Utopic Déjà Vu: The Power of the Public Hallucination in the UAE

Abstract

Every year, the United Arab Emirates processes millions of resident visas for those who chase the Dubai dream. In fact, the country has the largest migrant population per capita in the world. Much like Disney, Dubai brokers in feeding the imagination, chiefly of immigrant-workers who make up 90% of the population. The promise of tax-free living, year-around sunny skies, and a bespoke lifestyle materializes the luxury skyscrapers and spectacular infrastructure projects for which the city is known.

From an inconsequential fishing village 50 years ago to one of the world’s great metropolises, Dubai presents a type of future shock for so-called locals, expatriates and migrant workers who all negotiate the city in profoundly different ways. This thesis will lay out a framework for utopic déjà vu, a new critical term to describe how the guest worker survives in a city undergoing rapid change: of a past under constant regeneration, a present that is always in flux, and a future that demands constant resources and psycho-spatial attention. By investigating narratives of national history and historiography, urban architecture, government policy, critical theory, and my own artwork, we will explore a new mechanism for understanding time and space in the city of the future, as well as the ethics and aesthetics that it propagates