Dubai, 1974. Reima and Raili Pietilä’s project for the Deira Sea Corniche Competition

In 1971, the six emirates of Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Fujaira and Umm al-Quwain confederated into the United Arab Emirates (UAE). One year later, the emirate of Ras al-Khaima also joined. Over the years, the urban and economic expansion of the different emirates developed with diverse speed and characteristics, setting up dissimilar and peculiar territorial structures. In the framework of the urban landscape and of the built heritage of the UAE, the emirate of Dubai is a particularly interesting case-study for complexity and dynamics of urban and territorial development. This paper presents, through unpublished documentation coming from the archives of the Museum of Finnish Architecture in Helsinki, the visionary competition project by Reima and Raili Pietilä for the Deira Sea Corniche of 1974 in Dubai, which for the first time was proposing the construction of artificial islands and canals, anticipating what will be achieved only many years later. In recent times, the very fast expansion of Dubai, alongside with a policy of urban development manly focused on the financial interests of real estate developers, has led to wide phenomena of urban sprawl, that generated the current lack of urban form of the city. The relation with the human scale and with the balance of the traditional Arab urban fabric is today missing in many of the most recent developments, with a general loss of identity and of quality of life. Pietiläs’ proposal tried to re-establish the old values of the urban space, through “the cultivation of space” and “humanization of form.” A “culturalist approach” to achieve an urban development respectful of the tradition of the human values and of the culture of the city. This approach should perhaps nowadays be remembered as a main requirement for a re-planning of the dispersed urban agglomeration of nowadays’ Dubai.