A Panorama of Legacy
Showpiece Dispatch 19
Dubai Expo, autumn 2021.
September 1, 2022 marked the re-opening of Dubai's expo grounds as a “city of the future”: Expo City Dubai.
The Abu Dhabi–based National invited me to write about retrofit plans for Dubai's emptied fairgrounds. As published, the article's title and pull quotes focus on optimism.
It seems my piece isn’t findable on the paper’s website, so I have placed here the final version I sent to the editor. Some sentences didn’t make it in.
World expos tend to follow one playbook: first, there are city leaders excited to serve as global hosts; then, promises to improve upon past expos through a “legacy” master plan; then, celebratory chronicles of the actual event; and finally, a cloudy diminuendo when the big post-event plans don't work out.
For the new district to become the “most sustainable expo in the history of expos,” it must also ensure that the city's existing skyline will continue to be used, reused, and cared for.
Article begins:
Today, the grounds that once hosted Dubai Expo 2020 will reopen, this time as Expo City Dubai. Paying visitors (not yet residents) will be asked to imagine there a “city of the future”, nearly fifty kilometers from the city’s historical nexus at Dubai Creek.
During the expo days, a visitor would have walked around a panoply of national pavilions designed to grab her attention. Many of those buildings are now gone, having been collapsed for intended use elsewhere and, regarding their less durable parts, crushed in landfills. Swept up and refreshed after a reported twenty-four million visits, Expo City marks the next phase of attracting the public: legacy.
In the recent history of world expos, “legacy” has steered host cities’ master plans. The word directs attention to what kinds of lasting benefits will remain after the event closes. Expos, in this way, promise to bring their host cities new or updated districts instead of leaving them with a fenced-off void of hollowed pavilions and weed-strewn walkways. Dubai organizers were no different in declaring legacy as a key design driver. And the rush to reopen the site’s gates this month are part of the plan to keep momentum up.
One of the chief attractions promised this month (with an extra 30dh entrance fee) is an ascent to the “Garden in the Sky,” Dubai’s nod to the standard viewing platforms at expos (Paris’s Eiffel Tower is the long-lasting example). This viewing platform functions as a play on a typical Dubai pastime, watching how construction sites transform over time.
Construction sites function as a kind of public theater in Dubai, something that corresponds with the city’s overall fascination with the new. The latest construction projects consistently garner media attention and higher rents and stock the in-fashion restaurants and shopping districts. In the process, the old can be left behind.
Expo City offers a curious case: is it new or renewed?
Failure of former expo sites to ignite into lively new urban districts happens all too often. Their planners often set their sights on locations far from the active center, with hopes that a global event will enliven an overlooked district. Legacy plans are often spiced with dreams of transit connections and high-tech amenities. The money usually runs out.
Expo City’s ambitions are no different. Dubai Expo was beyond the last stop on the metro; an extension had to be built to reach the location. For the expo’s six-month run, local residents committed to journeying out to a place that was once inaccessible. On the metro, residents floated over the endless and once invisible rows of dusty-grey warehouses that keep the city’s stores and restaurants stocked. For many Dubai residents fortunate enough to have access to a private car, the expo made for their first ride on the city’s greatest investment in public transit.
Dubai Expo’s leaders predicted the “most sustainable expo in the history of expos,” and for that to be realized, the legacy project must be a realized success. Expo City’s greatest hazard, in becoming truly sustainable, might be its own success.
Although success isn’t inevitable, Expo City certainly has potential in doing much better than other host cities. It’s not difficult to see Expo City becoming a lively district. The location, for example, could be ideal for families whose salary earners have offices in both Dubai and Abu Dhabi. The district comes with its own international airport and access to one of the region’s largest seaports, surely attractions for more global companies. A new city here has in fact been on the planning table since the 1970s, when Jebel Ali City was proposed as a home for a half-million people.[1]
There have been promising announcements of major companies who plan to open regional offices on the premises. And already larger tenants seem to be attracting smaller startups. The campus’s conference centre promises unmatched conference facilities in the region. Its touted data networks and no-cars transit system will feel advanced.
If you do pay the eighty dirhams in tickets that will get you to the top of Garden in the City, I wonder if there’s something else you might also monitor during your stay, namely how Expo City’s workers are repurposing the buildings that are scheduled to remain, and how they are giving new life to not-so-old buildings.
Retrofitting and renovations are urgent themes for Expo City to tout, and they are strategies from which the rest of Dubai can also benefit. What kind of effect can Expo City’s success have on the rest of the city? Will a new city merely expand the Dubai’s offerings, or will it come at the cost of existing residential and commercial districts?
So often Dubai’s growth has been through expansion, and when older districts have been scheduled for renovation, it is often through spectacular demolition. In districts closer to Dubai Creek, there has been voiced interest in “preserving” certain buildings, often for their historical or cultural relevance. In this way, they are read as monuments, not unlike that Garden in the Sky, rather than as active places of human interaction. Some of the larger buildings that get attention in this way are the World Trade Centre, the Phoenician Hotel, and perhaps the whole strip of building lining Deira’s creek edge. Many mourned the loss of Golden Cinema, the National Bank of Dubai, and Al Maktoum Hospital. Apparently no one was ready to bestow any of these buildings a strategy for survival. A rare exception has been some speculative thinking about a new life as an art museum for the Dubai Petroleum headquarters.
According to the World Green Building Council, the building and construction industry is a gargantuan polluter, allegedly responsible for 36% of global energy consumption and just under 40% of energy-related CO2 emissions. In a city like Dubai, more dependent on building interiors than other cities, emission rates are even higher. Production of steel, concrete, aluminium, and glass to make Dubai’s newest buildings are some of the most energy-demanding materials that humans manufacture. Once a building is complete, that carbon consumption is “locked in” along with the building’s ensuing systems for cooling and maintaining it. At the end of a building’s “life cycle,” demolition throws all that expended resources to the wind, with the expectation that a new project will only increase energy consumption.
Many of Dubai’s existing and older districts are well alive, even if they are not the topics of the city’s international marketing campaigns. But these districts also show signs of disrepair, only compounding the allure that new districts can hold.
Expo City plans to be an example for the rest of the world for how expo sites can be incorporated into a city’s fabric. One might also hope that Expo City could become an example for the rest of the city, by acknowledging that, once a new building is built— even before it is built—there needs to be some imagination about its future.
[1] Cited in Showpiece City.