Sin City Vs Sheiks Playground. Is Dubai the Las Vegas of the Middle East?

"Las Vegas was the intitutionalised wide-open town - an environment where retired Rotarians from deepest Indiana could carry on with pagan abandon, pulses pounding to the assembly-line clatter of a thousand slot machines. In Europe such opulent surroundings had been prerogative of the aristocracy; only in America was it available (at least in theory) to everyone "

Startdust Memories, J. Hoberman , 1996, Artforum International Magazine

"Once the manic burst of building has stopped and the whirlwind has slowed, the secrets

of Dubai are slowly seeping out. This is a city built from nothing in just a few wild

decades on credit and ecocide, suppression and slavery. Dubai is a living metal metaphor

for the neo-liberal globalised world that may be crashing – at last – into history."

The dark side of Dubai, Johann Hari, 07 Apr 2009, The Indpendent

Is Las Vegas Postmodernism gone wrong or is it a little bit more sinister than meets the eye? Much has been said and seen about Las Vegas in various media ad nauseum -  journals, books(some pulp, some academic) films and music. Indelible impressions of its 'iconic' buildings  representing myriad ancient civilisations juxtaposed cheek by jowl with disneyfied monuments have stayed in the minds of many visitors long past their trip. Although architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour addressed a particularly urbanistic  observations of Las Vegas in their highly seminal book Learning form Las Vegas, the controversy regarding the book has led to intense discourse that goes  beyond purely architectural and into individual space and experience such Air Guitar by David Hickey.  He homes in on it as a backdrop and canvas for the personal. We would like to believe, especially for those who have not stepped out of their ordinary homeland that Vegas is a well-conjured up fantasy that is just hyperreal, sexed-up by branding and marketing. But in actual fact, as Umberto Eco realized,  it is a 'real city' lived by ordinary citizens who strive on their own terms to pursue the American dreams or the equal chance of winning afforded by the many gambling opportunities.    

The economic engine of Vegas has been pumped  by a strange combination of adult entertainment and family-oriented simulation. This incongruous mix may be considered low-brow youthful culture that attracts retirees who did not experience bohemia or liberating adulthood and probably too crass to the liking of the bourgeoisie in upmarket New York, but Las Vegas, as lived by the working inhabitants, is very ordinary, stripped of formal social stratification. This seems to be the main pulling factor! Unlike the typical rich and gentrified American city where your wealth, values and heritage put you in the pecking order of class and status, Las Vegas seems to be blind to such differentiation.  There is a respect for individual expression of cynicism from physical decoration of human bodies all the way to the simple and honest interior and decorations. The 'homegrown visual culture' shows ordinary people can aspire towards unpretentious aesthetics with no pressure to live within societal norms of rules, virtue or status.

Dubai is Las Vegas on steroids. And more sinister unlike its Western cousin,whose vices are plain to see in a no-holds-barred, in-your-face face sort of way. Eerily enough, this is what happens if life immitates art as it is well-represented in the German expressionist cinema classic, the Metropolis made in 1927. In the movie, the ultra luxurious and vertigious skycrapers are inhabited by 'managers' in the futuristic mega-city Metropolis built by the blood, sweat and tears of those workers who lived and toiled underground. Similarly, in Dubai, there is no doubt it is built  by the' invisble hands'on 'Sand, Fear and Money'. Those of us who are ignorant  or have only been misinformed by the veil created by shimmering and glittering facades of this city's umpteenth, empty architectural spectacle via CNN's Inside  the Middle East segment, would be surprised there is a troika of 3 classes within the society whose medieval dictatorship is alive and kicking :1)the royal ruling Emiratis -  the elites who run the country a la corporation who buys its native people political submission via mass bribery 2)the expats, mostly Westerners working as managers, directors and CEOs of MNCs or state-owned enterprises, who turn a blind eye on human rights abuses (slave trade is one) and 3)the servant and manual labour class whose live precariously as underpaid workers with no hope of returning to their homelands as their passport are confiscated by their employers.

Las Vegas and Dubai make interesting comparisons as superlative cities built from scratch in the desserts but the two have stark contrasts. While both are outward expressions of what are humanly possible with whatever money can buy give-and-take a stretch on mother nature's fragile and extreme ecology, the Sin City triumphs as an endeavour in materialising a liveable metropolitan from a social point of view. Although Vegas has managed somewhat to shed its gangsterous past, its democratic society offers the ordinary people a chance to move upward.  Without a civil society that is built on democratic values, social equality and a relative sense of freedom to speak your mind, Dubai will be running on empty in the near future. In fact, signs have shown not just of a potential ecological disaster, but the recent financial crisis and the Arab Spring have provided impetus for the city to implode and undergo major social upheaval soon.