We're always in the middle of something. Somewhere. Or some-time. It's proof that everything is more connected than disconnected. Despite this, we have vocabularies that persistently designate divisions and rifts, fault-lines and borders. In language, time is bisected into the past and the future. The present is placed in between, like a temporal bridge, whose ends are impossible to discern. Perhaps words are to blame. Maybe words introduce stoppages, when otherwise we'd think in terms of continuities. Words can and do mark out spaces and territories.
Coinciding with the first ever International Design Forum (IDF) in Dubai, this book casts an eye across the broader swathes of the Middle East. It explores how spaces and territories form fundamental ideas about individuals, communities, and worlds. As everyone now knows, Dubai's ambition is to become a truly global locus, liberated from any trenchant localism. In doing so, it has also come to represent an alternative twenty-first-century Middle Eastern reality that simultaneously ushers in radical capitalism while sustaining Islamic state identity. It's a "slash" condition, as in "/". Not either/or, but both/and.
As Dubai builds an unprecedented realm of new newness-some of it new-old and old-new-other parts of the Middle East grapple with physical and symbolic histories again and again. Relics come against re-invention and revolution. Memory contests with an all-pervasive media presence. Micro-mutations in Middle Eastern politics or economics are part of our shared "local" news around the globe. We're always all in the Middle, it seems, again and again. A middle that has taken to re-designing how it is perceived, as places that we consume for real or in real-time coverage.
Aesthetic or political values are enshrined in the words we all use, whether in Arabic or English or Farsi or Urdu. Classical dualities grounded in the bedrock of philosophy seem to recur throughout our languages: inside/outside, here/there, resident/alien, same/other. The title of this publication invokes another one of these plus/minus pairings: with/without. Depending on their context, both conditions-with or without-can be a potential asset. Or liability. In some slippery way, "with" and "without" are interchangeable words. Brought together-with the semiotic sealant of the slash-with/without presents a choice as well as a compound.
The subtitle of With/Without refers to "spatial products, practices, and politics." These three species of spaces are distinct yet intimately entwined. Spatial products refer to manufactured entities, such as buildings, public spaces, monuments, gardens, and transport infrastructures as well as the vehicles set upon them. Spatial practices describe an unwieldy cohort of professionals and amateurs whose work involves the imagining, configuring, or destruction of spaces. The most obvious would be the traditional city planner. But we could add to this UN humanitarian relief agencies or legislators charged with dispensing new laws allowing special economic or social zones to exist within a nation state. Spatial politics make up the last category. Here, we're gauging the ways in which spaces (often referred to as "territories"-occupied, contested, or otherwise) are an embedded instrument of political imagination or discourse. For many, design may take place in a conceptual bubble of the genius designer's intentions. But the consequences of design become a province of human concern beyond aesthetic criteria alone.
Fourteen chapters make up a selective view of the Middle Eastern city as it is today. Each of the chapters takes an apparently obvious architectural or institutional typology (the museum, the villa, the street, the skyscraper, etcetera) and illustrates it with essays, interviews, and documentary photographs. Its content has been developed and curated partly from Bidoun magazine's archive and partly through exclusive commissions for the book. The idea is that you, as the reader, will move through the pages and in doing so, traverse geographic, symbolic, and ideological distances. Often, the spaces that have the greatest impact have no clear "star" designer behind them. Yet, they matter intractably. By de-emphasizing the author, we're not trying to kill the star. But we believe that effect can often transcend cause-something that happens in the actual life of buildings and cities. This goes beyond the imaginations of the most gifted of architects and designers.
With/Without isn't propaganda for or against what is happening in the Middle East today. Nor is it a triumphant declaration of love or loathing for what Dubai has come to represent. Literature on Dubai so far falls roughly into two categories: neo-liberal coffee-table gloss-dross or neo-left moralizing. Cultural critics tend to fall back onto unwitting neo-colonial accounts that hinder any constructive move forwards. Most certainly, some of the spatial/political practices evident are in need of critical interrogation and accountability. But an unexamined Western paradigm can surely no longer be the ultimate measuring stick? Does "democracy" come pre-packaged like a Big MacTM? Recent events suggest the answer is a demonstrable "no." In emerging situations like Dubai, premature hyperbole should be avoided by critics. Ditto to over-determined doom. Fast, sweeping conclusions will be weighed down by our distinctly Western/Middle/Eastern cultural baggage. We must seek a plurality of positions that are as agile as they are inventive.
If design is to play a significant part in shaping the world outside the shop window, then we must investigate the world "without" design(ers) as much as the world "with" design(ers). Even though this part of the world exhibits and undergoes flux and mutability at an incredible rate and with amazing jump-cuts, history will be made by accumulating critical freeze-frames for us to look back on. And we're back here again: in the middle somewhere.
Shumon Basar, Antonia Carver, and Markus Miessen, editors