I.
Dubai is a city designed by, for better or for worse, money hungry autocrats and their architects. It is the truly modern city; the first city of the 21st Century. The buildings are more important, and more amazing, than the humans who inhabit them; the ideology behind the city still more incredible than the buildings that have been built because of it, because when the money runs out and the city finally sinks back into the sea, what we will be left with is a giant metallic monument to the first ten years of the new millennium. The place is an architect’s wet dream. Giant towers in which every floor is able to revolve independently. The Atlantis Hotel with a whale shark in its swimming pool. This is the ideal of the inorganic supermodern city that exists outside of the narratives of history.

There are more computer-generated images of Dubai than there are real images, more ideas than there are applications from them, more transitory people than there are natives: a city of prospectors, developers and architectural agencies and everyone is out to make a quick dollar. Dubai doesn’t exist as anything above the ideals of the imagination and as the representation of the possibilities and failures of the condition of supermodernity.

II.
Dubai is the definitive exemplar of the application of the supermodern, of the new city as non-place; like the airport, the train station, the shopping centre, the motorway, the hotel; wholly artificial places of transition and journey, that subjugates nature to the power and spectacle of humanity. Dubai is a city made up of these artificial, functional non-places, with the Media City, the Business City, the Culture City, all artifice and only representative of Man’s ability to understand, to control, to direct every single aspect of modern life.

For example, the airport. Every airport is reassuringly similar, the baggage check, the security check, the duty-free lounge, the food courts, the gates, the people. Nothing happens in these non-places, it is only the transience of the moment that the non-place foregrounds – the air-conditioned atmosphere that separates you from the world, the frightening similarity of everything, no ontological questions are posed by the non-place, there is only the juxtaposition of static and transient moments.

III.
In Dubai we have a city set apart from reality, beautiful because of the sheer inhuman scale of it, not in the same sense of scale as the miles of Indian shanty-towns or of Los Angeles’ sprawling suburbs, but inhuman in its inorganic nature. It will end up like South East London’s own Elephant & Castle, organic half-alive matter growing in the cracks of inorganic half-dead buildings.

Modernism focused upon the creation of great truths, using narrative to explain the world; postmodernity was a deconstruction of those truths through the fracturing of memory, of narrative, in which truth becomes an impossibility; but supermodernity is a new historical imperative, set apart from the old historical narrative of cause and effect, of narrative as a way of explaining, supermodernity happens too fast for narrative to act as a method of explanation. With supermodernity there is only an abundance of meaningless information and construction that when added together equals zero. The new city and the new life are part of this, twenty-four hour news that tells you everything but then nothing; the infinity of information available on the internet that relegates actual information to a low digital background noise of ones and zeros; the blogosphere of information on peoples individual lives that creates only a fraction of a constructed identity that interrelates only to other fractured and constructed identities.

Dubai could be the great Promised Land for those suffering from the condition of supermodernity, in which the fractured and constructed can find an outlet through the ridiculous architectural landscapes that fully relegates the human to what it has become, a fragment of an identity inside a bigger, created false identity that only alludes to individuality.

IV.
Inside Dubai’s massive skyscrapers, laid out carefully in grids by town planners, humanity becomes an ant, part of a giant and anonymous collective supermodern conscious waiting only for the sand dunes to reclaim it.