreated at any other point along the Gulf coast. Its harbor was silting and could not keep up with modern shipping requirements. Its foreign relations—already its economic lifeline—was not necessarily anchored to Dubai; people could leave as quickly as they arrived.”[39] This was just after World War II, when imperial powers had finished mapping the new Middle East. At the time, Dubai had not much more than this age-old ephemeral foreign population, and the newfound promise of oil.[40] Transient populations would not do in the oil state that Dubai was to become. As is known now, Dubai would never become an oil state like its richer cousin Abu Dhabi. Nevertheless, the project of setting up an urban center began under Sheikh Rashid, to whose family Reisz credits this “modus operandi: mere sovereignty was not going to keep the people of Dubai fed, but an aggressive marketing strategy might.”[41] All they had to do was sell the promise of modernity.
The British did not quite see it that way. Dubai was drawn as an exceptionally simple and straightforward metropolitan plan by a British engineer.[42] All that remained was investment at this nascent stage, which came. As the British saw it, this soon-to-become oil state would be a good place to park money, not generate it, as Reisz puts it.[43] But Dubai would persevere past the side-eye sneer of the British.
Dubai had been a city known for its tax breaks and tax free special zones for many years, before they started applying a Value Added Tax (VAT) in 2018.[44] Tax regulation, or the lack thereof, represented a turning point for Dubai when, in 1985, “…Dubai launched the Jebal Ali free zone, where local and foreign businessmen can operate outside Dubai’s own customs and legal regimes. Jebal Ali and heavy investments in transportation infrastructure helped Dubai become a center for cargo operations, a commercial trade entrepôt, and a competitive location for warehousing and manufacturing.”[45] Hazbun sees the Jebal Ali free zone as an example of reterritorialization, a symptom of globalization. In reterritorialization, in economic spaces, “…entails the development of nodes within global networks that generate spatially defined economic benefits for firms and property owners.”[46] This economic reterritorialization turns these so called global cities into “command centers” from which globalized trade can expand and control market flows.[47]
Jebal Ali, and Dubai’s generally tax-free status (until 2018) can also be described in terms of the “offshore”. Palan, as paraphrased by Simpson, describes an economic realm that is divided into the “onshore” and the “offshore”; the onshore being spaces which are “subject to conventional state regulation and taxation, and ‘offshore’ realms where some degree of those regulations are withheld” (Simpson, p. 23).
Back to the story: With all these businessmen around, Dubai started building luxury hotels to host them in style. As Hazbun notes, these hotels represented, as they do for many newly independent, modernizing states, “prestige projects to mark the state’s wealth and growing importance.”[48] Then the tourists started coming, despite the wars and terrorism that plagued the region. Hazbun has aptly identified this as the “Middle Eastern tourism paradox”—a trend of tourism in the Middle East even as it became known for instability post-9/11.
Dubai struck it rich with tourists by creating utopic islands of experience under the shadows of ever increasing mega development projects that make the city constantly new. Luxurious shopping malls followed the luxurious hotels, until Dubai became a shopping hub for other Arabs in the area, as well as Asians and Eastern Europeans, for whom Dubai acts as an crossroads. Developers and marketing firms crafted shopping venues for tourists into “themed niche markets.”[49]
Dubai has also benefited from trends in the global tourism market that have sustained demand for artificial and simulated experiences of place. Rather than building an industry on natural environments or monuments of historical significance, Dubai relies on a process of economic reterritorialization, defined as “[…]the development of nodes within global networks that generate spatially defined economic benefits for firms and property owners.”[50] Foreign investment allows for the almost limitless creation of zones of consumption that is so ecologically ungrounded it’s almost ironic. ‘Nature tourism’ takes the form of ski slopes embedded within a massive indoor shopping mall,[51] enjoying the “local culture” means visiting the Ibn Battuta mall. So these islands of consumption, masked as experience, proliferate. Simpson sees this creation of “simulated experience of place” as being part of the legacy of the “offshore island” model that Dubai fosters in its economic scheme. These islands, too, represent a “symbolically offshore” space in which normal conventions no longer prevail–because these spaces are made for people who are not culturally bound.[52] In this offshore island pattern, the boundaries between the public and the private, the economic and the cultural, become increasingly blurred as spaces undergo intense economic reterritorialization.
Economic reterritorialization comes at a significant cost to many different actors, including non-human entities. As Simpson puts it:
Billions of dollars have been squandered to construct Ibn Battuta-themed shopping malls, five star Armani hotels, verdant desert golf courses, and exquisitely baroque casino resorts. Hidden beneath these gilded facades are the ugly realities of resource deprivation, labor exploitation, and cultural and economic dispossession, all of which belie their utopian status.[53]
The intense privatization that comes with economic reterritorialization also results in chilling militaristic and surveillance strategies. For example, Simpson also points out that the mercenary force, Blackwater, has been trained to address unrest in UAE labor camps.[54] Additionally, Elsheshtawy notes that the “few remaining public spaces in Dubai are being privatized […] to discourage lower-class people coming together and minimize possibility for protests. In fact, all public space, if we can call it that, is heavily controlled to prevent resistance.”[55] These are the consequences of capital set loose in an economic and governmental “offshore realm”—though it should be noted that these abuses do take place in democratic governments, but at other scales and in different ways.
The SC is most definitely part of this context. It is simply another island in which one can enjoy one style of life, before moving onto the next one, even in just the space of a day. After all, the SC is a gated community, a quintessential island. Setha Low defines the gated community as
An exclusionary enclave where upperclass followed by middle class residents search from the sameness, status, and security in an ideal “new town” or “green oasis” […] The “pod” and “enclave” suburban designs further refine the ability of land-use planners and designers to develop suburban environments where people of different income groups—even in the same development—would have little or no contact with one another (Langdon 1994). Resident behavior, house type, and “taste culture,” however, are more subtle means of control.[56]
Though Low works within American contexts, these foundational aspects of the gated community can be found in the SC. First off, the SC is definitely exclusive, as even the cheapest villas go for about a million dollars.[57] This highlights the primary problem that Calthrope and Condon are trying to avoid: sprawl. The kinds of housing found in gated communities results in sprawl for two reasons. First of all, gated communities need to find a space, usually removed from the interior of the city, in which to build. The more gated communities are built, complete with golf courses, or horse stables (in the SC’s case) the farther into the desert the city expands, resulting in sprawl. Second of all, Condon states that neighborhoods should be mixed income, as all communities need a diverse class base to function. If space isn’t provided for laborers, babysitters, landscapers, guards, and the many other people needed to keep a gated community like the SC going, then they are going to have to find cheaper, usually fringe, housing and commute long distances, further exacerbating sprawl.[58] To be fair, most of the villas include a maid’s room, though I don’t think this qualifies as social sustainability.
Apart from the issues of exclusivity and sprawl, the nature of gated communities, especially in the context of Dubai, is to create a space of like-minded lifestyle and consumption.[59] For example, the Sustainable City hosts a farmers market, as well as an “Origin” market, “a bi-monthly, al fresco, artisanal experience at The Sustainable City plaza which brings together a community of extraordinary designers, entrepreneurs and artisans.”[60] This is chillingly in line with Hazbun explanation of the logic of reterritorialization, “Within each cluster, the locational benefits are intensified by the agglomeration of firms within the cluster, the locational branding and identity that the theming offers, and homogeneity within each cluster.”[61] So through the Origin market, and the other consumption opportunities, the SC becomes an island of “green” consumption. Green is put in quotes, considering that any food produced in Dubai is dependent on one of the most polluting water extraction projects in the world, desalination. Even though the SC is clearly just another neoliberal island of exception in Dubai, it is received by the media and those who consume this media to be a viable model for facing climate change. This can be seen in the proliferation of borderline-ecstatic articles on the the SC that have titles like “The future is now, inside a home in Dubai’s Sustainable City” or “City with a conscience: Dubai’s desert utopia.”[62]
In Inhabiting the Spaceship: The Connected Isolation of Masdar City, Gokce Gunel explores the false universality of the eco-city, specifically Masdar City in Abu Dhabi. Masdar is close kin to the Sustainable City, though differs in significant ways. Masdar was meant to be a “real” city, versus the SC’s hyped-up gated community model. It also seems that Masdar was much more ecologically rigorous: Masdar was built with all locally produced materials, had a complex infrastructure for encouraging cooling, and monitored water and energy use extremely closely. The SC did not target local or sustainable building materials; their infrastructure is much simpler, and measurements are not as highly specific.
Even though it was superior in these ways, Gunel claims that Masdar belongs to an architectural lineage which promises salvation by saving the few. The story, of course, begins with the biblical story of Noah’s ark. In this myth Noah and his family are chosen by God to survive the flood He is sending. Noah’s family, like the animals Noah brings on to his ship, will repopulate the world. In a technologically advanced world, Noah’s “arc” becomes the “spaceship”, and instead of surviving the flood, now the chosen few must survive climate change–but only as representatives of a now deceased humanity. As Gunel puts it: “In prioritizing enclosure for some over collective survival—the tension that underpins most space-faring movies—the spaceship also advances the principles of selection and endorses what Sloterdijk calls “exclusivity dressed up as universalism.”[63] Gunel views Masdar as one such “spaceship” whose exclusive and space-bound technological functions promise salvation, though it is a compromised salvation. The SC fits under this categorization as a localized, tech-dependent, exclusive site of sustainability.
Ironically, neither of these projects appear concerned with climate change. The Sustainable City and Masdar are both projects prompted not by environmental concerns, but rather the finitude of petrodollars and an anxiety concerning resources. As Gunel explains, the “belief in the infinity of oil also played a key role in producing ‘the economy’ as an object, which could likewise expand without limit.”[64] Masdar, in contrast, faces a future where oil may, in fact, be finite, and aims to exploit a truly “infinite” source of energy—the sun.[65] Similarly, Dubai began its sustainability initiatives after the financial crisis of 2008, which saw real estate prices in Dubai falling by 50 percent[66]—another situation in which a presumed infinity, in this case foreign investment, was dashed.
What is forgotten, however, is that there are finitudes which technocratic innovations cannot overcome, primarily the limited supply of water and the threateningly high wet-bulb temperatures. However, in the short term these limiting factors can be put off and ignored specifically because these limits are addressed technocratically. As Gunel says, the “‘man-made’ quality of water—where more can be generated through desalination whenever necessary—allows the actors in the area to envision and embrace its infinity, regardless of existing water scarcity.”[67] Meanwhile, the hidden costs of desalination are quietly piling up. The UAE may reach a point where their water source is so salty from all of the pumped back brine from the desalination plants may make it impossible to continue desalination.[68] Perhaps other technocratic advancement were to be called upon to surmount this new boundary, but the inefficiency, long term costs, and loss of biodiversity necessitated by this blind consumption should undermine faith in technocratic regimes, as opposed to more sustainable solutions which call for radical decreases in consumption and a reworking of normalized lifestyles.
Likewise, should climate change continue on its current path, wet-bulb temperatures, which measure heat and humidity levels, can reach deadly levels. At 46 degrees Celsius with a humidity of 50 percent, the human body can no longer maintain homeostasis–a person can die within a matter of minutes in these conditions.[69] It is predicted that in already hot and humid places like Dubai, these levels will become more and more frequent, making it uninhabitable.[70] Under the threat of wet-bulb temperatures such as these, and inaccessibility of water, there is little use for islands of sustainability like the SC. The availability of unsustainable choices in the SC means the foreclosure of future possibility for human life, barring, of course, those on the spaceships.
Conclusion
Throughout the course of this paper, criticism of Dubai has been severe enough to warrant explanation. It may seem to the reader that there is no “winning” when it comes to sustainability in Dubai. Or, one might reply to these criticisms of Dubai by pointing out that most nations depend on foreign imports of goods, services, and labor just like Dubai, that most nations are maltreating their water sources, and all countries create spaces in which an exclusive, niche lifestyle and consumption can be enjoyed by those who can afford it. This is all true; we live in an enmeshed world of globalized capital in which no one can really measure the supply chains that zigzag across the world, and inequalities are everywhere. However, desert ecologies are uniquely vulnerable to the stresses humanity rests upon it, whether that desert is in Dubai or California. And though withdrawing from these ecologies is probably impossible, the consequences and realities of living within these spaces cannot go uncriticized. It is also worth noting that Dubai is an exceptional place so far as how loose the reigns of capital are combined with the lack of democracy. A city of millions, in which only 10 percent of the population has any kind of governmental voice is not ever going to be an equitable or sustainable place so long as a system benefits the select few who were born lucky.
What does a true commitment to sustainability look like, then, in Dubai? A gated community is not it. Nor is an “eco-city” like Masdar, which only aims to preserve the status quo of lifestyle and consumption through technocratic innovation.[71] The Sustainable City of Dubai is a paradox in itself, dependent as it is on desalinated water, it could never be sustainable. Ultimately, the Sustainable City fits too neatly into the general pattern of island making in Dubai to represent anything more than an isolated community of experience, consumption, and lifestyle. An island of recycled desalinated water does not pose a challenge to the broader issues of consumption in resource deprived Dubai, which depends on the continuous construction of mega-developments and luxury branding to survive.
***
[1] “Net-zero energy” typically means that the household produces as much energy as it consumes. However, given that the SC has not released its carbon accounting publically, we cannot know how the SC had decided to define and measure “net-zero.”
[2] Leanna Garfield, “The United Arab Emirates Is Building a $354 Million City with Driverless Cars, Greenhouses, and Solar-Powered Villas,” Business Insider, January 29, 2018, www.businessinsider.com/dubai-sustainable-city-uae-2018-1#sustainable-city-has-garnered-more-interest-from-uae-residents-or-at-least-those-who-can-afford-to-live-there-since-homes-start-at-1-million-approximately-1800-people-have-bought-homes-while-around-900-rent-12. ); Robert Kunzig, “The World’s Most Improbable Green City,” National Geographic, July 27, 2017, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/urban-expeditions/green-buildings/dubai-ecological-footprint-sustainable-urban-city/.
[3] “About the City,” The Sustainable City, Diamond Developers, accessed March 18, 2019, https://www.thesustainablecity.ae/.
[4] Melanie Hunt, “The Future Is Now: Inside a Home in Dubai’s Sustainable City,” The National, February 18, 2018, https://www.thenational.ae/lifestyle/home/the-future-is-now-inside-a-home-in-dubai-s-sustainable-city-1.705583.
[5] “Dubai’s Real Estate Slump to Last until 2020 – S&P,” Reuters, February 20, 2018, www.reuters.com/article/emirates-dubai-property/dubais-real-estate-slump-to-last-until-2020-sp-idUSL8N1QA24Z.
[6] “Dubai’s Real Estate Slump,” Reuters.
[7] Todd Reisz, “As a Matter of Fact, The Legend of Dubai,” Log, no. 13/14 (Fall 2008): 131, www.jstor.org/stable/41765238.
[8] Robin Bloch, “Dubai’s Long Goodbye” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34, no. 4 (2010): 950.
[9] Samer Bagaeen, “Brand Dubai: The instant city; or the instantly recognizable city,” International Planning Studies 12, no. 2 (2007): 173-197.
[10] Bagaeen, “Brand Dubai,” 175.
[11] Middle East Real Estate Predictions: Dubai (Deloitte, 2018), 12.
[12] Pardis Mahdavi and Christine Sargent, “Questioning the Discursive Construction of Trafficking and Forced Labor in the United Arab Emirates” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 7, no. 3 (2011): 12.
[13] Mahdavi and Sargent, 18.
[14] Gunel Gokce, “Inhabiting the Spaceship: The Connected Isolation of Masdar City,” in Climates. Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary, by James Graham, Lars Muller Publishers, 2017, pp. 361–371.
[15] “Homepage,” Dubai Miracle Garden, accessed March 18, 2019, https://www.dubaimiraclegarden.com/.
[16] “About the City,” The Sustainable City, Diamond Developers, accessed March 18, 2019, https://www.thesustainablecity.ae/; Diamond Developers, “The Future is Now,” Youtube video, December 17, 2017 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPcq8a5_u-w.
[17] Karim el-Jisr, “Dubai Sustainable City: Shaping Future Cities,” EnviroCities eMagazine, no. 18 (Fall 2017): 8, https://ecat.ae/Uploads/EMagazine/Issue_18/en/PDF/ECAT-EN-V18.pdf.
[18] Hunt, “The Future is Now.”
[19] Zachary Shahan, “The Sustainable City in Dubai,” Youtube video, December 30, 2017: 14:21 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iHZ79jc1vg
[20] Plug Me In, “The Sustainable City: Interview,” Youtube video October 12, 2017: 10:51 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZybXCpjRoCg.
[21] The Gulf Real Estate Award was instituted by the Dubai Land Department, something they do not readily advertise on their own website, but was mentioned on The Sustainable City’s blurb on the award they won. All but two of the awards were given to projects and developers from Dubai; Saudi Arabia was the only other country winner. It should also be pointed out that the winner of these awards and some of the awards themselves promote the image that Dubai is wishing to project: tech-centered, green, happy, and socially conscious. The Sustainable City actively promotes their Happy Community award, but they also received the best Master Development, and Sustainable and ‘Green’ Developments awards as well.
[22] @TheSustainableCity 2018: h, l, q, x, e1, f1, g1
[23] “About the City,” The Sustainable City, Diamond Developers, accessed March 18, 2019, https://www.thesustainablecity.ae/.
[24] @TheSustainableCity 2018: gl.
[25] Calthrope
[26] Calthrope
[27] Patrick M. Condon Seven Rules for Sustainable Communities Design Strategies for the Post-Carbon World (Washington DC: Island Press, 2010), 12-5.
[28] Khaled Alawadi, “A return to the old landscape? Balancing physical planning ideals and cultural constraints in Dubai’s residential neighborhoods,” Journal of Housing and the Built Environment (2018): 3.
[29] Diamond Developers, “The Sustainable City 3D Virtual Tour,” Youtube Video, July 17, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxVaR-7hTzE.
[30] “About the City,” The Sustainable City, Diamond Developers, accessed March 18, 2019, https://www.thesustainablecity.ae/.
[31] @TheSustainableCity 2018: k, v
[32] Hunt, “The Future Is Now.”
[33] Sacha Bollet and Benoit DeMarie, “Building Green – Masdar City, Exploring the Future,” Youtube video, February 16, 2018,
www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfOVIhGuI4A&ab_channel=BestDocumentary.
[34] Gökçe Günel, “Inhabiting the Spaceship: The Connected Isolation of Masdar City,” in Climates: Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary, ed. James Graham (Baden, Switzerland: Lars Müller Publishers, 2016), 369.
[35] “Building Green – Masdar City, Exploring the Future,” 34:26.
[36] “Building Green – Masdar City, Exploring the Future,” 31:22.
[37] “Building Green – Masdar City, Exploring the Future,” 34:30.
[38] Diamond Developers, “Future is Now – The Sustainable City,” Youtube Video, December 17, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPcq8a5_u-w.
[39] Reisz, “As a Matter of Fact, The Legend of Dubai,” 128.
[40] Reisz, “As a Matter of Fact, The Legend of Dubai,” 128.
[41] Reisz, 129.
[42] Reisz, 131.
[43] Reisz, 133.
[44] Yasser Elsheshtway “‘The Dubai of…’,” Middle East Report Online, (Summer 2018): 258.
[45] Waleed Hazbun, Beaches, ruins, resorts: the politics of tourism in the Arab world (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 206.
[46] Hazbun, Beaches, ruins, resorts, xvi.
[47] Hazbun, Beaches, ruins, resorts, xxix.
[48] Hazbun, Beaches, ruins, resorts, 207.
[49] Hazbun, 207.
[50] Hazbun, xvi.
[51] Hazbun, 218.
[52] Tim Simpson,“Mapping Tourist Utopias” in Tourist utopias: offshore islands, enclave spaces, and mobile imaginaries, ed. Tim Simpson (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017), 23.
[53] Simpson, “Mapping Tourist Utopias,” 15.
[54] Simpson, 25.
[55] Yasser Elsheshtawy, “‘The Dubai of…’,” Middle East Report 287 (Summer 2018), https://merip.org/2018/10/the-dubai-of/.
[56] Setha M. Low, “The Edge and the Center: Gated Communities and the Discourse of Urban Fear,” American Anthropologist 103, no. 1 (March 2001): 47, https://www.jstor.org/stable/683921.
[57] CNN, “Global Gateway–Vision in the Desert,” Youtube video, June 2, 2017: 04:39 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EG3jwt-lqI.
[58] Condon, 14.
[59] Low, “The Edge and the Center: Gated Communities and the Discourse of Urban Fear,” 47.
[60] “Events,” The Sustainable City, Diamond Developers, accessed March 18, 2019, https://www.thesustainablecity.ae/events-page/.
[61] Hazbun, 216.
[62] Noni Edwards, “City with a conscience: Dubai’s desert utopia,” EuroNews, February 19, 2019, https://www.euronews.com/2019/02/15/city-with-a-conscience-dubai-s-desert-utopia.
[63] Günel, “Inhabiting the Spaceship,” 364.
[64] Günel, “Inhabiting the Spaceship,” 368.
[65] Günel, “Inhabiting the Spaceship,” 368.
[66] Kunzig, “World’s Most Improbable.”
[67] Gökçe Günel, “The Infinity of Water: Climate Change Adaptation in the Arabian Peninsula,” Public Culture 28, no. 2 (2016): 299.
[68] Günel, “The Infinity of Water,” 299.
[69] “UAE dismisses claim Gulf heat levels will become ‘intolerable to humans,’” Arabian News, November 2, 2015, https://www.arabianbusiness.com/uae-dismisses-claim-gulf-heat-levels-will-become-intolerable-humans–610854.html.
[70] Damian Carrington, “Extreme heatwaves could push Gulf climate beyond human endurance, study shows” The Guardian, October 26, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/oct/26/extreme-heatwaves-could-push-gulf-climate-beyond-human-endurance-study-shows.
[71] Günel, “Inhabiting the Spaceship,” 371.