Shopping Malls in Dubai
While Dubai’s mercantile origins occupy a longer timeline and different physical landscape to today’s modern metropolis, this essay focuses on the compressed historical-spatial dialectic that has imprinted Dubai within the collective global consciousness. Chronologically, the infrastructural initiatives which first established modern Dubai’s trajectory1 were broadly coincident with the rumblings of dissatisfaction that beset the modernist movement in the early-1960s, most notably voiced in Jane Jacobs’ great polemic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Of most significance here was Jacobs fascination with the processes and structural configuration that are necessary to sustain a vital urbanity, as observed within her native New York, and especially in Greenwich Village, contrasted against deterministic principles of the regimented visual order in modernist town planning that – in her brutal analysis – assumed the ‘dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served.’2
Dubai is of course a long way from New York, and the extent to which its large-scale urban grain differs from the focus on more intricate patterns of city life advocated by Jacobs is immediately noticeable. Dubai has flourished precisely by employing the characteristics that Jacobs believed a successful urban realm should avoid at all costs. On deeper reflection, this may not be such a surprise. Jacobs’ analysis observed a condition where there was an established cityscape and a relatively mild climate, suitable for an active life on the city street all the year round. Dubai, conversely, sits in the desert with temperatures almost twice those of New York (or its European counterparts) at any given time of the year, and yet has grown from a sleepy regional port to an internationally recognized metropolis in less than fifty years. The adoption of that most American, albeit principally suburban, building type – the shopping mall – as the means of delivering urban space in modern Dubai exemplifies the awkward gap between the theory and practical reality of what a city might be under such circumstances. It is a scenario that clearly perplexes urban theorists in Jacobs’ shadow, who recite declamations of a soulless and weak urbanity dominated only by vulgar consumption. Instead, I would argue, these types of statement indicate a reading of the city that – despite its relevance to a Euro/American context – may have reached its limits within an environment whose compressed history and climactic challenges ask a wholly different set of questions of what a city should be. Through an analysis of the shopping mall as a building typology that is hybridized in this extreme context, this chapter will explore its relevance to the making of modern Dubai and the nature of the urban space that results. But first, we must qualify the relevance of the building typology within this context a little further.
Dubai’s assumed ‘status as the lower Gulf’s economic capital’3 – born out of its free-trade orientated infrastructural gambles, namely through the expansion of Port Rashid4 and later the opening of Port Jebel Ali5 – is one that is now proving difficult to sustain. Itself relatively impoverished in terms of ownership of the Middle East’s most precious natural resource, oil, yet part of a country, the UAE, which holds the world’s sixth largest reserve,6 Dubai lives in the constant shadow of its neighbouring Emirate, Abu Dhabi, which controls 90 per cent of this resource.7 Without the self-sustaining financial security of its neighbour, Dubai’s ruling al-Maktoum family instead felt compelled to make a ‘commitment to invest in their own domestic infrastructure so that Dubai would be able to support and enhance its existing re-export and commercial sector while also facilitating broader diversification away from oil in the future.’8 It is striking to note that oil and natural gas account for less than 6 per cent of Dubai’s economic activity.9 Rather, it is speculative real estate/construction, trade/re-export, financial services and luxury tourism (attracting around 5 million visitors per year) that now dominate.10 Dubai’s financial security is thus dependant on an openness to foreign investment, necessitating that it adopts a commensurate ‘visibility’ to the outside world.
While this openness can easily be represented statistically – a staggering 80 per cent of the city’s population of 1.7 million consists of expatriates – it is even more explicit in the provenance of architectural forms that represent the modern city. Displayed here is the strategic intersection of capital and skyline commensurate with ‘the infrastructure and the servicing that produce a capability for global control’.11 However, it is hardly sufficient, within this global representation of place image, to reproduce the generic cityscape of elsewhere. Mike Davis observes that:
… the same phantasmagoric but generic Lego blocks, of course, can be found in dozens of aspiring cities these days (including Dubai’s envious neighbours, the wealthy oil oases of Doha and Bahrain), but al-Maktoum has a distinctive and inviolable criterion: everything must be ‘world class’ by which he means number one in the Guinness Book of Records. Thus Dubai is building the world’s largest theme-park, the biggest mall (and within it, the largest aquarium), the tallest building, the largest international airport, the biggest artificial island, the first sunken hotel, and so on … Having ‘learned from Las Vegas’, al-Maktoum understands that if Dubai wants to become the luxury-consumer paradise of the Middle East and South Asia (its officially defined ‘home market’ of 1.6 billion people), it must ceaselessly strive for visual and environmental excess.12
Captured within Davis’s description of the Dubai skyline are those characteristics that have pervasively displayed themselves as the stuff of globalised architecture since Jacobs’ polemic half a century ago. It is a process recognized by David Harvey as the ‘relation between capitalist development and the state … as mutually determining’.13 Ostensibly this describes a top-down vision whose autocratic underpinnings are obfuscated by a language of visual spectacle borne of, though far removed from, the core intent of Jacobs’ theories. The hegemony of global capital is reinforced by stealth, at the expense of the genuine existence of micro-level processes of urban interaction from which its supporting visual rhetoric is drawn. By superficially harnessing the streams of critical thought that served to undermine the socially progressive aspirations of the modernist project, capital has also hollowed them out, limiting the potency of any new influence that contemporary theory may attempt to produce.
At a global level, the shopping mall is a building typology that is central to this penetration of capital into all facets of modern life under the democratizing auspices of populism. Founded on the generic building block of a spatial formula that was christened the ‘dumbbell plan’ (the brainchild of the godfather of the shopping mall, Victor Gruen), and which persists due to its devastating financial success, the internalised environment of the mall differentiates itself within a given consumer market via a language of decorative surface that can be tailored to suit any target demographic.14 Asserting itself as a more desirable alternative to a given lifestyle, the mall, in its ‘native’ western existence, typically adopts the form of a pastoral alternative to the perceived ills of urbanity – in other words, a self-contained entity accessed by car and predicated on familial values of safety and togetherness. It is a scenario that Kim Dovey describes as ‘a collective dream world of mass culture … at once captur[ing] and invert[ing] the urban. It is a realm of relative shelter, safety, order and predictability which is semantically and structurally severed from the city.’15 Whether the city actually represents the threat implied by the mall, and whether the mall can deliver a genuine alternative to the collective anxiety that it fosters, remain highly questionable.16
Transposed to Dubai, however, this strategy of ideological opposition finds a more tangible target: the climate itself. A climactically controlled internal environment provides Dubai’s expatriate population and tourists, many of whom are totally unused to the fierce heat of the desert, with a comfortable public space that possesses a deeper significance than the inferred civic benefits within the mall’s western context. Rem Koolhaas, in his study of the urban spaces of Singapore, a context whose tropical climate in many ways echoes the challenge of Dubai, describes it thus:
… [It is] the city as a system of interconnected urban chambers. The climate, which traditionally limits street life, makes the interior the privileged domain for the urban encounter. Shopping in this idealized context is not just the status-driven compulsion it has become “here” but an amalgam of sometimes microscopic, infinitely varied functional constellations, in which each stall is a “functoid” of the overall programmatic mosaic that constitutes urban life.17
Onto this scenario, Dubai has even grafted one of its most prominent civic events, the Dubai Shopping Festival, which takes place during February each year in its shopping malls, attracting 3 million visitors to the city.18 While undoubtedly a commercially driven stimulation of tourist cash, it is also representative of the kind of spatiality in which much of the city’s social life takes place, and of the principal activities it offers.
Climatic necessity aside, the need to understand the civic space of the Dubai shopping mall is made even more vital by the less visible role that this typology plays in the general apparatus of globalization within a skyline contrived to attract foreign capital. The shopping mall can thus be understood as assuming, for the foreigners drawn to Dubai, a means by which the inhabitation of a largely alien context is naturalized through more familiar symbols and spatial practices. In mitigating the effects of cultural dislocation that are inherent in the expatriate lifestyle, the mall compresses geographical space as a ‘response to desire for fixity and for security of identity in the middle of all the movement and change. A ‘sense of place’, of rootedness, can provide … stability and a sense of unproblematical identity.’19
The implication is that in Dubai there is indeed a transcendence of the consumption-based values that undermine our perception of the western shopping mall, though key questions still remain – such as, what are the civic qualities of the urban space the Dubai mall actually produces, and to what extent are cultural processes also hybridized by the transplantation of the mall into this context?
Our search for answers to these questions begins as the grain of old historic Dubai bleeds into its modern skyline, stewarded from the early-1990s by its ruler, Sheikh Mohammad bin Rashid Al Maktoum. Located at the commencement of Sheikh Zayed Road (the long axis linking Dubai to Abu Dhabi), the Bur Juman Centre – unlike many structures that define the Emirate’s brand image – displays its own internal history. As one of Dubai’s very first shopping malls, opened in 1991 by the Al Ghurair Group, the centre was soon forced to compete with newer and far more sophisticated malls as expatriates, tourists, and their concomitant money flowed in.20 Accordingly, the Bur Juman Centre was given a face-lift and relaunched in 2005 as a high-end mall aimed at the luxury market. This six-yearlong, AE Dirham 1.4 billion expansion at the hands of an American architect, Eric Kuhne (who also designed the Bluewater mall in the UK) duly doubled the size of the centre to 80,000 m2 with 300 shops.
Kuhne believes his work has deeper significance than a straightforward rebranding exercise. Naming his design sphere as that of the ‘Civic Arts’, and referring to the project as Bur Juman Gardens, Kuhne clearly wishes to be perceived as a socially and contextually conscious architect, above the morass of commercial architecture in which the mall usually sits. In his own words, ‘Bur Juman Gardens celebrates the diversity of science, arts, and letters that the Arabic World has contributed to civilization’.21 Grand words indeed, but what does this vision really deliver? Kuhne’s extension avoids the outright pastiche of image and form that undermine so many shopping malls, instead favouring abstracted contextual motifs. These include a pseudo British High-Tech series of laminated timber beams and roof glazing whose references to the designs of Michael Hopkins et al. are robbed of any feeling of integrity by the overbearing sheen of marble and fussy decorative details adorning many of the mall’s internal surfaces. While a certain Arabian flavour in some of these details lends a localized reference over and above one’s conventional expectations of shopping mall interiors, the overall result is far from the didactic historical message that Kuhne’s rhetoric implies.
9.1 Atrium roof in Bur Juman Gardens
9.2 Modern extension to the Bur Juman Centre
9.3 Original mall at the Bur Juman Centre
The visual tension between the mall’s history and its need to suit Dubai’s contemporary brand image is particularly problematic. Spatially joined as a seamless figure-of-eight configuration, the visual contrast between the shiny new extension to the Bur Juman Centre and its first phase could not be greater. The resulting disjuncture only serves to reveal that it is the building’s underlying plan form which is the key determinant of its spatiality, a point which is worth exploring further. The notion of an instrumental plan as the basis of the shopping mall is not of course a new concept. Victor Gruen’s ‘dumbbell plan’ has, since the earliest days of the typology, exerted an almost unbreakable hegemony over the design process. Comprising a linear shopping route flanked by smaller retail outlets, and terminated at either end by large ‘anchor’ stores, this spatial formula understands that the ‘exposure of all individual stores to the maximum amount of foot traffic is the best assurance of high sales volume’.22 Functioning as shopping magnets, the two anchor stores draw consumers through the entire range of curiosities and temptations which the mall has to offer, heightening the user’s psychological stimulation to engage in acts of consumption. By coupling this pattern of coerced perpetual movement with its internalized plan form, the mall creates an introverted journey of consumption freed from the unplanned distractions and encounters which occur in more traditional urban scenarios. The atomization of the mall’s inhabitants forms the bedrock of the sustained consumption-led fantasy on which its financial success depends, though regrettably robs the typology of many of the interactive social processes that Gruen had hoped would be fostered within his creation.
As the scale of global mall developments grew, Victor Gruen’s generic formula has developed a number of variants to counteract the fatigue its instrumental axial layout can produce.23