fd2s Blog

Until very recently, every city in the world began as a settlement that hugged the ground — communities of people who built simple shelters close to each other. Over time these settlements fanned out like water droplets in unimpeded directions and grew dense by accretion as the communities swelled. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, cities shot upward, making use of new construction methods to house populations and staff workers in taller and taller buildings. Waves of development ricocheted through cities, extending their footprint to “edge cities” and back into the urban core planting new pockets of density.

Whether all of this growth was organic or planned, one could always find the most lively aspects of city life at ground-level: the riot of street-side commerce that enlivens the first floors of buildings tall and short and the sidewalks in front of them. Shops, restaurants, and services tucked into storefronts, arcades, and side streets. Cafes and markets encroaching outside their doors. All catering to the unending current of passersby.

Well all that has changed in Dubai and its twenty-first century peers. The street is a vacant obstacle course shadowed by the towers above. A lounge on the 47th floor of a hotel or a gym on the 52nd floor of a condominium may be bustling with activity while at ground level, a lonely pedestrian navigates the pockmarked streets and peers into unfinished shop windows. Residents and visitors in these towers may be conversing, interacting and through these moments, creating a sense of community — but it is unseen and literally siloed far above the street.

While this may be an eerie and unique moment in the growth of a twenty-first century city, it won’t last very long. Landscaping, paved sidewalks, and first-floor tenants are all on their way. And with them will come the evolving, effervescent character of street life, now temporarily shelved overhead in square floor plates. If indeed it exists at all in cities that are built upside down.