ABSTRACT
“This is truly a surreal place,” begins the Discovery Channel's special on Ski Dubai, a 22,500-square-meter indoor ski arena in Mall of the Emirates. 1 Ski Dubai opened in 2005 and includes a four-hundred-meter long, eighty-five-meter high run, and four other slopes of varying difficulty. While even among the world's indoor beaches and ski slopes the climatic differentials at Ski Dubai are extreme—the average high temperature in Dubai in August is forty-one degress Celsius, while the temperature in Ski Dubai varies from between one degree below zero in the day and six degrees below when snow is produced at night—they are not necessarily unexpected. In fact none of the manipulations of program, of topography, or of climate at Ski Dubai are outside the reality of the contemporary urban experience or the definition of public space in cities, from colonialism through globalism.
