This thesis uses pre-existing local phenomena to construct a near-future scenario where political systems are exploited to demonstrate the politics of aesthetics and their ability to alter a context and its existing socio-economic infrastructure. By imposing unfamiliar forms and systems, familiar aesthetics are recast to redistribute the sensible and create a new reality out of underlying social, economic, and cultural power structures. As a result, form, composition, and aesthetics can begin to operate politically to uncover hidden realities and project alternative futures.

Characterized by a unique system of governance emerging from a conflicting political agenda of autocratic neoliberalism, the city of Dubai offers a lens to demonstrate the politics of aesthetics and their ability to alter a context and its existing infrastructure. In Dubai, the agendas of autocratic neoliberalism extend far beyond politics, encroaching upon the responsibilities of architecture and urban planning by reordering the city into an aggregate of discrete zones - the zone of exception, the zone of labor, and the zone of excess, visibly separated by seams of landscape and infrastructure.  Each zone is governed by a differing degree of autocratic neoliberalism, resulting in palpable seams of political tension between the zones.

In a near-future reality, the inconsistent social, economic, and cultural power structures across these zones are exploited to purge zones of exception of the violence and lawlessness associated with their current enclave form. Zones of exception migrate to the city and collide with the existing culture of material excess creating an opportunity for zones of labor to be included in the global image of the city. The collision of these hidden phenomena redirects material and labor flows to impose a new unfamiliar, highly political form which subverts familiar aesthetics to alter perceptions which redistribute the sensible, creating a plausible near-future reality where form, composition, and aesthetics operate politically to instigate change.