Just a day to go — I hope we get it. I have very specific and perhaps personal reasons to hope that Dubai wins Expo 2020. World cups and Olympics are fun and the World Economic Forums and summits are great, but more than any other event, the Expo does not just graze through a city. It does not take over momentarily and it does not capture a specific audience. No, it requires the city and all those who reside in it to comprehensively reexamine it, its place in and relevance to the world.
When a city bids for the Expo, let alone wins it, it requires all members of that city to ask existential questions about their city’s identity, purpose and place in the world.
If Dubai wins, we will spend the next seven years thinking and shaping its identity in a completely new way than the past. This is not about appropriating neo-urban slogans and reintroducing a post-crisis Dubai — it will be unambitious to be that reductive in scope. This is about finding a new vocabulary to define Dubai. A lexicon that captures not what it was and is, but what it has not yet been — a text for the yet unintended.
Seven years of textual discovery is what will happen. Substantive inquiry into what a city that wants it all — and paradoxically at times appears to already have it all — should need at all.
By 2020, Dubai will remain the capital of the things it seems to be the centre of today; but the Expo can impose a different quest: intellectual conciliation. How does a city without all the wars, upheavals and protests of others become a city? It must develop local ideas that withstand global dissection.
The Expo provides Dubai with a litmus test of sorts. It stares at Dubai and asks it not to just organise it, but host it. The Expo asks that it not be wooed by tired Davos-ian panels and intellectually hollow prefabricated stands sprinkled by United Nations-esque workshops and internationalist exhibitions and film programmes all wrapped under a docile yet unmemorable theme.
No, Dubai can do much more. It can reexamine the very notion of the Expo and applicability of its national framework in a world of non-state actors e.g. cities, corporations, individuals. The Expo could be an expose of the present’s negotiations with multiple futures. Can Dubai capture that haggling? Can Dubai frame itself as the latest frontier of that debate? I think it can and I think it should. In fact, I think it is the only way it can meaningfully host the Expo.
In 1900, Paris hosted the Exposition Universelle under the style and effective theme of Art Nouveau. The French Expo showcased many new inventions and technologies that are considered symbols of last century’s modernity such as Gustave Eiffel’s tower, Rudolf Diesel’s engines, George Ferris’s wheels and the escalator. The exhibition was not only scientifically progressive, but also socio-culturally through the Negro exposition, which attempted to demonstrate the contributions of African Americans to the US.
One hundred and thirteen years later, the world is crumbling from modernity’s inequality of excess. Dubai has had enough success and it could present a different idea about itself and the world in 2020. Dubai does not need to announce its arrival; it arrived sometime ago. This is not about getting to the top, but about leading all those who watched you get somewhere to greater pastures. The very idea of the mountain is temporal. No one gets to stay there. Moreover, the notion of elevation is no longer defensible. The world today lives a paradox of uber connectivity and uber fragmentation. It is simply too complex to control and govern through hard and soft power alone. It needs new ideas.
And that is precisely what the Expo should be — a showcase of new ideas. The Expo can take a look at the world holistically and review the great disconnect between its intellectual structure and infrastructure. Our modern schools, nations, hospitals and courts were developed some centuries ago, yet the way we learn, govern, heal and disagree today are vastly more complex than then. Our institutions attempt to catch up, but we rarely look back, let alone stop. This is not only bad, it is dangerous. This is not just about tech disruption, but a complete reboot; and Dubai’s proposed theme of “Connecting Minds, Creating the Future” is expansive enough to contemplate such a reboot.
The Industrial Revolution had incalculable effects on the way we not only lived, but also perceived ourselves and assigned value to things. It eventually forced us to redesign our political, economic and social organisations. This century — with all its advances in connectivity, life expectancy, urbanism, education and governance — will require us to do so yet again. Traditional and modern tools and institutions will soon fail us.
And through this process Dubai will come closer to defining itself not in classic modern terms (capital of this and centre of that) but in new terms for this coming era.
Imagine if in the Dubai Expo 2020 Elon Musk’s Space X unveils its first habitation project on the moon and Ray Kurzweil demonstrates how the singularity will merge — not replace — us with machines? What if Dubai hosted an expo about that?
Mishaal Al Gergawi is an Emirati current affairs commentator. Follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/algergawi
