Three long years ago – in the days when an underwater hotel was still on the cards for Dubai, and the western press regularly dismissed and gawped at the city’s excesses in equal measure – a funny-looking book appeared with the unusual purpose of taking Gulf cities seriously.

An odd mosaic of snapshots, graphs, charts, verbatim interviews and deadpan provocations, the volume was called Al Manakh – a word that means “climate” in Arabic and evokes the term “almanac” in English. And though it featured a dizzying array of contributors and editors, the book was probably best known for being presided over by Rem Koolhaas, the Dutch celebrity architect renowned almost as much for his literary efforts as for his buildings.

“The world is running out of places where it can start over,” wrote Koolhaas in a page-long introductory essay to the book. “The Gulf is not just reconfiguring itself; it’s reconfiguring the world.” He took westerners to task for being acid in their critiques but moribund in their ideas about the emerging region, which he suggested might be a “last chance” to think through a new kind of city. The book became an eccentric but indispensable document of the boom.

Then came the economic crisis, and a whole new question emerged: what chances are there now?

This week, a year and a half into the post-boom era, the long-limbed sexagenarian Koolhaas made a special trip to Dubai and Abu Dhabi – in-between visits to Hong Kong and Doha – to ring in the official release of Al Manakh 2: Gulf Continued.
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