2024 06 20
Downtown Atlanta, Georgia. May, 2024. © Clayton Hauck
Soon, the tallest building in the United States will be in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma (pop. 700,000).
Soon, the tallest building in the world will be in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (pop. 4,000,000), surpassing the current tallest building in the world located in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (pop. 3,400,000).
I’m not sure what, exactly, the meaning is, but there has to be a correlation between late-stage-capitalism and the rise of inequality to the locations of the world’s tallest buildings. It would be interesting to see a graph of the tallest buildings in the world per capita.
List of skyscrapers per capita, as found on a random page on reddit:
UAE - 36.09
Monaco - 25.61
Qatar - 19.58
Singapore - 16.39
Panama - 15.45
Bahrain - 12.05
Malaysia - 8.72
Australia - 5.82
South Korea - 5.37
Kuwait - 3.64
One thing I learned about the UAE by going there is that nobody wants to be outside, so it kind of makes sense to build upwards. That said, I’ll bet that within one hundred years, many of these buildings which have popped up like weeks in Dubai will need to be demolished as it will be cheaper than maintaining them.
-Clayton
