1002 – a modern city
Posted: July 25th, 2013 | Author: Gergana Milusheva | Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »on the very first day we already found out that a regular walk in the 1002sth for Scheherazade’s fairy tales is something absolutely unheard of; so unheard of that there are no sidewalks… we tries though!
in order to acctually see Dubai and so that there are at least some pictures of it we had to hire a car from the hotel for a sight-seeing trip; no stopping – nowhere to stop, so all the pics are shot from the front seat while moving…
the following one would have been a very pleasing pic, if it was not shot by accident while we were driving through a complex road crossing on our way back from the Jumeira Palm:
the pic was carefully cut and processed in photoshop; in other words – too good to be true! in Dubai there are no such views; reality looks more like this:
(this copying is not unusual but I will not comment on the reasons…)
there is not even a trace of public space among these towers strangely planted on the ground; nothing… and there is no way to have any – a city in the desert, from noone for nobody.
I couldn’t make it out if all of this really emerged from the sands without any planning, without any initial thoughts or vision; it seems so at least – with the exception of the strangely and uncommonly stretching line of the metro (!#@#!#@@*&^(&(), lifted above ground and built, like in Orestad, Cobenhavn, even where the city does not exist yet… and for whom since a liter of gas costs 17 eurocents?!
the streets in between the skyscrapers are small and narrow and I cannot stop wondering – if all these buildings were to be populated and everyone travelled with their personal cars, what would happen early in the morning, at the beginning of a normal week day… I still do not know where and how do children go to school, where do they play, where do their parents meet and socialize… only in the shopping malls did we see groups of people in the evening, and the malls are nothing different than anywhere else.
I had to visit Dubai to make it out that despite all we, Bulgarians, we are Europeans – not by life standards, not by income, but by mentality, by the way our socium is built and organized.
even way north, at -35 in the realm of the long nights and ever ruling snow, the City feels social – a place, inhabited with people who know each other, socialize, meet, laugh, quarrel, visit the bakery every day and go to the nearby sport center for a swim… and this goes back for generations and ages.
and there is this city, a huge city that costs billions… for people not from here, for foreigners who came here out of economic necessity and with their contracts over they will head home… a monstrous city home to nobody.
to be continued…
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