Using Dubai as a sort of modernist blank slate for urban and social renewal, author Ingo Niermann — a relentlessly creative artist whose tongue is firmly jammed into his cheek — confronts today’s most relevant cultural and technological developments with elixirs that are as pertinent as they are unbelievable. In the fifth book in the Solution series, Niermann sees Dubai, a sparsely populated piece of desert, become specialized as housing the global center for treating diabetes, called Sugar World. And the Gulf state will be Kumbaya-style universal, too, offering non-confrontational public spaces where both a state of total advertising and compulsive kindness, or what he calls a “personal humaneness account,” co-exist.

“Ingo Niermann is the author and brain behind some of the most intriguing and bizarre intellectual speculations of the last years.”

—Fabrizio Gallanti, Abitare