from the Introduction:

Maraya is the eponymous title for an eight-year collab- oration by Glen Lowry, M. Simon Levin, Henry Tsang and many others who tracked the appearance of Vancou- ver’s downtown waterfront in the Arabian desert twelve time zones away. Meaning mirror or reflection in Arabic, Maraya focused on the urban regeneration megaproject in Vancouver’s False Creek that had become an impetus for new thinking about 21st century urban development. Through the mobility of architects, developers, and urban planners, it subsequently shaped one of Dubai’s first master-planned developments: the Dubai Marina.

The story of Maraya began on the shores of what has only recently been called False Creek in Vancouver, Canada, on the unceded Coast Salish territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. After coloniza- tion by the British and decades of resource extraction and subsequent heavy industrial use, False Creek was developed into a master-planned high density residen- tial neighbourhood. This approach to building commu- nity and commodity came to represent a new form of urbanism heralded by architecture critic Trevor Boddy and others as Vancouverism, a homegrown response to an outmoded Manhattanism. Indeed, it was the transformation of the post Expo 1986 World’s Fair site that attracted the attention of Dubai-based EMAAR Properties to realize their interpretation of False Creek in the Arabian Desert. As a result, Vancouver’s towers of glass and steel fronting urban waterfronts have become emblematic of a new / 21st century city built for and populated by the newly mobile middle classes emerging with new global economies.

Maraya employed a variety of forms and aesthetic strategies: exhibitions, public engagements, talks, academic presentations, publications, interactive online platform, and finally, the Sisyphean Cart as a series of creative and critical responses to the global movement of city building and the impact on those who live in, move through and in between them.

The Sisyphean Cart was pulled along both waterfront seawall paths by anyone willing to play along. It func- tioned as a foil that challenged the audience to consider the vital social processes that are lost behind the pro- liferation of skyscraping facades. Imagery produced by the upward-facing sousveillance camera revealed both similarities and anomalies, generatively remixing its HD video capture with imagery from its doppelganger. Archetypal architectural forms surround the camera, reflecting the master-planned urban landscape that in turn reflects the design and desire of lifestyle and capi- tal that is so fluid and mobile in today’s globalized econ- omies. The cart itself, and significantly the pulling of it, invoked the spectre of labour — purposeful walking as a form of resistance to readily consumed images of ideal- ized leisure — and the Sisyphean weight of this vision.

Cities as apparently distant and disparate as Vancouver and Dubai have become key sites in unfolding the nar- rative of neo-liberal mobilities. The historic flow of ideas, people and money between Vancouver to Dubai is a story that binds developers and planners to the goals of capital; it chronicles a zealous faith in returns on invest- ment—rather than addressing concerns around unaf- fordable housing, public amenities and usability and the importance of growing civic involvement. We ask, what is missing in this spatial collusion of urban mega devel- opments, real estate speculation and city planning? Is the promise of the livable city another marketing ploy to lure foreign and tourist dollars and the capricious flow of international investment? Set amidst the false “green” of Vancouver and the genuine “bling” of Dubai, the Sisyphean Cart reflects the desires of these cities to compete for attention on the world stage, upstaging the local inhabitants in the search for global capital.