ABSTRACT
An architectural critic writes in a respectable professional publication in 2000, while Dubai was beginning to make headlines, that the overall impression of the city is that of a ‘film set’ and that outside the ‘frame’ is a ‘trackless desert in place of normal urban fabric’. Taking Dubai as an example the manner in which some of the more visible spaces of the city have been designed and planned may run counter to this very notion. Cinematic narratives are by definition a subjective account to further a fictionalized story. Dubai seems to be an embodiment of a city that is planned to be experienced through the windscreen of a car. The highly utopian appearance of the driverless Dubai metro train as it glides one’s head, with barely visible silhouettes of passengers intensifies notions of isolation and estrangement. A camera man was leaning against the boat’s rail and looking at all this in bewilderment.
