13. Urban, desert

Urban desert. Urban, desert. A large, empty desert lot at the edge of the city of Ajman. Every urban empty lot in Ajman has desert sand because the city is the desert, the city is overtaking the desert. Even the sidewalks in the fringe areas are sand sidewalks, and the curbs in the streets accumulate the sand blown around by urban desert storms, mini-storms, micro-storms, neighborhood storms that reallocate the urban sand and accumulate it in every crevice to remind us that, after all, the city is still usurping the desert. Ajman, like many other smaller cities in the UAE, is under steady transformation from a desert city to a city built where there was a desert, a peculiar form of artificial urbanity made possible by the abundance of targeted investments, the abundance of manual labor and the abundance of empty desert space. Larger metropolises like Dubai or Abu Dhabi have managed to eliminate (hide) the desert as an urban presence. But in Ajman, the desert is still visible in the amalgam of scattered built episodes (buildings, districts, infrastructure) that so artificially conform the urban landscape in this part of the world. None of the intrinsic qualities of the desert –silence, absence, homogeneity, persistence- is present, in any way, in the city. Only the sand that accumulates everywhere remind us of what this once was.