Fear and Money in Dubai
metropolitan disorders The hectic pace of capitalist development over the past decades has taken tangible form in the transformation of the world’s cities: the epic expansion of coastal China, deindustrialization and suburbanization of the imperial heartlands, massive growth of slums. From Shanghai to São Paolo, Jerusalem to Kinshasa, cityscapes have been destroyed and remade—vertically: the soar- ing towers of finance capital’s dominance—and horizontally: the sprawling shanty-towns that shelter a vast new informal proletariat, and McMansions of a sunbelt middle class. The run-down public housing and infrastuctural projects of state-developmentalism stand as relics from another age. Against this backdrop, the field of urban studies has become one of the most dynamic areas of the social sciences, inspiring innovative contributions from the surrounding disciplines of architecture, anthropology, economics. Yet in comparison to the classic accounts of manufacturing Manchester, Second Empire Paris or Reaganite Los Angeles, much of this work is strikingly depoliticized. Characteristically, city spaces are studied in abstraction from their national contexts. The wielders of economic power and social coercion remain anonymous. The broader political narrative of a city’s metamorphosis goes untold. There are, of course, notable counter-examples. With this issue, NLR begins a series of city case studies, focusing on particular outcomes of capitalist globalization through the lens of urban change. We begin with Mike Davis’s portrait of Dubai—an extreme concentration of petrodollar wealth and Arab- world contradiction. Future issues will carry reports from Brazil, South Africa, India, gang-torn Central America, old and new Europe, Bush-era America and the vertiginous Far East.
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