Showpiece City: How Architecture Made Dubai

Dubai’s reputation builds off skyscrapers and boosterism, but its foundation is more prosaic: urban planning. Writer and architect Todd Reisz discards the city’s superlatives by focusing on the city’s transformation from desert backwater to pioneering hub. Sourcing from the library of British architect John R. Harris, designer of Dubai’s first town plan in 1960, Reisz reveals how the city’s growth in subsequent decades relied on both ambition and ambiguity. British disinvestment couldn’t stymie Dubai’s port, and the port’s mystique grew as its wealth remained concealed. Oil compounded optimism, creating a bonanza for British experts, but the benefit flowed both ways: Shaykh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum, who ruled Dubai between 1958 and 1990, assumed both the risk and credit for projects from Dubai Creek’s “hardened edges” to the World Trade Centre, what Reisz considered true “showpieces”—infrastructure that hastened Dubai’s ascent.