On the plane ride to Miami I turned to my colleague and said, “That place is going to be a ghost town in ten years or less. There is no way they can sustain it.” Within two years of that statement, Dubai was being bailed out by neighboring Abu Dhabi’s Ruler, Skeik Khalifa, for the construction costs of the Burj Dubai.
In May of 2008, I was fortunate enough to be able to travel with Delta Designers, a forward thinking architecture student group based in Miami, to Dubai to do some research on the development of the city and to see some of the new architectural developments. For a week we indulged in everything the emerging center of the Middle East had to offer. We explored Jumierah beach and the Burj Al-Arab Hotel (I skipped out on the $80 dinner), Shiek Zayed Road and the Emirates Towers, the Palm Islands (still under construction), and of course the Burj Khalifa (called Burj Dubai when we saw it) the worlds tallest structure.
We stayed in a hotel in the “old city,” which I put in quotations because it really is a different city. It origins are several hundred years old and had a history of maritime trade and military harboring. At some point in the mid 20th century, they found oil, made a lot of money, and their children [who were probably exposed to a lot of Western culture] decided they wanted to build metropolis. And this is a huge different between Dubai and the other major cities of the world: Dubai was built so they would come, not built because they came.
The history of modern urban development, since about 1800, has been a process of accommodation and innovation. As corporations and people moved to the city, building were built house them. Urbanism was in the natural flow of cultural development. Construction buildings was need based. Adversely, as Dubai began its rapid expansion and development beginning in the 1990s, the “new city” seems to have been conceived as place focusing on innovation. It was built empty to be filled later. There was no cultural need to for urban expansion, and in fact, it required shipping in thousands of construction workers from China and India. When the domestic workforce is grossly inadequate to sustain the work, it indicates a process that won’t last. When cities like New York were experiencing large amounts of expansion, the workforce lived in, contributed to, and became a lasting part of the culture. In Dubai, the workforce is shipped in for a project, kept in shanty town miles outside of the city, and shipped back to their hometown poverty at project completion, leaving a luxury tower to remain majority empty for years.
As the spectacle of Dubai is fading, it is easier to look more closely at the current state of the city. Hundreds of projects are now indefinitely on hold, the Burj Khalifa needed to be bailed out [and had to be closed a day after opening for structural issues], and property values are dropping. It seems as though urbanism can not be forced, or at least not in the UAE. It is important though to take Dubai for what it was [or at least how I see it]: an experiment. First, It is proving that, while population is flocking to the cities, it requires a process of cultural development that makes the city livable. Second, the urban expansion of a city should be of itself, not of imported labor.
I will not be disappointed if what I said is premature, and Dubai proves me wrong. The ball is, and has been, in their court.
Fabricated 