Perpetual construction in cities like Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Qatar, Paris and Singapore is a status symbol, and an erasure of human values under the guise of innovation. AD ponders the thought.
As skylines multiply and landscapes are reconfigured into photogenic, investor-friendly visions of the global city, the experience of inhabiting them is often marked by sensory overload, repetition and a subtle temporal disparity. Repetition not only in the increase of towers that mirror one another in glass and steel, but in the recurring language of ‘launch’ and ‘coming soon’, which we often notice on hoardings as a cyclical promise of a future that is always imminent. By anthropomorphising the city, considering its rhythms, pauses and overstimulation as one might a body under strain, we begin to see how urban environments absorb, project and sometimes conceal their own fatigue. To inhabit a city like Dubai today is to live alongside a city in a state of perpetual becoming, where decades of transformation are compressed into a handful of years.
Construction fatigue seems to have become both a metaphor and a living condition. With cranes, scaffoldings and boom-lifts in sight, there is, however, an accidental artistry in this state of suspension. It is a transition not from the old to the new, but from intention to inhabitation. Buildings under construction with their temporary veils wrapped in fabric and mesh inadvertently imitate the monumental wrappings of Christo and Jeanne Claude. In many global cities today, the horizon is less a fixed line than a moving edge. To witness this is to inhabit a space perpetually mid-sentence, never quite complete and always in anticipation of the next segment.
One experiences the shifting urban profiles through a bus ride from Al Ghubaiba to Dubai Mall, on the metro from Burjuman towards Expo 2020, or even while travelling along the Blue Line metro in New Delhi. The low-rise density of older neighbourhoods gradually gives way to widened highways, glass towers and monumental structures. With this architectural transformation comes a perceptible shift in demography. Work uniforms give way to corporate tailoring, vernacular languages blend into English, and one briefly notices shopping bags and a subtle alteration of commuters. The landscape not only changes in form, but it recalibrates in social texture. The journey here is less about reaching a destination than about moving through layers of transition. It is a passage of the everyday intimacies of the city to aspirational masterplans rendered in glass, steel and concrete. Development here is reactive, expanding to accommodate influx and ambition alike, reshaping both the environment and experiences in the process. The Gulf has long offered the promise of reinvention, a place where individuals and institutions arrive to begin again, and where the city itself seems to revise its biography every decade or two.
While cities are made entirely by humans, much of the contemporary aspiration is directed towards attuning to techno-savvy environments – what is often termed a ‘smart city’. The urban fabric embeds an increasing amount of tech-intelligence, raising questions about how human intelligence is redistributed or made visible. A great example is captured in the movie Humans in Loop (2024), directed by Aranya Sahay, where a marginalised woman approaches AI with a parental optimism, believing it can be nurtured, trained and shaped by values, only to be confronted that these systems are not neutral at its core. It inherits the assumptions and biases embedded by the makers and the data that feeds it. To realise that even abstract systems and technologies carry preconceptions is profoundly unsettling. It echoes the inequities we encounter daily. Yet even as cities strive to become seamless, the lived experience of growth remains tactile and mostly noisy and exhausting.
Exhaustion is, after all, a state that is felt humanly, perhaps even by cities. Rapid construction not only produces new skylines, but it also brings erasure. Masked under a modern vocabulary of revitalisation and ‘progress’, we see patterns and ornamental details of the past through arched colonnades recalling vernacular souqs, windtowers in polished concrete, mashrabiya rendered in laser-cut steel screens or the concrete-made jaalis in heritage sites in New Delhi. Similar examples can be seen elsewhere under the pretext of Urban Renewal.
In European capitals, historic facades are retained while entirely new structures rise behind them, a practice often described as facadism. In each case, heritage is not erased but carefully staged. Transformation can blur the line between preservation and replacement. The question that surfaces is not whether history exists, but how it is constructed, and which narratives are built alongside new facades. What is retained and what quietly recedes? Revisiting Kevin Mitchell’s reflections in Al Manakh more than a decade on, one is struck by its continued relevance. Conversations around spectacle, speed and sustainability have not disappeared – they have simply been absorbed into the next phase of expansion.
Rhythm offers another lens. Does a city inherit its rhythm from the individuals who move through it, or does it impose one of its own? Across urban spaces, the percussion of construction such as drilling, hammering, the steady churn of cement mixers, the movement of heavy vehicles and fast cars form an audible undercurrent to daily life. We queue in lines and disperse with discipline, moving through metro gates, public centres and mall entrances in orchestrated flows. There is choreography to this efficiency that feels at once organic and engineered.
Authorship of this rhythm is often attributed to architects, engineers and master planners whose names anchor hoardings and headlines. Yet the city’s pulse is equally shaped by surveyors, masons, carpenters and on-site workers who translate blueprint into built form. They are frequently positioned as executors rather than co-authors, and yet their labour determines how a wall meets the ground, how a facade catches light, how a pavement registers underfoot. The humanness of the city resides not only in its iconic skyline but in these accumulated gestures of making.
It is said that in Paris, the Eiffel Tower is visible from almost every point, whether a bridge, a rooftop or the curve of the Seine, anchoring the city’s visual identity. In many Gulf cities today, it is the boom lift and the crane that perform a similar role, visible from almost anywhere, signalling perpetual ascent.
I write this from what I assumed to be a quieter quarter of the city. I chose the apartment for its distance from the main roads, as it seemed to offer stillness. By day, however, one can listen to the unmistakable soundtrack of progress. Piling, drilling, the metallic echo of materials being assembled, another building taking shape. One begins to wonder whether ‘completion’ is ever the goal. Perhaps urban exhaustion is more about continuity, a city stretching beyond its previous limits and re-engineering itself.
Our cities are bodies in motion, in states of constant exertion, expansion and repair where fatigue mirrors our own but so does resilience. In recognising exhaustion as a shared condition between city and inhabitants, we might begin to see it not as a depletion but as a signal. A moment to recalibrate the values we build into our environments, because growth needs not only to accelerate, but to observe and listen. And perhaps the most pressing question is not simply how human our cities are, but how consciously we choose to shape them.
