DUBAI IN HINDSIGHT:SOUQ CARTOGRAPHIES

摘要

The past decade, in hindsight, might be remembered as "the international real estate decade." This can be bracketed approximately from the opening of Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao on October 19, 1997, through Lehman Brothers' filing for bankruptcy in New York on September 15,2008. Saskia Sassen prefigured the international real estate decade in 1991 by identifying the importance of what she termed "producer" services for postindustrial, international cities, comprised principally of the finance, insurance, and real estate sectors.1 The bundling of these sectors and their subsequent meltdown-expressed in the subprime mortgage crisis, the fall of A.I.G., and the Lehman Brothers closing-are at the heart of the current international recession woes. As an aspiring global city during the international real estate decade, the Emirate of Dubai rode the wheel of fortune farther out on the edge than perhaps any place else.