Gondola rides through the sand - what does Croatia have to do with Dubai and Abu Dhabi?

Dubai, Abu Dhabi – all of these fast growing places are looking to develop pronto and hiring firms from the west to help them do this. They want the success that the west found over centuries but they want it in the next 10 years. They want the prestige that association with the west has. So they hire firms from London, the US and even Croatia to help them do this. In some cases we’ve already seen the results. The canals of Venice were brought to the desert of Dubai in a Las Vegas manner. A ski mountain a la the Swiss Alps, was constructed in the hot and dry sand. These examples are well known and no one argues that they are far from a seamless or even tasteful creation in Dubai. No one seems to care. But taste aside, how about the environmental impact, the water use, the electricity needed to maintain these places. And then overlap of the psychology involved in making these places with the environment and you realize that one very dangerous repercussion is the mentality that this is OK because it is possible. If you can build it, then it is righteous. Rolling that idea back one notch, you get “if you want it, if you can envision it… then you can build it and it is righteous”. Before you know it, a mentality that we esteem in the US, the American self-made man who has a dream and goes after it has supplanted any cognizance of where you are – the genius loci. I’m not even talking about the greed involved in these decisions. Simply the idea that if you want it, it can be so. And if you want Venetian canals, Miami-style swimming pools and verdant British parks, you can have it. Thus the surgical extraction of people from their environment occurs and is replaced, like poor plastic surgery, with artificiality. That’s right, Dubai is turning into Joan Rivers, David Hasselhoff and Joselyn Wildenstein.

There was a report about a Chinese girl who is having plastic surgery to look like Jessica Alba. The transformation includes changing her eyes and rhinoplasty among other things. She still speaks Chinese, goes to a Chinese high school, eats Chinese food, and spends time with her Chinese family. Yet she wants to be a southern Californian actress. This is the conundrum of Dubai. Some doctor needs to talk to this Chinese girl and say, “it’s cool to be cool – we get that. We all want to be beautiful – that’s easy to understand. Let’s help you gain what you want in a way that fits with who you are”. So (I’m getting to my point in this drawn out metaphor), when Dubai businessmen come to foreign landscape architecture firms and say “we were thinking we’d really like San Tropez here in Dubai. Maybe throw in a bit of Versailles because we love that fountain of Neptune and we were hoping for a Champs Elysee leading up to Hyde Park with a gondola that travels through aspens. Can you do that?”. I’m not sure if it’s the horrible economy or the ease of creating something brand new but firms are jumping at the opportunity. I had coffee here in Zagreb with one firm director. I asked him about this dynamic. He simply said “but it’s what they want”. The water becomes murkier here because who are we to question what a client wants? It seems patronizing to tell them that they really do NOT want that and in fact, they SHOULDN’T have it because it’d be irresponsible, overly consumptive and a waste (not to mention tacky), even though the west has all of those things (including the tackiness). This firm director sees the environmentally sensitive solution as finding technology that will reduce the energy and water waste while giving them green grass, spouting fountains and ski hills. As Bill McDonough points out in Cradle to Cradle, it’s like the “reduce, reuse, recycle” mantra – it allows us to continue to consume, waste and discard… but at a slower or lesser scale thus better. Eventually that recycled water bottle is going to end up in a landfill and its better that it took four forms before that happened but it’s still trash in the end. That's not a healthy cycle. It's not really a cycle at all. It's the same linear, consumptive mentality - a "better badness". The landscape architecture firm director gave me an animated explanation of their new and improved, still-in-the-works (lean in and whisper or risk the idea getting stolen by the couple at the next table) drainage system installed under the lush fields of irrigated grass. It prevents irrigation water from seeping into the sand under the soil substrate thus it saves water. But the grass still allows for massive evaporation as it acts like a wet towel on hot sand. And, perhaps more importantly, the people who use this grass have now lost their connection to the desert in which they live. They live in a grassy bubble.

“They want an oasis”, the director said. “We need to give it to them”. Is this because his firm seeks to please or because if they don’t give them the grass and dolphin fountains, some other firm will?

Actually, an oasis is a landscape that does originate in that part of the world. It is the perfect scenario for Dubai – I don’t argue that. An oasis is a place of respite amidst the harsh sun and dry conditions of the desert. People hallucinate the lush palms, heavy with dates clustered around a spring with fresh water. It is a place of activity, a crossroads. These are all positive elements of the oasis. Yet there is one very important experience that must occur for an oasis to truly feel like the haven that it is – one must pass over desert to get there. You need the contrast between the harsh environment and refreshing oasis to have an oasis. You must cross over. You can’t have an oasis if you turf the desert. Then you just have suburbia.

Gustafson Porter was hired to do a park in Abu Dhabi. I applied for an entry level position the moment I saw it. Since I did my MLA in the desert, I felt that my expertise would be the cognizance of creating public open space, responsibly, in the desert. I didn’t get the job, or at least they didn’t respond to my application. Gustafson Porter is well known, well respected and out of London. Katherine Gustafson designed the award winning Princess Diana Memorial. I don’t think my MLA from University of Arizona, with no experience impressed them much. But every so often I google the project to see what has progressed. I’m curious to see what their interpretation of the desert oasis will be.