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Eastward to Doha

Hijacking Aspen's latest posts from Doha: horses & mosques

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Photos from my friend Paul Stevens, reporting live to me from the massive Cityscape conference, where he had a booth (they have a branch office there): one of the more structurally zany projects unveiled at the show by one of the Dubai developers... and the Burj Dubai... to stand 120 or more storeys tall upon completion. The ratherest thing, you must admit...

Flaneur of the Air

This was inevitable: Mike Davis heads to Dubai, the archetypal city of the decade. Or, as he puts it, "the new global icon of imagineered urbanism," and "a hallucinatory pastiche of the big, the bad and the ugly." It takes a searing turn, not surprisingly. But I was struck by the similarity of his opening to my friend Greg Lindsay's excellent piece on Aerotropolises.

There seems to be only one way to describe Dubai -- as a sort of flaneur of the air.