Las Vegas vs. Dubai - Capitalism and Social Mobility

I have never been to Las Vegas. However, I do have an image of it in my mind and an idea of what the city must be like. Through films, photos, conversations I conceive it as a city to be consumed, a place to go, have fun and leave.

However, I started reading a book by Dave Hickey called Air Guitar. He describes an entirely different view on Vegas, he describes it as his home: "(…) this most un-homelike of cities has come to function for me as a kind of moral bottom-line - as a secular refuge and a source of comforts and reassurances that are unavailable elsewhere - as a home, in other words."

In his text, Hickey is making a point about what makes a place a home. That moral bottom-line means an understanding of a place, an understanding of how the people one is surrounded by think, act and relate to each other. One doesn't necessarily need to know or have spoken to a person in order to know them. The notion of home is the greater assumption about one`s neighbor. There is a very specific example in Hickey`s essay about that specific momentum. He describes a conversation he had with a waitress in a restaurant who wants to move up from "food to cocktail where the tips were better." She is "thankful for something and looking forward to something else." It seems to be that modesty, honesty and optimism of the people in Vegas Hickey relates to.

Las Vegas is about money. You can make a lot of it there or loose a lot. That being the city`s central feature, Hickey argues this means the total erasure of social classes, no one is special in Vegas "(…) because money here is just money." Therefore, Vegas is a city where people are true to themselves as it "is about stakes, not status - real action, not covert connections." People are more down to earth in Vegas and their ambitions are not as far fetched as elsewhere. Thats why Hickey calls Vegas his home because "there are only two rules: (1) Post the odds, and (2) Treat everybody the same. Just as one might in a democracy (What a concept!)". According to him, Vegas is more democratic than any other city, maybe not on the level of governance but surely in the way people relate to each other.

Like Las Vegas, Dubai is a city which is based on money, making profit and speculating. However, the city grew in a very different way and more importantly, they differ in one aspect mainly: social mobility. As described previously, Vegas is a city that provides opportunity for anyone and according to Hickey there are no social classes. The city provides a democratic ground for anyone to move up from "food to cocktail".

In opposition, Mike Davis observes in his essay Fear and Money in Dubai that the economic flourishing of that city is primarily based on social inequality and the exploitation of cheap and imported labour. He argues that Dubai, in becoming the new world capital of finance and speculation, is based on a social construct as seen in Fritz Lang`s film Metropolis (1927): the ultimate culmination of social inequality. This political framework provides the basis for architectural gigantism and visual orgasms. Davis´ conclusion about Dubai: "Speer meets Disney on the shores of Araby."

Dubai has become a city of excess in every aspect. Sheikh al-Maktoum, Dubai`s Emir provides the right ground for foreign investment, a tax-free oasis, attracting many national and international companies and enabling the hyper-capitalist economy to prosper. Effectively, the construction of the city develops immensely, achieving the construction of bigger and bigger projects (Burj al Dubai, The Palm, The World etc.). But the city strives for finished architectural images and products that ignore any public or democratic use. Davis puts it: "In fact, it goes even further; it copies not the product as it exists in its countries of origin but its `ideal type´, and it is able to do so for the very reason that it is in a position to append instead of going through the process of development."

In this sense, the city is ignoring reality (its majority of people). Rather than dealing with the city as a home for people (like Vegas) Dubai is the prime example of a city becoming a brand for speculative investment. The city`s infrastructure has been set up to serve a selling image, the city has become a brand. However, it shows ignorance and arrogance towards what a city should be: a dense accumulation of architecture and infrastructure to make the concept of a home possible. In the end, Vegas works well as a city as it manages to provide a home to people and a democratic base which enables social mobility and on which people can relate to each other. In opposition, Dubai is a constructed reality, like Disney World, but on a Speer-scale. It does not establish any relationship between its social classes and therefore stagnates in its attempt to draw the perfect image of its future.

starting off: the financial crisis and Zaha

I agree with a lot of aspects being brought forward in Badiou`s text "This crisis is the spectacle: where is the real?" from Alain Badiou`s book The Communist Hypothesis (2010). It is a critique on finance capitalism. He asks for the real. National economies have removed so far from the people ("the real") that they have become abstract spectacles to us. We find ourselves witnessing the financial crisis on television as if it was some kind of bad Hollywood Blockbuster:

"(…) It’s all there: the gradual spectacle of the disaster, the crude manipulation of suspense, the exoticism of the identical – the Jakarta stock exchange in the same spectacular boat as New York, the link between Moscow and Sao Paulo, the same banks going up in the same flames the terrifying repercussions: ouch, ouch, the best laid ‘plans’ could not prevent Black Friday, everything is collapsing, everything is going to collapse… But there is still hope: the little squad of the powerful has taken centre stage. They are as haggard and as intent on what they are doing as characters in a disaster movie. The Sarkozys, the Paulsons, the Merkels, the Browns , the Trichets – the monetary fire-fighters, pouring billions upon billions into the central Hole. One day we will ask ourselves (this is for future episodes) where they got the money from, because whenever the poor ask for a little something, they’ve said for years as they turn their pockets out that they haven’t got a penny. For the moment, that doesn’t matter. ‘Save the banks!’ That noble, humanist and democratic cry springs from the breast of every politician and all the media. Save them at any price! You’ve said it! Because none of this comes cheap."

The financial crisis appears to us as an abstract catastrophe that no one really seems to understand. However, almost any politician we see talking about it, argues for that we must save the banks. We must spend 400 billion Euros of European tax money to keep them working and fluctuating.

I relate to what Badiou is saying about the banks; simply because I don't understand the link between what he calls the "real economy" (production, assemblage, transport, consumption) and the "unreal economy" (trading, financial services etc.). The letter seems to use the real economy as a dynamic playground to speculate on whether companies are doing good or bad. In effect, traders (whose only aim is to make profit) can make money by betting on the downfall of a certain economy or company and it seems they will do so with any means and without responsibility towards whose money they are using. The ideal of any bank trader is to use someone else`s money to make profit at high risk. However, if the maneuver fails they are not being made responsible for their acts. In this sense Badiou is quite right when he argues that "(…) capitalism is nothing but banditry, and it is irrational in its essence and devastating in its becoming."

However, Badiou doesn't convince me entirely. Towards the end of his writing he argues that we should return to the "real", the lives of the people. He becomes ideological and proclaims a new communism. He says:

"Of course the word communism, which was for a long time the name of that power, has been cheapened and prostituted. But if we allow it to disappear, we surrender to the supporters of order, to the febrile actors in the disaster movie. We are going to resuscitate that name in all its new clarity. Which was also its old virtue, as it was when Marx said of communism that it `involves the most radical rupture with traditional associations` and will give rise to `an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all."

I think the reason for communism has never worked is the fact that it is in the human nature to achieve something better than one`s neighbor. There will always be people striving for the seduction of power and money. And since we live in societies that work on very large scales (millions of people have to be governed) there will always be someone using his power for his own benefits. But capitalism has always evolved in a natural way since it was about people`s individual benefit. And that`s when people become creative and inventive: when they see their own interest. In opposition, communism has always been forced onto people and never evolved naturally.

However, the text by Jonathan Meades on Zaha Hadid raises a similar question towards architecture and our society at large: What is the social responsibility of the architect? To what extend do we as architects have to explain our design?

Again, I agree with the authors opinion, that architects are spending others people`s money (like bankers), they involve many people`s lives (in terms of occupants but also in terms of construction) and their buildings reflect on the current political, economic and social situation of their context. Architects often have the same problem as bankers or politicians to explain their endeavors to the public in a way that can be understood by anyone. Meades points out:

"Architecture is the most public of endeavours, yet it is a smugly hermetic world. Architects, architectural critics and theorists, and the architectural press (which is little more than a deferential PR machine) are cosily conjoined by an ingrown, verruca-like jargon which derives from the cretinous end of American academe: "Emerging from the now-concluding work on single-surface organisations, animated form, data-scapes, and box-in-box organisations are investigations into the critical consequences of complex vector networks of movement and specularity..." They're only talking about buildings. This is the cant of pseudo-science--self-referential, inelegant, obfuscatingly exclusive: it attempts to elevate architecture yet makes a mockery of it. (…)"

There is a whole vocabulary invented by architects to describe their designs which is pretty much not understandable to anyone apart from themselves. These words supposedly make their design sound more "professional" and "creative". I completely agree with Meades saying that they make a mockery of architecture by acting in that way. Maybe the problem nower days is that architects do not take themselves seriously enough or too serious. The architect´s ability should be to base their design on current social, economic, political and climate issues. Much architecture (like Zaha´s) has derived from itself by putting forward ideas that much rather reflect the architects ego than his engagement with the site and its context.