The World: A Vision Made Real

The World is today’s greatest development epic. An engineering odyssey to create an island paradise of sea, sand, and sky, a destination has arrived that allows investors to chart their own course and make the world their own.

The World offers “A Vision Made Real.” This vision, and the image it provokes, is now offered as the world itself. It is a world we can observe from afar – through speculation (luck), through development (progress), through our ability and creativity (genius). It is this world, we hope, that can supersede the old, decrepit world, offering us a venue (the world) for our creative potential, our humanity. It is this world that could very well solve the world’s difficulties by remaking the world as image.

This new world is guided by principles – “principles that define what development means today and in the future, and how the ideas and initiative of a select few will architect a destination whose allure will attract the attention of millions.”

By defining what development means today and in the future, we will be better able to avoid any risks or misunderstandings that might arise between ourselves and our image. Our image, of course, is our destination – always far-off, always a world becoming (and never become). By keeping a distance between ourselves and our destination we are able to enlarge our bodies while shrinking the surface between us. Those who refuse to acknowledge our future of perpetual development, of a future totality that is undoubtedly inherent in our evolution, those people who cry wolf every time an iceberg sinks or a body vanishes, are simply missing the bigger picture. They are not the select; they are not the world class. These naysayers need to stand back and look again. For it is in looking, envisioning, that the disbeliever will turn into the believer. His attention and adoration is necessary for our world to be made as we would like it to be made. As the principles propose, attention must be attracted. And we will shape this attraction.

“In an era of multiplicity and me-too, it’s hard to standout. But in times like these, it’s still possible to be the sun in your own universe. Welcome to your very own blank canvas in the azure waters of the Arabian Gulf. Where orchestrating your own version of paradise – whether it’s a resort hotel or condominium communities – is a much needed inoculation against the ordinary, and where you’ll discover that The World really can revolve around you.”

The World is now the "spectacular collective expenditure" of the elite social class. (It has perhaps always been.) The World includes only those worthy of it, only those who seek the extra-ordinary. These World citizens have created their World out of their collective "extra" - that which they not only can spare, but look to spare and expend. To fully claim the world for oneself, the "me-too" must rid itself of the "too." In this way, the world is truly mine. By this, I mean, the universe truly revolves around me. I am the sun and I will shine upon myself.

We came to The World because life should be easy. We were promised the ocean, the sun, the beach. But now we are told to stay inside. The water, they say, is polluted. It cannot be, I think. My internet connection (The World online) shows me a world of "flourishing marine life." I am offered a video and an image gallery. Each fish is a beautiful thing.

Dubai's motto is "Open doors, open minds." Everything is possible in Dubai. Only the extraordinary man can know this. I know this. There are no boundaries here: I continue to grow. I will extend my body and have my vision too. Our motion will not cease.

The water quality got worse and worse. The guests started to spot raw sewage, condoms, and used sanitary towels floating in the sea. So the hotel ordered its own water analyses from a professional company. 'They told us it was full of fecal matter and bacteria "too numerous to count". I had to start telling guests not to go in the water, and since they'd come on a beach holiday, as you can imagine, they were pretty pissed off.' She began to make angry posts on the expat discussion forums – and people began to figure out what was happening. Dubai had expanded so fast its sewage treatment facilities couldn't keep up. The sewage disposal trucks had to queue for three or four days at the treatment plants – so instead, they were simply drilling open the manholes and dumping the untreated sewage down them, so it flowed straight to the sea. (Johann Hari, The Independent)

The Sun is too much for The World. The earth is a desert and there is not enough drinking water. Because of this, we must pay exorbitant prices to have the ocean unsalted. In Dubai, we have the world's biggest carbon footprint. That is called a solar no-no. The carbon footprint stomps on the sun so that it spews out more heat while the Earth cannot help but refuse its excess waste. The elite among us consume more to save themselves from the overbearing heat, from desert life. The sun gets hotter and the shit gets bigger. The world-class citizen cannot be dirtied by this process, so he grows more and more inward. He looks for dwelling elsewhere - within. He does this by constructing his cities indoors. The walls provide a new layer of thick skin. We will have none of this outdoor shit. "Blame the shit," we say. We must expend our expenditure! We must shit away our shit! We have grown too expansive. But how do we do accomplish this next level of expenditure?

By containing our shit. By refusing refuse. By turning our shit into pearls.




"Burj Dubai: Monument, Jewel, Icon." Still unfinished, it is already the tallest building on Earth.
It is the latest development in the war on shit.

"The rich man consumes the poor man's losses, creating for him a category of degradation and abjection that leads to slavery" (Bataille, The Notion of Expenditure). The World and its surrounding worlds have been built through slave labor. Having arrived in Dubai, these men and women's passports are taken from them, and they are forced to live in disgusting conditions, working fifteen hour days out in the hot, disasterous sun. They build our expenditures, and in the process lose any power over their own.

You sweat so much you can't pee, not for days or weeks. It's like all the liquid comes out through your skin and you stink. (Sahinal Monir, as quoted by Johann Hari)

Having lost any power over their expenditures, their waste, the workers become slaves, and so, become expendible themselves. To be blunt: those who have lost the power to expend become our waste.

Living in my very own jewel, I rarely notice the worker-slave. He is like the desert to me: part of the dying world. Inside, I am cool. I sit comfortably, unaware of the pressures I am releasing upon the walls that contain me. Inside, everything is pristine. I am unaware that I am sitting in the pit of an erupting volcano - though I surely know.

The terrestrial globe is covered with volcanoes, which serve as its anus. Although this globe eats nothing, it often violently ejects the contents of its entrails. Those contents shoot out with a racket and fall back, streaming down the sides of the Jesuve, spreading death and terror everywhere. (Bataille, The Solar Anus)

Simply: those who cannot enter the volcano will waste away in the desert. We will no longer see our shit, but it will pile up.

And so will the volcanoes.




X Seed 4000 - 4000 m. tall

Sky City 1000 - 1000 m. tall

The Pentominium - 618 m. tall

Crystal Island - 450 m. tall - 2,500,000 sq. m. of floor space.

This movement inwards, this "accumulation of organized energy concentrated in so small a volume" (Teilhard), is what Paolo Soleri would label the movement of "miniaturization." If a man is the center of the universe (as some would have it, as I might) then this miniaturization is the perpetual development of The World - in its most perfect and imagined state.

Each Volcano is, in fact, a potential high-density city of cleanliness, beauty, and development. Over the last several decades, the architect Paolo Soleri has constructed a theory of "arcology" - the fusion of architecture and ecology - that calls for such immense and complex structures to deal with the growing immensity and complexity of Man:

...at a certain point in bigness, the architecture itself becomes a positive environmental or ecological factor, shaping man’s sociological identity. An arcology illustrates the premise that man must define his corporate image in finite, perceivable terms if a sense of place, belonging, and identity is to be fostered. Each arcology is a particular instance in how man might wish to live. (Donald Wall)

Miniaturization creates mega-structures.

…Embryonically advanced in the ‘cosmic potentials’ …the idea of high density was carried to its ultimate logical conclusion when Soleri advocated the use of vertical structures of such an immense size that they would incorporate all aspects of life (work, education, health, and recreation) for as many as a million people per cubic mile in cities conceived as single buildings. (Donald Wall)

The evolving complexity of man, Soleri argues, "demands a corresponding effort toward miniaturization." He argues against the sprawl of the laissez-faire utopia. He believes that man must learn how to contain himself.

Man shall have to put order to his own layer; to structuralize his environment... the ultra-structure he will create out of such an environment and himself. To put structure in his environment he must define a neo-nature, a physicomineral sub-layer apt, as nature is not, to render him specific and solely human services. This neo-nature, necessarily rooted into the geological and puncturing through the biological (biosphere), must be congruous with the general swill of evolution so as to be one of its makers. It must then be, by necessity, of a miniaturizing character. (Soleri)

Soleri speaks of his future building in evolutionary terms. If we take his form of Environmentalism (a purely aesthetic environmentalism that celebrates man's genius over man) to its potential end, we can imagine a world free of the unclean. We can imagine a world that separates the inside from the outside - an inside where dirt and shit are unseen, though surrounding. To save the Earth, Soleri wisely looks to forego the Earth - to give up the world for the world in a final sacrifice and final expenditure.

But of course, this loss cannot be final. We will continue (some of us) to live in the pit of the volcano. We will not need much, but we will have everything. We - the complexifiers of the world, we who understand miniaturization, we who are moving towards Teilhard's Omega Point or Soleri's Omega Seed - will undoubtedly have the noosphere under our control. Today, as I write, cyberspace has miniaturized the world while making it infinitely larger - for me.

A follower of Soleri, who was himself a follower of Teilhard, writes of "liquid architecture"...

whose form is contingent on the interests of the beholder; it is an architecture that opens to welcome you and closes to defend you; it is an architecture without doors and hallways, where the next room is always where it needs to be and what it needs to be. It is an architecture that dances or pulsates, becomes tranquil or agitated. Liquid architecture makes liquid cities, cities that change at the shift of a value, where visitors with different backgrounds see different landmarks, where neighbors vary with ideas held in common, and evolve as the ideas mature or dissolve. (Marcos Novak)

In Dubai, we stand indoors staring at the ocean. It is clean. It opens up to me. It is my ocean, and mine to lose.

I dream of a future destination where my interests are met, where I am welcomed, where things are where they need to be. "Open doors, Open minds," Dubai suggests. This World might exist on a computer screen. The privileged, packed densely in their chosen World, will stare at The World - their destination close. The volcano will erupt with excitement, and we - on the inside - will be filled, finally, with a "vision made real."