What Are You Really Afraid Of?

The International Herald Tribune’s Roger Cohen sat next to an architect at a dinner party the other night, heard about the aerotropolis for the first time, and today’s he fretting about our ugly, discontinuous, unsustainable world. You can read the whole column here, but there isn’t a whole lot in it that hasn’t been raised elsewhere (including Will Self, the white British writer who is shocked, shocked! at the exploitation of Bangladeshi laborers in Dubai and the UAE.)

Cohen’s pivot line is this: “In a rosy view, Airworld serves the winners as it sets losers on an upwardly-mobile path with a basic wage. But I find a darker image insistent: of a frenzied world chasing its tail even as it devours scarce resources.” The only striking thing to me about that sentence is that you could substitute “globalization” (or, to be more specifc, “neoliberal globalization) for “Airworld” and the meaning remains the same. For a critic like Self, who savaged the book (while praising the writing – thanks, I think), it would appear his larger fight is with globalization itself. So he walks to the mouth of the Thames, and walks across Dubai, and walks from London to New York (via Heathrow) and pretends (like Thoreau pretended, really) to get back in touch with the land. But the truth is that globalization is neither purely good nor purely evil – if it was the latter, it would have collapsed by now, rather than continually solving its contradictions and crises by expanding its reach and intensity and drawing more people into the fold.

“The Chinese are not remotely interested in what the U.K. thinks, but they are very interested in London,” the architect tells Cohen at dinner, which is fitting considering the U.K. is stagnant while London remains the world’s pre-eminent financial center, one which its former socialist mayor Ken Livingstone imagined as a “Singapore of the West,” its destiny untethered from Britain’s. The 600 million Chinese lifted out of absolute poverty between 1990 and 2005 by its export-based economy don’t care what Cohen and Self think either, which is why construction of these cities will go on regardless of the consequences.