THE DUBAI SKYLINE is designed to inspire wonder, the sparkling glass towers reflecting the desert sky. At the northern end of the emirate, the world’s tallest skyscraper, the Burj Khalifa, juts into the atmosphere.
If you face the tower with your back to a neighbourhood that largely houses migrant workers, you can gaze at it through a 150-metre-high gold frame – also the world’s largest – intended to present the real-life cityscape as though looking at a photo.
The sense of awe that comes from staring up at the towers of glass and metal or the fake canals and lakes between them, much like the manicured islands created to function as sea-level gated communities for the wealthy and famous, comes from the constant sense that everything the eye lands on has been created by human hands. Nothing is organic, and nothing is accidental.
“The emirate’s brand identity is a strange medley of Wall Street and Disneyland,” wrote the Lebanese typographer Huda Smitshuijzen Abi-Farès. Dubai’s dedication to marketing itself is paramount: it is no coincidence that
