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What a nightmare! developers building a dream city in Iraq
What a nightmare: "Construction companies are putting together Dream City in Iraq"
As reported by James Hider, "Construction companies are putting together Dream City in Iraq". A "slide of Western suburbia", with its luxury homes and a shopping mall doing the trick!
I wonder whether the Archinect's contributor of this item considers invasion, assassinations and abuse necessary stages to creativity, as she/he has entitled this news: "Iraq now open for visionary architecture" - I hope this is not the case [apparently not, it was intended as "a tragic comment"]. Back to the original article, it is interesting that a designer would equate luxury houses and shopping malls with the word dream - I thought we would know better by now.
So, new luxury dwellings will have to make up for the potable water that is not yet restored, for the sewer ruined by the invaders, for the shattered education and health systems. How will these visions ever ease the pain of those who have lost (and still loosing) their children, families, friends and colleagues? (see: Academics targeted as murder and mayhem hits Iraqi colleges). This is not a dream, this is a imposed nightmare, an obscenity illustrative of the immorality that governs us.
Developers to build Iraq dream city
by James Hider
As reported by James Hider, "Construction companies are putting together Dream City in Iraq". A "slide of Western suburbia", with its luxury homes and a shopping mall doing the trick!
I wonder whether the Archinect's contributor of this item considers invasion, assassinations and abuse necessary stages to creativity, as she/he has entitled this news: "Iraq now open for visionary architecture" - I hope this is not the case [apparently not, it was intended as "a tragic comment"]. Back to the original article, it is interesting that a designer would equate luxury houses and shopping malls with the word dream - I thought we would know better by now.
So, new luxury dwellings will have to make up for the potable water that is not yet restored, for the sewer ruined by the invaders, for the shattered education and health systems. How will these visions ever ease the pain of those who have lost (and still loosing) their children, families, friends and colleagues? (see: Academics targeted as murder and mayhem hits Iraqi colleges). This is not a dream, this is a imposed nightmare, an obscenity illustrative of the immorality that governs us.
In the early weeks of his occupation proconsulship, Paul Bremer fired all senior academics who were members of the Baath party. "They went home and tried to leave the country," another Baghdad arts professor complained. "But those who stayed are now mostly too frightened to return because they have been named - and they fear for their lives." Academics targeted as murder and mayhem hits Iraqi colleges
"The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then you have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was."
Milan Kundera, The Book Of Laughter and Forgetting in Abe Hayeem's new book "Destruction as cultural cleansing", http://www.bdonline.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=429&storyCode=3062126
Developers to build Iraq dream city
by James Hider
BUILDING SUCCESS: Construction companies are putting together Dream City in Iraq.
On the ground, Dream City looks like nothing more than another walled compound in a country full of ruined army bases.
It is only when watching the promotional film that the future of this particular site is revealed as a complex of 1200 luxury homes, a shopping mall, parks and schools: in short, a slice of Western suburbia grafted on to an Iraqi city.
(.....)
Next to the ancient souk in Irbil, where merchants sell honeycombs, goats cheese and pistachio nuts in a hive of crumbling alleyways, a vast shopping mall of four 30-storey buildings is going up, with 6000 retail spaces inside. On the road between the boom towns, peasants still live in Iron Age villages of stone and mud-brick huts, grazing sheep and travelling by donkey. Even in the centre of Irbil, people live in hovels carved out of the ruined facades of Ottoman mansions on the Qalal, a hilltop fortress that has been lived in for 7000 years, the oldest continuously inhabited site in the world.
(.....)
Its well paid. I get around US$10 to US$15 a day working on the construction of an underpass, he said. The Kurds treat him well, he added, although he had decided not to go out to the market after two suicide bombers killed 12 people in the city earlier this week, the first bombing inside the Kurdish region in months.
(.....)
find this news at: http://www.itp.net/business/news/details.php?id=18653&category=
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