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"If you want to be apocalyptic," Dutch architect and theorist Rem Koolhaas writes in "Al Manakh," a new study of Persian Gulf cities and their beanstalk towers, "you could construe Dubai as evidence of the-end-of-architecture-and-the-city-as-we-know-them."
To be apocalyptic, you will probably not be surprised to hear, is precisely what Mike Davis wants. His own views on Dubai are included in "Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism," a timely if uneven collection he edited with Daniel Bertrand Monk, and they possess all the razor-sharp pessimism he's spent a career perfecting.
Davis' view of Dubai -- one of the seven city-states that make up the United Arab Emirates, and for the last decade the biggest construction site this side of Shanghai -- is marked by stories of greed, exploitation and enough conspicuous consumption to make a hedge fund manager blush. In classically over-the-top fashion, he characterizes Dubai as "the ultimate Green Zone," a fantasyland built on the backs of overworked and underpaid foreign workers who are violently brought into line every time they try to organize. It's a place, Davis says, that "earns its living from fear," with a skyline that is "a hallucinatory pastiche of the big, the bad and the ugly."