Selling Adelaide to Abu Dhabi

‘We are going to follow a good example when we follow this beautiful city which we are visiting.’
- UAE government advisor Dr Hashem Arrefaei on a visit to Adelaide, Australia in 2006, ABC.

No city is invented from scratch. To use another city as a precedent is by no means exceptional; it is inevitable that urban planners and city officials draw upon their experience and knowledge of pre-existing cities. Pure urban invention is today dismissed outright as megalomanic. But when the precedent is so far removed from the intended destination, something is truly amiss.

Why would Abu Dhabi look to Adelaide as an example? Culturally, contextually, climatically and politically these cities could not be more distinct. Even within Australia, Adelaide is a joke, better known for its bizarre murders than as a model of exemplary urbanism. It is not a world-class destination listed alongside New York, Paris, London or Tokyo. Nor is it a so-called ‘livable city’, ranking unremarkably at no. 32 in the Mercer index. Admittedly it is higher than Abu Dhabi at 88, but why not aim for Vienna? Aside from lowering expectations, what could Adelaide possibly stand to offer?

Mercer Quality of Living Global Index 2009 – click for larger.

Rather than being selected for its appropriateness or relevance, this minor Australian state capital is imposed on a burgeoning global centre because of a sequence of seemingly coincidental financial, political and corporate transactions between these two cities. A bond forged with slight consideration for the metropolitan implications; the selection of an urban prototype is guided by the forces of globalisation.

Writing in the Emirati newspaper The National, Australian Foreign Minister Stephen Smith highlights the areas in which in which “Australia and the Gulf are natural partners’”, these include “combating climate change, urban design, education, tourism, renewable energy and green technology.” Despite this claim to the future of sustainability, Australia and the UAE act as mutual enablers of environmental destruction. Statistics from DFAT value Australian exports to the UAE at AUD $2.4Bn, largely composed of passenger vehicles, raw minerals and construction materials. Similarly, of the AUD $1.7Bn exported from the UAE to Australia, 88% is crude petroleum. In addition, the very infrastructure for enabling this transaction is managed by the UAE. DP World, a government-owned Emirati holding company and marine terminal operator owns a majority 60% stake in South Australia’s main container terminal.

Specifically concerning urban design, of the Australian planning and architectural consultants operating in the UAE, the three largest and most visible all originated in Adelaide. Commercial architecture firm Woods Bagot; engineering, infrastructure and defence consultant Hyder; and landscape architecture and planning firm EDAW.

Indeed the success of this consultant invasion has become too much to bear for brain-drained South Australia. In January 2008, the state government engaged the peculiar tactics of popular culture in a ploy to reverse this trend. The Adelaide Crows played the Emirates airline-sponsored Collingwood Magpies in an AFL demonstration match in Dubai. With little interest in the sport beyond Australia, the true intentions of the match according to the SA Department of Economic Development were to “promote the state’s interests in Dubai in the automotive and defence industries (although I have no idea how a game of football could achieve that) and to help attract back SA expatriates.”

Adelaide Crows training on Jumeirah Beach in nearby Dubai.

With thousands of expatriates based in the region, the imposition of Australian urban models into the Arabian context occurs in plain sight, implicitly and naturally, as these experts simply draw upon what they know. Could Abu Dhabi’s proposed lightrail network be inspired by the trams installed in 1900, clanging through the streets of Adelaide? Perhaps it is not a problem if the trams were. To examine and ‘learn from’ cities traditionally outside the canon was famously endorsed by Venturi and Scott Brown in their study of Las Vegas, a city which was at the time considered shockingly popular and distasteful, not offering anything to the educated urbanist. But Vegas was extraordinary, a radical sprouting of linear form driven by new forms of transportation, gambling regulation, and propelled by a nearby source of cheap energy.

Sultan bin Mohamed Al-Qasimi, the ruler of the UAE state of Sharjah, is shown a didgeridoo on his visit to Adelaide University in 2005. Adelaidean.

Abu Dhabi is currently undergoing its own urban explosion as sovereign wealth propels an immense construction and real-estate boom. Peculiarly, it is this deployment of the speculative as a strategy that Adelaide and Abu Dhabi have in common.

Adelaide was Australia’s first colony based on free settlement rather than convict labour. In 1834, it was proposed that instead of granting free land to settlers as had happened in other colonies, the land should be sold, and the money used to transport labourers to the colony from the major hubs of Sydney and Melbourne. Adelaide was in effect named, planned, advertised and largely sold before a single settler had set foot in their new home. This peculiar origin in speculative investment offers a strange precedent to Abu Dhabi’s contemporary enlisting of real estate as a key economic driver of development. The current development boom in the Gulf is far from unique, but has parallels with colonial city-making of the 19th century.

Finally, in another bizarre twist, it was recently discovered that this notoriously second-rate city offered inspiration to arguably the 20th century’s most original urbanist, Le Corbusier. A recently discovered drawing shows that in 1950 Corb drew the plan of Adelaide using CIAM conventions, noting the grid planning, the location of major public buildings, and the encircling parkland. It has been argued that this plan served as a key reference for his design for Chandigarh, executed only six months later. Anthony Moulis writes that ‘Le Corbusier’s overtly rhetorical approach to design would not have admitted the plan of Adelaide … as a source of influence or as the master plan of Chandigarh, yet this drawing provides compelling evidence of a covert connection between the two.’

Le Corbusier’s sketch of Adelaide, 1950, via AA. Click for large.

Far from being a joke, Adelaide could be the silent hero of urban prototypes, with countless other cities modelling their transportation networks and zoning mix on this unassuming minor state capitol. Perhaps Adelaide is not a bad precedent, just an unglamorous one that nobody has been bold enough to disclose, until now.

(Excuse: This piece was written to test a hunch that the urban models of Adelaide and Abu Dhabi may be connected in some way. Turns out, they’re not really, I know the arguments are dodgy. Feedback appreciated.)