The Childish Folly of Dubai

Dubai feels like it was designed by a five-year-old boy. What kid doesn’t get excited about the BIGGEST BUILDING EVER, or the WORLD’S BIGGEST MALL? And then there’s the idea of a SEVEN STAR HOTEL. Wow!

A real kid’s drawing would have these elements laid out side-by-side, in two dimensions. Drawings by five-year-olds generally don’t have much perspective or depth. Dubai’s recent urban planning efforts seem to lack them as well. Where else can you visit a city that actually implemented all those dumb ideas you thought were cool in kindergarten? And that laid them all out as ineptly as you would have when you were five?

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Beirut: Signs of Postwar Politics

Cape Tin

Nestled in a sun-kissed valley amid coastal mountains, pastel-hued, historic Cape Town is arguably one of the world’s most beautiful cities. So it’s long been a rude awakening for first time visitors expecting to arrive amid its sweeping vistas and colonial architecture that the N2, the highway stretching between the Cape Town’s airport and the city center, is lined by the handmade shacks that constitute the Joe Slovo informal settlement.

Nestled between the highway and the formal black townships established by the apartheid government on the Cape Flats, Joe Slovo was the result of the rapid population influx into South Africa’s cities since the end of racial discrimination in 1994 — and of the government’s inability to keep up with demand for housing, guaranteed as a right in South Africa’s progressive constitution.

In 2005, a fire that rapidly ate through Joe Slovo’s makeshift shacks left hundreds homeless. At the same time, the government began planning a permanent solution to the housing crisis that had produced the settlement, which was ironically named for Nelson Mandela’s first housing minister. Joe Slovo’s shacks were to be replaced by the N2 Gateway, a proper housing development. But first, Cape Town needed a place to put the refugees of the fire — and those whom it would eventually relocate to the N2 Gateway.

Enter Blikkiesdorp, officially the Symphony Way Temporary Relocation Area, and unofficially what translates from Afrikaans as, literally, “block village” — more often known as “Tin Can City” in English. Established in 2007, it was initially built to house another set of shack dwellers who had set up camp nearby — and it’s increasingly housing refugees from shack settlement and apartment evictions all across Cape Town. Enclosed by a thick concrete fence, constantly patrolled by vigilant police, its rows of numbered tin shacks have elicited comparisons to a concentration camp.

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Street View in South Africa

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Hillbrow, Johannesburg

With the world’s attention trained to the World Cup in South Africa, it’s a logical time for Google to debut its Street View coverage of the country. People unfamiliar with South Africa now have a chance to peer beyond the stereotypes and get a look at the country as it actually is. While there’s only so much you can tell by looking at something on a computer, even a virtual walk gives you a better sense of what a place is like than reading a sensational account of it in the media.

One of the first neighbourhoods I checked out was Hillbrow, the central Johannesburg neighbourhood that was a popular with white yuppies and students during the final decades of Apartheid but suffered terribly from crime and poverty after 1994. As I dragged Google’s little yellow man onto a random corner, I expected to see derelict buildings and empty streets — evidence of the abandonment and lawlessness I’ve seen described so often. Instead I found a neighbourhood with few vacant shops and plenty of new investment. There must still be problems, but a new narrative has obviously emerged — one that hasn’t yet been told in much detail.

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The Art of Personal Space

In New York, bulging sidewalks have led to the partial pedestrianization of Times Square and plans for something similar along teeming 34th St. In Cairo, fed up pedestrians often take matters into their own hands, competing with cars to form express lanes off the sidewalks of window-shopping meccas like Talaat Harb. And anyone navigating a busy scramble crossing like the one just outside Tokyo’s Shibuya station might feel like an extra in Braveheart, surging into battle against the horde on the opposing corner.

Ever since the concept of “personal space” was first coined in the late 1960s, the increasing density of the world’s rapidly urbanizing population has meant that it’s gone largely forgotten or ignored. Now, two artists on two different continents are fighting back — in a manner of speaking. As a Digital Arts postgraduate at Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand, Nathan Destro created a “personal space protector” to keep strangers at a distance.

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White Nights on Sharia Talaat Harb

It’s two in the morning on Talaat Harb Street, the heart of downtown Cairo, and the sidewalks are sclerotic. People shuffle slowly past shop windows exploding with merchandise. An intense white light beams across the thoroughfare. Avoiding hawkers thrusting t-shirts in their faces, trying to lure them to clothes and sneakers piled in tables approximately every ten feet along the way, the throngs spill out onto the street, taking control most of the roadway, permitting only a lane or two for a line of taxis to proceed.

The scene doesn’t suggest it, but suburban flight is no stranger to Cairo. Its well-to-do are increasingly leaving the city center for suburban villas in the desert to the east, may now prefer to shop in tonier Heliopolis, or the cavernous (and, crucially, air-conditioned) City Stars Mall. Even a seemingly more entrenched presence, the American University, has largely decamped to a vast new McCampus on the city’s outskirts.

None of this seems to have affected the density of the crowd along Talaat Harb.

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Three Stops on the Cairo Metro

Pending the completion of Johannesburg’s Gautrain, the Cairo Metro is the only rapid transit system in Africa. And for all the rot and deterioration that characterizes much of Cairo’s city center, it’s surprisingly clean and efficient, with stations that possess a maintenance level and design savvy that would be the envy of New York.

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Floating Through Kabul

Some cities ravaged by war slump into decline and desperation. Others rebound with as much vigour as before. Kabul seems to be the latter, which is not surprising considering its 3,000-year history as a crossroads of culture, commerce and empire. In this clip from documentary film Kabul Transit, the camera floats through the streets of the Afghan capital, past hawkers selling tea, lunch, fabric, chickens. Men dash across the street pushing wheelbarrows or pulling wagons piled high with boxes. People are everywhere. Like turn-of-the-century New York or present-day Shenzhen, it strikes me as being a kind of hustler’s city, where everyone is trying to aggressively make up for time lost to poverty and violence.

Finding Peace in Bujumbura

The central part of Bujumbura was laid out during colonial days, and features a classic City Beautiful rond-point, around which vehicle
traffic is channeled. The Chaussée Prince Louis Rwagazore and the Chausée Peuple Murundi come together here.

Bujumbura is the capital of Burundi, Rwanda’s non-identical twin in the Great Lake Region of Central Africa. Like Rwanda, Burundi’s population is divided between Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups, with Hutus forming the vast majority, about 80 percent. (Both countries also include a small proportion—less than three percent—of Twa, a people related to the pygmies.) Inter-ethnic violence has been endemic for more than 40 years, and although Burundi has not seen bloodshed on a scale of the Rwandan genocide of 1994, a civil war that began in 1993 has claimed thousands upon thousands of victims. Whereas in Rwanda, Tutsi were the target of Hutu violence, the situation is reversed in Burundi.

A long, slow process toward peace and reconciliation was just beginning when I visited Bujumbura to research a novel, The Violets of Usambara. That was in October 2001, a most interesting time to travel in Africa, I can assure you. Both the US and Canadian governments had travel warnings in effect, and before I left I was told not to venture outside the city alone. What I found in Bujumbura was a city which still showed its colonial roots in the design of the central section. Wide, City Beautiful-inspired boulevards took off from a rond-point or climbed toward the hills. Both the airport and the cathedral boasted classic modernist design from the 1950s and early 1960s. But the city was surrounded by acres of informally-built housing. These neighborhoods are said to have grown as people have come to take refuge in the city from violence in the hills.

Cattle are extremely important still to Tutsis who are the traditional herders in both Rwanda and Burundi. When I was there the peace process between the two ethnics groups was underway, but tensions were still acute. Several well-off herders had brought their cattle down from the hills for safe keeping in corrals in the city right at the edge of Lake Tanganyika.

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“I’m a Nigga Forever”

“I’m a nigga forever,” said Yasser, introducing himself. He looked more like a buff Arab in a homeboy costume: big jeans, Nike trainers, and a revolver in his back pocket. Yasser was incongruous with the provincial city of Rada, Yemen. Most people around him were scrawny men in the traditional chequered keffiyah, proudly wearing dangling jambiyaa knives as a crotch-level accessory.

Getting to this town had been a hassle. The last police checkpoint involved a 20-minute interrogation in Arabic, to which I replied with baffled shrugs. I don’t think they were supposed to let me through, but they didn’t really know how to send me back. Yemen is not used to independent travelers. When I arrived in town, I had nothing but a two-line description in my guidebook to go from, but heaved a sigh of relief when I found a local hotel. I was far from the relative comforts of the capital, Sana’a. My 20-word vocabulary in Arabic, consisting mostly of words like “hummus” and “kebab”, wasn’t getting me very far with the locals. It was nice to come across a local English-speaker at a local juice bar.

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Bulging Cheeks in Sana’a

Old Sana’a: bricks and gingerbread

Yemen’s capital is known for its dense streets of brick buildings with white icing. There’s nothing like it anywhere else. But there’s another curious and unique thing about Sana’a: all the men in town have bulging cheeks!

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Streetcorners in Alexandria

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Morning Coffee: Cafés in Old Cairo

El Fishawy is the best known café in Cairo
and a favourite of Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz

Mention Cairo, and the first things that come to mind are the pyramids. Why do I consider this unfortunate? Because the pyramids are a remnant of a dead civilization, and Cairo today is a living city of 16 million people. Let me suggest a better symbol: the cafés of Khan-el-Khalili, a living microcosm of Egypt’s metropolis.

Cairo’s cafés are many things at once. Sometimes, they have the social buzz of a nightclub or pub. You can often count on the Egyptian smoking a shisha next to you to strike up a conversation. I even saw some French tourists at a nearby table who seemed to be flirting with two Egyptian women in conservative Muslim headgear. Somewhere beyond the shisha haze was a family in party hats celebrating their kid’s birthday surrounded by golden trays crammed with large frothy milkshakes. A café isn’t a café without, well, introspective café types: reading, quietly sipping their dark mint tea, or scribbling away.

Cafés are habitually doorless and windowless. The interiors spill out onto the streets and the suq spills into the cafés. Cairo’s most famous café, the Fishawy, is a series of mirrors and ornate doorframes crammed into a through street. The street is used by shopkeepers, trinket vendors, and pedestrians, who brush against the tables. Sometimes the people-watching seems a little too intimate but this is Cairo: dense, chaotic, and wonderful.

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Skyscrapers in the Desert

Shibam is certainly one of the most architecturally outstanding places in the world. This dense walled maze of five hundred mud-brick skyscrapers seems to grow right out of the Yemeni desert. Many of its buildings date back to the 1500s—the city is as impressive from a distance as it is inside the city walls.

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