ABSTRACT
The unprecedented scale and scope of fast-track urbanism in the Persian Gulf and the Asia Pacific Rim at the start of the twenty-first century raises serious challenges to the traditional image of the modern metropolis – and even the very "idea of the city". Holistically designed experiments in planned urban living are certainly not new in the history of city building. Constructing entirely new cities from scratch represents a powerful new trend in city building at the start of the twenty-first century. Instant urbanism conflates history and chronology. Unlike the fits and starts and reversals that characterize the temporality of history, chronological time conveys the idea of sequential movement along a linear pathway. Master-planned, holistically designed 'smart cities' are projected to be the new urban utopias of the twenty-first century. The steady growth of privately managed 'corporate cities' is a disturbing harbinger of twenty-first-century urbanism.
