DongGuan Dérive.

I arrived at the bus station in DongGuan around 1pm. It looked liked it was going to rain. Maybe just a shower, nothing too serious.



I walked towards the mamouth South China Mall. Currently the worlds largest shopping mall. Though when i visited it last summer to shoot some video footage, it was completely devoid of shops (except for a small department store.)



Very little had changed. Maybe one or two new shops had recently opened, but i think there seemed to be less people walking around compared to last year.



The whole mall is like an enlarged 4D cartoon.



Clowns are surposed to be entertaining, though they turn out to scare people. This kind of place is the same. It was built to entertain, to be fun. But is depressing and mournful somehow.



My camera ran out of batteries. So i went to the only department store to buy some more.



I felt hungry, and ate at the only place open that served food; McDonald's.



God this place was barren. Like a post-apocalyptic worldscape, where people once wandered and bought shampoo and slippers.



I had to leave.



The surrounding area looked very typical of Chinese suburbia. Similar in some ways to American suburbia. Possibly as alienating. But different, more high density.



I spent at least 3 or 4 minutes trying to cross the road.



I walked towards a store called Metro, which i also visited last summer. China currently seems to have a penchant for building such 'big-box' stores. B&Q and WalMart have also invated China.



Metro sells everything in bulk. I got stared at by the shop assistants for taking pictures, and carrying a large back pack that could be used to stuff full of bags of washing powder. Maybe the store assistants were just bored. I would be in their position.



I still thought it might rain, so i bought an umbrella. I walked outside and walked up what looked like a cul-de-sac with a demolition zone on one side and at the end, and apartment buildings on the other side.

I walked to the end of the road, where there was some farming going on, and lots of rubble. Despite the big supermarket chains moving into China, many of the Chinese still grow their own food on allotments. Maybe this has something to do with the famine of the 50's, or general paranoia about food security. After all, 1.5 billion people is alot of mouths to feed in a single country, and will become increasingly difficult in the future. Food prices have skyrocketed in the last 2 years, crop yields are down, and there are already people going hungry.



I walked down the sidewalk that ran along the never-ending line of apartment blocks trying to look for DongGuan's downtown city-center skyline.

Walking in China can be a bizarre experience. The pedestrian is dwarfed by everything, even the plant pots and street lamps.



I give up looking for the skyline. Chinese cities generally have no single area with tall buildings. Chinese cities are only and all tall buildings. So i wave for a taxi.

I spent 5 minutes trying to explain that i wanted to go to the downtown, the main street etc. etc. but the taxi driver just shouted things in Chinese. I called my assistant; Jenny, to help. She explained to the driver where i wanted to go.



20 minutes later i wondered if the taxi driver was lost, taking me to a downtown in another city, taking the long way around to clock up as many miles as possible, or if the downtown really is this far away. I guessed the last. Chinese cities are vast. Especially DongGuan, which appears to suffer from suburban sprawl more than any other Chinese city i have visited.



Eventually he dropped me off in the 'main area' of the city, which looked from my window to be a collection of elaborate shopping malls and colourful ginormous billboards.



I walked up to one of the malls, where a boy in a fluorescent orange polo shirt offered me a voucher to a fitness club.



I walked towards what looked like a subway entrance, which turned out to be the entrance to an underground mall. I took the escalator down, had a look, and decided to turn back.

I walked alongside a wall covered in mobile phone numbers. The unemployed (this part of China has many at the moment) post up or paint their mobile numbers everywhere incase an employer is looking for labour.



It seemed as if DongGuan was built for clowns. Every building was adorned with the same gaudy primary colours and oversized ornaments usually found in children's nursery schools. Why did everything looks so childish?

I explored a huge courtyard parking lot. Again there were oversized toys everywhere.



I walked towards what looked like a factory, but got shouted at by a security guard. I turned back and entered a shopping mall.



This mall was full of shops selling furniture and home appliances. I walked into a chandelier shop, took some pictures, and got asked to stop. I find it frustrating to be constantly asked to stop taking pictures, due to the fear that i might want to copy and sell what i'm photographing, especially in a country that plagerizes everything.



I crossed the road, and entered another shopping mall. Malls in China generally contain one or more supermarkets. This one had two. I entered Carrefour, and walked around.



Chinese supermarkets are always littered with advertisements and cardboard arrangements promoting new products that in the 'West' are dull, but to Chinese customers are new oddities.



I left the supermarket and walked towards what appeared to be a collection of pseudo-'European' buildings. I passed a number of businesses catering to cars.



The pic-and-mix collection of European buildings turned out to be yet another mall.



This one was certainly more decrepit, even more so than the South China Mall.



Next to the mall was probably the largest apartment building i've ever seen. I wondered what it would feel like to live in a tiny container in such an enormous building.



I realized quickly that most of the mall was vacant. That it obviously wasn't a place worth caring about, like many of the places that have been build during the past 50 years. Such places in China are commonly referred to as 'face-projects'; usually ambitious building projects pioneered by a wealthy city official with wild ideas and tax revenue at his disposal, built with an ego, but without keeping in mind how people will actually live with such a project, how it will be carried forward into the future, how it will interact will other surrounding buildings and spaces, and how it actually feels to live, shop, work or even walk through such a place. City officials in China are not elected and do not have voters to please, so they can do whatever the hell they want.



I continued walking, and reached a network of apartment buildings that seemed at least 40 years old, which appeared rare for DongGuan. I walked down one of the alleyways, and peered through a few windows and observed families as they held BBQ's outside.



I reached a dead end, and turned back on myself, to exit onto a main road. This always surprises me in China, how one minute you can be amongst little alleyways and children playing and old women hanging out washing, and then suddenly your out on a main road with thousands of cars and strip malls and neon lights.



I passed yet another 'European' themed shopping mall. I didn't go inside. Surely such places have been built for their aesthetic abilities to lure people to them, though they appear clownish and cartoonish. I generally feel places like these chip away at our dignity day after day, until we stop caring.



I continued down the road towards a number of giant balloons in front of a furniture supercentre.



I went into the furniture center, and got waved at by two young women who spoke English. They asked me to take a tour of the shop with them. They took me around and showed me a variety of furniture and appliances. Fake fruit and bread and animals were everywhere. They gave me a business card.



I walked along one of DongGuan's main thoughroughfares. Either side there was development going on; new tarmac been layed, apartment blocks been constructed, workmen painting and sanding.



I crossed the road, and was faced with yet another shopping mall, this one adorned with gaudy ornaments and oversized models of consumer products.



I was hungry, and dinned on noodles in a Yunnan restaurant, where i flicked through golf magazines from 2007 and 2008.



Upon exiting the restaurant i realized it had become dark, and so i decided to leave the city center, and head back to the coach station in a taxi. The taxi ride only took 10 minutes. I realized that earlier on in the day i had been ripped off, and had probably been taken around the city in a loop to rack up as Yuan on the meter as possible.



I arrived back at the South China Mall, which was now lit up with neon signs.



I walked back to the coach station along the highway and construction wastelands of half finished fake-Bavarian style apartment blocks. The huge neon sign for the South China Mall produced an immense purple glow of light pollution in the humid air, like some alien spacecraft that landed on a hundred foot high plinth.



I arrived at the coach station at 7:35, bought a ticket back to Foshan for 7:50, and waited for my bus.

Interview with George Katodrydis.

Could you describe Dubai as an urban format.

Dubai is a fascinating city, and a lot of people would not guess so in the sense that it is a planned city. The first master plan of Dubai happened in 1959, and it has been planned since then in a really visionary way. The only problem is that these plans have not been finished to their end, so a lot of the city feels half finished. At the beginning of the 21st century, Dubai is a strange city, because it’s a fragmented. The fragments and pieces of the city are really well organized, but there is no coherence as a whole. In that sense it presents a problematic city of the 21st century, built out of nowhere in the middle of nowhere, that will be difficult to sustain in the future.

Do you see Dubai’s urban format as unique, or do you think it represents a new urban format that is taking shape in cities around the world?

Dubai is a generic city, in the sense that well rehearsed urban theories and urban plans are being executed. It is very similar to other cities that have been emerging in the last 10 years. So in that sense it lacks historical uniqueness. I think what makes it fascinating is the speed and type of decision making that its leaders have applied here. The city is certainly changing on a yearly basis.

How important has the tourist been in shaping Dubai?

To look at the geographic location of Dubai, it really is a fantastic place, and it’s always been a place of transit, whether with traders, business travellers, desert nomads or tourists, people arrive here on route to somewhere else, but lately Dubai has been a final destination for many individuals. Projections say that by 2010, 15 million tourists will visit Dubai, which is an incredible amount of visitors. Its interesting to note the geographical location of Dubai, in-between the two emirates of Abu Dhabi and Sharjah. Dubai’s coast is about 45 kilometres in length in-between the two other Emirates, which is not very long. But with Dubai’s new prosthetic extensions been built out into the water such as ‘The World’, and the ‘Palm Islands’, that coastline of 45 kilometres has now expanded to 2000 kilometres. This interface of land and water, will become an enormous line of resorts, and hotels and hotel villas.

Dubai really does have this ephemerality. Nobody actually knows the living population of Dubai. On the other hand nobody can really predict that lifespan, and sustainability of such developments, on again something ephemeral which is tourist, whether they are here for 1 day or 1 month, they are considered temporary in Dubai. In a fascinating way the contemporary tourist trade here, fits very well with the history of Dubai. It is a nomadic city, and has always been a nomadic city.

How significant is the process of theming in the construction of Dubai’s built landscape?

Because the city is so new, and if you study the recent history of the city, you will come across archive photographs from the 50’s and 60’s when Dubai was just a small fishing village. It was not until the late 80’s, long after the discovery of oil, that the city expanded into becoming more modernized and westernized. For the contemporary traveller the city is a very interesting place to arrive, because one expects to find an identity, one expects to find the Arab city. When you arrive in Dubai at the beginning of the 21st Century, there is really very little history to see. What the city has managed to do in an amazing way, more than the theming of Las Vegas, is to re-enact its lost identity, by introducing anything that has been relevant in the Arab world in terms of history, whether this is the traditional village, souk or street bazaar, or a kind of re-enactment of Orientalist paintings. This can be an interesting way to inject a lost nomadic identity in the city ready made for touristic consumption. Dubai offers what a European or American expects to see in an Arab city. It is selling back to the west its own invented fictional imagings of Arabia depicted in Orientalist paintings. It is selling very well. For a Western tourist this Arabian identity constructed in developments throughout the city, is a really critical point of engaging with a locality.

One of the ambitions of the city is to make Dubai the capital of the world by the year 2050. It has to become a very global, a very international city in order to achieve this goal. The borrowing of theming from Venice and California and so on became a very fascinating political decision that is interfacing with an urban master plan solution. Given the global condition in the 21st century, of the tourist and investor who can built across the world without any limitations, somehow Dubai found this unique formula to attract both investors and buyers to consume this global vision that anything is architecturally possible.

Are there problems with Dubai’s built landscape and infrastructure, and if so how can they be resolved?

There are problems, not because of lack of planning, but because of the city’s inability in being able to adapt and change its plans. The city has been making decisions too fast in such a way that the city’s infrastructure has been unable to adjust. As they say ‘you built it and they come’ of course they build it and they do come, but then there are issues of congestion, and increased energy and water demands that become issues.

Where does Dubai currently stand on sustainability?

Development takes place here for investors and not necessarily for the end user. Because of this, the immediate and sensitive issue of sustainability is not addressed, partially because it will add an extra cost to the construction of a project. This means the initial investment for the investor will be higher, even though the running cost from solar power for example, would be lower for the end user. For an investor who is interested in building a property, selling it and making a profit quickly, is generally not interested in environmental sustainability. It is unfortunate that the city has developed without been sustainable but the government is becoming more sensitive towards this issue as people within the city are demanding that changes be made. We will achieve environmental sustainability, seen as in this part of the world we get more sunshine than anywhere else, that we can utilize, and convert into solar energy.

Where do you see Dubai in the future?

It’s a very interesting question. Certainly in the last 10 years, Dubai has placed a lot of emphasis on positioning itself as a global centre, and has had to be very flexible in changing its political decisions. The projection of its future, through a city of fantasy, of architectural renderings, in the middle of nowhere; it will sell itself as a utopian futuristic hybrid of West and East. Dubai uses the internet to communicate its imagery. I call this satellite urbanism; all of these amazing projects currently in development, people can view as drawings and simulations on the internet. Dubai really is a 21st Century Internet city in that sense. Dubai has managed to be one of the most spoken about places in the world.