Real Estate has become such a big thing in the world, such a fever (just look at the lanced mortgage bubble in the United States, bleeding so many banks and good folks dry, and look at the headlong race to build seaside condominiums in a big wall along Spain's southern coast). I think it's time to ask, what are we doing with all the space in the world? I say: "all the space in the world." But in reality what is becoming clearer and clearer is that we don't have all that much space left in the world. Everywhere you go, and particularly near cities and along coastlines, the walls of cement, of glass, of steel, of whatever supposedly ecofriendly material is in vogue, they're cutting us off from openness, vistas, landscape, and access to one another and the natural world.
I think a variation of the following experience has happened to anyone over the age of 30: you return somewhere you visited 15 years before, maybe even only 10 years before, and the changes are stunning. Invariably, the reason is that the build-up has achieved such volume and slickness that the place you used to know, its look and feel, the entire experience of being there, has been irrevocably transformed. And in most cases the feeling is that all the glass, the vertical gain, the multi-story curvy skyscrapers or residential towers, the grand homes in international styles and the modular condominiums, the comfortable parking lots, even the brand-name architecture-- all of it has subtracted rather than added to a place. The place ends up feeling a little more like everywhere else. It may have gained in apparent sophistication and "amenities" (a favorite word for real estate developers). But it has lost so much in terms of accessibility, local culture, idiosyncratic architecture, landscape, grit and other things undefinable and irretrievable.
Maybe the planet will have its revenge. Perhaps everything will collapse and the world will wind down into a green ruin. Perhaps believers in the Peak Oil scenario are right and eventually the whole U.S. Interstate Highway system will be an Inca Road winding around the country, for our cave-dwelling descendants to wonder over (How did they do it? Such engineering!). And so Las Vegas will be a definitively abandoned oasis, its neon dead. And Dubai? Dubai's indoor ski slope will have to go after a few hundred years, and its 21st Century skyline will seem like folly too.
Dubai is possibly in its entirety an "outlaw spatial product." I'm very interested in this notion of outlaw spatial products concocted by Keller Easterling of Yale University's architecture school. Because while she is doubtless more specific in her definition of what constitutes an outlaw spatial product than I will be (probably distorting her theory in the process), I think her concept is useful when applied quite widely. Her book on this concept is called (I haven't read it) "Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and Its Political Masquerades," and in it she writes about "resorts, information technology campuses, retail chains, golf courses, ports, and other hybrid spaces that exist outside normal constituencies and jurisdictions, in difficult political situations around the world." This is according to her publisher, the MIT Press, which adds that these "enclaves" or "real estate cocktails ... can become political pawns and objects of contention. Jurisdictionally ambiguous, they are imbued with myths, desires, and symbolic capital." According to Easterling, the development interests tied to these spatial products don't obey national boundaries but instead "move around the world like weather fronts."
Interestingly, one thing that these outlaw spaces often have in common, whether it's a mega-resort, combination duty free industrial zone and port, or a special technology district or what have you, is a kind of mixed development model integrating the government and private spheres. Why this is, I think, is easy enough to guess. When private investors or deep-pocketed transnational actors in the enterprise sector (be they drug traffickers, major corporations, philanthropists, banks, whatever) want to build something big, they often need either a lot of land to build it on, or a whole slew of special permits, licenses and political favors in order to make it happen. Usually they need both: a big chunk of virgin or devalued real estate, and a lot of special rule-bending and insider guarantees and back-room handshakes, etc. So it's natural that these outlaw spatial products are typically birthed through private initiative, with governments' complicity. Or they emerge as a sort of immaculate conception within the bellies of governments who suddenly conceive a bright development idea, which of course later turns out to have been an intentionally engineered pig trough for well-connected cronies within and outside the government.
Seen from a bird's eye view, the massive build-up of resorts and time-share type condominiums and general pseudo-Mediterranean villa type conglomerations on Spain's coast is a classic case of the spatial outlaw product. The problem is that it didn't happen with the wink and active collaboration of just one government, but in fact occurred in a generalized environment of rampant and sleazy corruption up and down the entire Spanish coast (the prototype is the Marbella scandal, which involved not only fantastically corrupt city politicians but also arms dealers and a whole "Bourne Identity"-type cast of unsavory characters). El País, the Madrid daily newspaper, recently published a series of photographs of entire five star hotels and condominium complexes built illegally on protected coastlines and within natural parks. Luckily the government has slated some for the wrecking ball in order to reverse the damage. That usually never happens. Governments are always loathe to tear down something that already has been built, which is in part why the world is filled with eyesores and architecture that is so patently awful to eye and bodies, which are just a little wiser a few decades later.
Another example: Dubai. It is to me a fearful, unnatural fact that there is sprouting, on an oil-rich desert coastline, a large, skyscraper-studded city, complete with artificial sea islands expressly made, apparently, only to create real estate hype for home lots (islands in the shape of palms or the world map itself). Dubai is billing itself the Miami Beach/Las Vegas/Singapore of the Middle East, wanting to be a magnet for all sorts of transnational types that would like a friendly, safe place to raise their polo horses, own a huge apartment with a sea view, and generally just feel clean, and sleek and modern. However, there is perhaps no worse place on earth for a luxury enclave of this type. The entire mirage is only possible because of oil wealth and because of the micromanagement of the entire affair by the sheik who runs the city-state. The most frightening detail: a shopping mall with an indoor ski slope, at which rich Arabs or Chinese or South Americans or whomever can ski downhill in their expensive and puffy winter gear, and then have a hot chocolate at the chalet-style base camp. All the while, just outside, the desert bakes at over 100 degrees fahrenheit on any given day. I wonder what the energy bills are like? Talk about an outlaw spatial product: this city flies in the face of every natural law, which dictate only sparse and humble settlement along coastlines surrounded by desert.
New York City, which once exported its own proud urban personality around the world, is not exempt from this rash of outlaw spatial products. It is slowly being infected by avatars of this global Dubai or Miami Beach-style development (Miami, with its natural beachy islands fringed with part time high-rise residences built expressly for nomadic luxury-seekers, who apparently buy all their real estate out of airline magazines). With respect to New York, one needs to remember, first, that in the current historical moment, big name architecture has become an inextricable ally of outlaw spatial development. No special enclave within the brave, new cities of the future will be absent its brand-name architectural or design or art icon: a Calatrava, or a Gehry, or Philippe Starck creation. I'll reserve aesthetic judgment on the New York City projects I'm going to mention, but merely say that the imprimatur of a big-name admired architect does not guarantee a project's cogency or wisdom. New York City has three major real estate developments in advanced planning stages, and no one seems happy about any of them: they are Ground Zero (Daniel Libeskind with Calatrava components), the Atlantic Yards development in Brooklyn (Gehry), and finally, the recent announcement of a $1 billion plan for the construction of residential and office towers on the site of the West Side railyards in Manhattan (which is the last prime virgin piece of territory on the island).
According to The New York Times architecture critic, the plan for the West Side railyards is awful, outdated, and harmful to surrounding neighborhoods. But, you know, the point of an outlaw spatial product is not to be a good neighbor. It is to cloak and protect its inhabitants from reality, it is a product meant to distance its inhabitants from the messy urban reality outside its neatly demarcated space.
In my mind the redeveloped docklands along the Buenos Aires riverside are a classic exemplar of an outlaw spatial product. They're known as Puerto Madero, a plan spearheaded by the kleptocratic government of President Carlos Saul Menem (1989-1999). He and his cronies created a mixed private-public corporation to oversee the development of a huge chunk of riverside real estate that had completely languished during Argentina's long midnight of dictatorships and isolation. Although some parts of the area were parceled out for an ecological reserve and public parks and green areas, it's also true that a magnificent swath of real estate was basically handed over to private interests, who created a luxury enclave of-- you guessed it-- high rise residential towers and luxury hotels, a squeaky clean enclave where trash is compacted internally within buildings and shipped out in trucks. A neighborhood without a scrap of trash alongside a city with a notorious trash problem and an army of trash scavengers. A neighborhood patrolled by its own police force, a specially-assigned chunk of the Argentine Coast Guard, who by special arrangement patrol Puerto Madero's dockside and park-side streets in ATVs, and stand at entrances into the neighborhood as if they were guarding a gated community, which in essence they are. The khaki-uniformed Coast Guard also possesses, in conspicuous view along the tourist drag, a state-of-the-art, glass-walled "Integrated Security Center," at which a slew of officers watches large-screen, real-time color imaging of virtually every sidewalk in Puerto Madero.
If a thief was ever to make off with a tourist's purse and make a run for it in Puerto Madero, he would have to be more nimble and swift-footed than Diego Maradona himself to escape back into the maze of real-life Buenos Aires. Because he'd be tracked on camera from the chase's beginning to end. Argentina's media is awash with rumors of Russian mob money and laundered cash making Puerto Madero's glassy skyline possible, but ironically it also touts itself as the most crime-free neighborhood in all of Buenos Aires. Some of its amenities: Puerto Madero has its own useless, ridiculously expensive, bullet-nosed trolly, a hotel designed by Philippe Starck, a Santiago Calatrava-designed bridge, and enough residential skyscrapers so that its young, crane-dotted and still under-construction skyline overshadows that of the financial and telecom skyscrapers clustered in the old Buenos Aires downtown. Of course, the neighborhood has the most stratospheric real estate prices in the city. Puerto Madero has parks sure, very antiseptic ones, handsome but seemingly built to discourage any mass usage of their facilities. These parks are terraced, cantilevered, filled with chutes and staircases, hilly lawns, dense tree groves. Tellingly, it'd be impossible to hold a significant pick-up soccer game or political demonstration on their premises.
And the newest behemoth development in Puerto Madero, on one of the last patches of undeveloped land? It's called Zen City, and it's going to be a four-building mega-residential community built around the theme, get this, of "balanced living." According to the planners, it's central courtyard-garden will be filled with gurgling streams and mini waterfalls, a landscape, they say proudly, modeled on that of a famous hotel in Las Vegas. "Zen City" in the heart of a neighborhood designed to be exclusive and exclusionary? There should be some kind of law against that.
