Dubai Sci-Fi

[alanajoli]

The more and more I read about Dubai, the more it strikes me as a city straight out of science fiction. The most recent article was this 60 Minutes segment hosted by Yahoo news. The Sheik decided that they should double the coastline of the city, and so they built an island that looks kinda like a spider, so that each of the arms could have beach-front condos on it.














I don't know if the look they're going for over there is the futuristic, or whether that's just what's happening, but Dubai looks like where it's at for science-fiction styled architecture and man-made islands.

Edited to add a photo that appeared in the NYTimes a few weeks ago, but that I couldn't find online. Luckily, I'd saved it. :)

Comments

[jeff-duntemann.livejournal.com]

Dubai looks oddly like many mid-Fifties visions of the City of Tomorrow, and I think the reason it does is that it's what a city would look like if there were near-infinite money to spend on it, and no objections from obstructionists. Western culture has chosen to spend its money in other ways over the past half-century, and we've given mind-boggling power to anyone who stands up and says, "I don't want you to build that."

Dubai is the product of an almost unthinkably rich autocracy, but it's a good thing to study for anyone contemplating future SF societies. It's possible (if depressing to contemplate) that Western democracy is a passing thing, and the sort of semi-benign tyranny you see in Saudi Arabia and China may be the way of the future.

Most tyrannies fail because they are corrupt, and there is no inherent check on their corruption. An inherently honest autocracy is a scary concept, and rich fodder for SF writers.