Dubai–pent up coast demand. Everybody lives in AC apartments; but humans flood the coast, climate permitting, weather permitting.
Dubai–pent up park demand. Weather permitting, climate permitting–a green park on the coast.
Remember the landscape context–this is the Empty Quarter–coastal edge, coastal zone.
Blue or green is rare and highly sought after, difficult to access. The coast line of the Gulf. City parks. The above two images are what I think the planners call ‘pent up demand’. But you’ve got to drive to get to these nodes. Tell me these green and blue major recreation nodes should not be 10 minutes or less walking from every front door.
Where’s the coast? Where’s the park? How do I get there?
Dense apartment life everywhere–that is Dubai.
So I said what might that locally accessible (ten minute walk max) neighbourhood park look like?
Dubai Blue::Dubai Green Dubai Dream–should be a major node, a landmark–something to organise the neighbourhood around–next to the local mosque.
Dubai Municipality sits in the Coastal Zone. Al Ain is an oasis in the Desert Zone. The oasis is supplied by rare monsoon remnants, from the Gulf of Oman, captured by the Hajar Mountains in the Mountain Zone.
I wanted to understand a little more about the larger landscape into which the Dubai Municipality sits. Dubai Municipality is just a narrow, but intensely built, strip along the edge of the Gulf. From the above satellite image–it is hardly visible.
The landscape transect distance from Dubai, at the Gulf coastal edge, above on the left, across to the right to the Gulf of Oman is 100km.
Many times, I drove that transect through the Dubai Emirate on a main road, identifying essentially three distinct landscape eco-zones:
A Dutch doctor, a General Practitioner, Marijcke Jongbloed, lived in the United Arab Emirates for twenty years. She surveyed, 1983-2003, the landscape of the UAE. She compiled her findings in a book entitled, The Comprehensive Guide to the Wild Flowers of the United Arab Emirates. She photographed each plant in its natural habitat, annotated a location map and commented on how the plant was used by humans (ethnobotany). Best reference I found for plants in the UAE.
Aladdin? A lamp? No, it’s the Empty Quarter and it’s full of sand and genies…No!! It’s full of djinnis and gnomes and surfs and a whole lot of people…but the humans only live along the edges, right? No, no, no…it is nothing…nothing but a mirage.
Mirage…dream, dream, dream…when I want you in my arms, when I want you and all your charms…whenever I want you, all I have to do is dream…the Empty Quarter…dream.
In my 2006-2010 search for the Dubai landscape, I found Dubai was two entities. An Emirate, one of the seven that comprise the United Arab Emirates. And a Municipality, in the centre of a burgeoning 230km coastal megalopolis stretching from Ras al Khaymah in the north east all the way south west to Abu Dhabi.
The rulers of Dubai, the Emirate and the Municipality, are the family of Shaik Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum. Shaikh Mohammed, born in 1949, is the Vice President and Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Emir of Dubai.
He has built Dubai and its hospitality offerings as a place for family vacations.
That’s the official story but even in the ‘winter’, I found the weather too hot to be in the sun very long, before seeking AC. And in the summer, sometimes only after midnight it might be ok for casual walks of more than 15 minutes, before seeking AC.
I was in a conundrum. Maybe it was my cultural upbringing, but I thought that family vacations were outdoor experiences. Yet in the Dubai landscape, I found its climatic extremes always pushed me back indoors. Aha! The aha moment–AC shopping–indoors–spectacular architecture and attractions–yes indoor shopping as a family vacation. Hmm.
Family vacation with outdoor landscape as a condiment. Just use it a little. Hmm…
I visited Dubai in the early 90s for business. Then in 2006, I moved to Dubai for business–four years living and doing business in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and the Liwa Oasis.
My landscape challenge was a simple question: what is the Dubai landscape? Never found the answer. But in 2007 I put together a short series of seven figures that addressed some important landscape issues in the region.
This one addresses the population dynamic of the humans in a hemisphere that is measured by a six hour or less jet flight from Dubai. This is a Dubai-centric world hemisphere.
Fighting to re-occupy what we humans call the city, the 21st century warriors, Primula urbanica, escaped captivity and weaponised to take the battle to the humans.
Don’t we all dream of this day of reckoning?!
They’re over the barriers already!!!
Look!!! They’re pouring over the barriers!! Victory is in our grasp!
Primula vulgaris
The Prim Roses back at camp, some resting from combat, others in training. For decades they suffered indignities. Humans spat foul names at them. Vulgaris they endured.
Until they discovered the portal to the inner secrets of the Berner Oberland. Behind the scenes, evolution became weaponised and the revolution began. In the dark corners of unknown-to-tourists stubbes can be heard the whispered discussions of Prim Roses: Flowers at every doorstep–no more easy access to cars!
Primula vera
Just past the edge of town, along the creeks, the Wildings keep a cool eye on operations, the battles in town. Sweet revenge. Order returns.
There was a time…when many people understood the secrets of plants. Today, Christophe Descroix sets out to re-educate the humans. Do not be afraid. Read. Decide yourself.
What are they and why clandestine—it is about service to plants, to gardens, to landscapes—it is about surrendering to the plants—listening, hearing…then letting time slip away…then being… with open channels…open ports of reception…then by miracle…portals become accessible.
Only you can do it.
It’s between you and the plants. Look at a favorite plant…listen and hear…let it enter…and serve it. Let quiet begin…there is something there if you are in receptive mode, rather than controlling mode.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHTBTgcs3XY?rel=0]
Born in Lausanne in 1784, and studied in Leipzig, Gottingen and Cambridge before heading to Arabia…he was a geographer and author, best known for having re-discovered in modern times the ruins of Petra, the Nabatean city in Jordan. Burckhardt was an explorer who spent three years in Syria learning the language and ways of Arabia before beginning his journey through the sands and on to Medina and Mecca.
Burckhardt was a modest and self-effacing man whose careful accounts of his travels in Syria and Arabia are classics, and whose conversion to Islam was apparently sincere.
Before leaving Damascus, Burckhardt had tried to anticipate trouble. ‘Knowing that my intended way led through a diversity of Bedouin tribes,’ he wrote in his journal, ‘I thought it advisable to equip myself in the simplest manner. I assumed the most common Bedouin dress, took no baggage with me and mounted a mare that was not likely to excite… cupidity …’
In Jordan, near the Saudi Arabian border where the sands meet the mountain cliffs are the carved facades of Petra –remnants of Nabatean culture. Image credit to Daniel Case – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33632136
His writing covered not only the natural geography of Arabia but also deep insights into the cultural geography of the Bedouin and the Wahabis–peoples of the sands. He wrote of the Wahabis:
‘The founder of this sect is already known as a learned Arabian named Abd el Wahab who had visited various schools of the principal cities in the East, as is much the practice with his countrymen even now being convinced by what he had observed during his travels that the primitive faith of Islam or Mohammedism had become totally corrupted and obscured by abuses and that the far greater part of the people of the East and especially the Turks might be justly regarded as heretics. But new doctrines and opinions are as little acceptable in the East as they are in the West and no attention was paid to Abd el Wahab until after long wanderings in Arabia he retired with his family to Derayeh at the period when Mohammed Ibn Saoud was the principal person of the town.’
Travelling as a poor man, Burckhardt drew close to the Arab tribes, he was depending upon them. His books tell the strange stories…lessons?
‘Unfortunately in Kerak he learned that cupidity is a relative thing. For there, for the third time, he placed himself under the protection of a shaikh—the Shaikh of Kerak—and for the third time was betrayed. Although he swore on the head of his son to protect Burckhardt, the shaikh promptly robbed him of most of his funds and turned him over to a guide who made off with the rest and then abandoned him. Again he was stranded in the desert without either money or a guide.’
The difference between truth, prejudice and political correctness can only be learned by the individual. But Burckhardt’s writings from two centuries ago and the contributions from many contemporary authors frame a window of understanding for that landscape and the humans who have called that desert their home.
Is mystique the Empty Quarter landscape magnet for Western culture? If so, then how…why?
How could a place, a landscape where cultures of India and Africa have interlaced for millennia be…empty?
How can there be an Arabian Peninsula landscape virtually untouched by Islam these last 1400 Hegira years?
And before Islam, how in the Empty Quarter can there be long lost whisperings…mystical names…unwritten sagas…still emerging from those sands…
But is this Empty Quarter mystique nothing more than a moth to fire?
For me it is unimaginable how non-Muslim foreigners came in search of this landscape…a foreign land…a foreign culture…a foreign religion…a foreign language…what to speak of…NO GPS…NO TELECOM…NO WEATHER REPORTS…
Everytime I think about our ‘modern technological tethers’, the real time information resources to which we are all accustomed, I am amazed by the strength and will power of these earlier explorers…and that gives their writing all the more gravitas.
