Snowpiercer, sans wheels. --- Dubai is building the worlds first climate-controlled city—its a 4.3 mile pedestrian mall that will be covered with a retractable dome to provide its shoppers with air conditioning in the summer heat. The Mall of the World, as its called, will become the sort of spectacular, over-the-top attraction Dubai is known for. Shortly after, it will probably become an equally spectacular real-world dystopia. ... The masses, including the underpaid immigrants who will no doubt help build it, may be free to wander through by day, but they will surely find no residence there. According to the UN, a full 88.5 percent of United Arab Emirates residents are foreigners; most are migrant workers, who receive few protections from the nations labor laws. There are estimated to be hundreds of thousands of migrant workers in Dubai alone, many of whom toil in conditions that resemble indentured servitude. ... A climate-controlled dome, intended to be a glitzy international attraction, may end up producing an entirely different, and uglier spectacle. It wont be long before there will be those who will be desperate to get inside; and it means an authority will be established to decide who can, and who cant. As my colleague Alex Pasternack has pointed out, there is something distinctly sad about any proposal to place a dome over a city—it means there is something that needs to be kept out; something that urgently needs to be dealt with, even in an overwhelmingly haphazard fashion. In Dubai, its the heat and the non-spenders. In China, its pollution. In midcentury US, it was the cold. In fact, some of the earliest dome city proposals originated here in the US—Paleofuture points us to scientists 1952 calls to establish perfectly feasible weather-controlled communities.
Posted on: Thu, 10 Jul 2014 02:16:51 +0000
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