I’ve been telling anyone who will listen that Up in the Air is a lock for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Actor (for George Clooney, of course), and a strong contender for Best Picture, Best Supporting Actress (Vera Farmiga) and maybe Best Director (Jason Reitman).

The reason? It isn’t a film about about emotionally unavailable frequent flyers, but the way we live now in post-recessionary America, just as Crash was about the way we live now in post-racial (but not really) America. Don’t take my word for it; The New York Times’ Frank Rich has reached the same conclusion:

“Here is an America whose battered inhabitants realize that the economic deck is stacked against them, gamed by distant, powerful figures they can’t see or know. “Up in the Air” may be a glossy production sprinkled with laughter and sex, but it captures the distinctive topography of our Great Recession as vividly as a far more dour Hollywood product of 70 years ago, “The Grapes of Wrath,” did the vastly different landscape of the Great Depression.”

So… the wholesale bankruptcy of the American airline industry has been deferred once more. Today’s Wall Street Journal article points out that a combination of fewer, fuller planes, fewer dirt-cheap tickets, and a raft of fees have stabilized domestic carriers’ finances. People who are down on aviation will point to the fact there are fewer seats aloft now than in 1998, but I’d rather dwell on the fact that ticket prices are also hovering around their pre-millennial level of $301. If they had kept pace with inflation, the average ticket would cost $417 today. In other words, the cost of flying continues to fall. And while that’s terrible for the airlines and their investors, that’s good for us.

There’s a counter-argument to be made that permanently depressed fares prevent airlines from upgrading their product, but then again, if United can scrape together enough cash to order 50 new widebodies from Airbus and Boeing (with options for presumably dozens more), than anyone can.

In Aerotropolis, I stress how the advent of aerotropoli in western China around cities such as Chongqing and Chengdu (both of which are larger than any city in the United States) will instantly connect tens of millions of people to the global economy. And more than that, they will enable China’s economy to continue evolving on the coast, while low-cost manufacturing migrates to less expensive cities inland. You can already see that in Chengdu and Chongqing, where Intel, HP and Foxconn (the Taiwanese manufacturer of Apple products) are all running or busy building factories. Five years from now, your next iPhone may very well be made in Chongqing.

But all of that depends on strong air service beyond China, and not just gigantic empty airports. There are signs of this happening, too, the latest being Air China’s announcement it will start direct flights in February between Chengdu and Bangalore—the Silicon Valley of India. In the short run, these flights will probably be filled with engineers working for HP, Intel and Cisco in India commuting to Chinese factories churning out devices on behalf of their employers. But in the long run, this represents one of the first tie-ups of perhaps the greatest threat to America’s high-tech dominance: highly-skilled Indian entrepreneurs and low-cost Chinese factories working in tandem to undercut and out-think the American brands which outsourced their expertise a long time ago.

For all the Schadenfreude over Dubai—a city, as we hear ad nauseam, that was “built on sand,” as it was smugly summed up with an ironic undergraduate epitaph from the poem “Ozymandias” (“Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”). But we should tone that down, because Dubai built itself in America’s gilded image: a debt-fueled “service economy” pleasure dome of beachfront real estate and megamalls, side-by-side with seething inequality and conflicting belief systems, each tolerant of the other only when shopping.

And if the emirate’s finances are buckling under the weight of its white elephants, they’d invested heavily in our bubble economy, from Barneys to the W Union Square, paying, in retrospect, much too much. The emirate’s biggest American misadventure by far is its 50 percent stake in CityCenter, the $8.5 billion gambling complex opening this week on the Las Vegas Strip. Dubai finally came to its senses last spring, suing owner MGM Mirage for breach of contract and trying to wriggle free, but the two sides eventually settled. CityCenter is presently worth barely half of what its uneasy partners paid for it.

It also looks rather like something that would be built—in Dubai. But for all the chuckles over developments like a suburb of artificial islands in the shape of “the world,” in fact, the resource-poor emirate did exactly what it was supposed to do during a decade when borrowed money was cheap and the price of its neighbors’ oil rose from $20 a barrel before 9/11 to nearly $150 last summer. Just as the bulge-bracket banks, hedge funds, and private equity firms leveraged themselves to the hilt to take advantage of these conditions, Dubai leveraged itself twice over—its debt is greater than its GDP—to build a city expressly designed to separate its neighbors from their money. In hindsight, this sounds crazy, but only in hindsight.

At the time, the Persian Gulf’s oil states were growing at a rate of 6 percent a year, while India was growing at 9 percent, and even African nations were benefiting from the commodities boom, while China couldn’t get enough of their oil. They were all dressed up with no place to go, so Dubai’s leader Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Maktoum and his lieutenants set out to build the world’s ultimate crossroads, a trading hub and playpen for the world’s nouveaux riches.

Clearly, they got carried away. But rather than a cautionary tale, Dubai has improbably become the model city of the Middle East. Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain are all busy building instant cities and sculpting islands in a bid to finish what it started and divert the world’s new wealth to their own doors. They have the advantage of petroleum reserves, however, to tide them through the downturn.

But Dubai isn’t finished yet, and there’s a lesson in that for us. Dubai might be stalled now, but it leveraged itself into becoming the region’s Hong Kong of sorts, boasting its largest port, largest airport, biggest and most profitable airline (Emirates, which flies the super-jumbo Airbus A380 to New York), and a no-questions-asked philosophy that has made it a smuggler’s paradise. Its melting pot of a middle class is composed of the best and brightest fleeing Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran. Thanks to them, half of Sheikh Mohammed’s experiment has a future.

Most importantly, Dubai is now the Western terminus of what the Royal Bank of Scotland’s chief China economist Ben Simpfendorfer calls the “New Silk Road,” the renewed trade between the Arab-speaking world and China. It’s China’s gateway to new customers in Africa and the Middle East—to whom it hopes to sell all the goods Americans are too tapped out to buy, in exchange for oil. Those are customers America needs if it hopes to get the economy back on track.

One of the great ironies of Dubai is that it was built with money repatriated to the Gulf after 9/11, following the Patriot Act and the ensuing hassles to obtain a visa. America is indirectly responsible for both Dubai’s rise and fall. And we’ll need it to rise again.

This past September, I was invited by Unboundary’s Tod Martin to speak about “the evolution of cities” at the first TEDxAtlanta. For those of you unfamiliar with TED, it’s the preeminent conference for progressive techies, designers, business types, and so on. It may be the only conference where the scheduled programs is the whole point of going (as opposed to schmoozing in the hallways). No one leaves their seats.

But it’s hard to build a brand around an annual event, and so TED has branched out with its TEDx satellites—smaller, locally hosted events in TED’s image. I was fortunate enough to crack the opening lineup of the inaugural Atlanta event, which will run three times a year. Photos are available, but no video, unfortunately. I’ve cut-and-pasted a few of my prepared remarks below.

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