The Maraya Project

This article examines the experimental research-creation platform the Maraya Project, initiated by Vancouver artists M Simon Levin, Glen Lowry and Henry Tsang to critique the parallel urban mega-developments in Vancouver and Dubai. Germane to the inquiry is the exportation of the city-planning model of Vancouverism to the Middle East that has resulted in a look-alike urban waterfront promenade by the same architects of Concord Pacific Place in Vancouver's False Creek for the Dubai Marina development in the United Arab Emirates. The article traces ways in which the six-year interdisciplinary project, which included exhibitions, walking tours and sea-walk interventions, public talks, transit-shelter posters, a social media campaign and a commissioned interactive website, brought forward considerations of the implications of citation and inter-referencing in inter-Asian contexts. It concludes by considering the Maraya Project as a kind of imaginative worlding research-creation practice that potentially embodies postcolonial urbanism as a critical transnational methodology

Art · Citation · Civil engineering · Exhibition · Media studies · Political science · Sociology · Urban planning · Urbanism · Visual arts · Architecture and Cultural Influences · Cultural Heritage Management and Preservation · Engineering · Law · Architecture