Desert field of dreams

From Griffith REVIEW Edition 20: Cities on the Edge
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.

Written by Sally Breen

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In the distance, the rows of high-rise towers on Dubai's infamous Sheikh Zayed Road glitter; ornaments on the edge of an immense plain. Closer, giant boxes – elaborate light-fringed shopping centres and business precincts – rise out of the dust. From the back of the Mercedes, we seem to be looping, the long curvature of roads crossing back on themselves like a tame sideshow ride that still manages to make me queasy. The streets are quiet, lined with orange and white barricades instead of gutters. The rain, unseasonable and unexpected, pools on the roads. It has nowhere to go. There are no sidewalks; beyond the plastic barricades, the streets just roll out into rubble and dust and are like the rest of this city, under pressure of construction, on the cusp of being reclaimed by the desert altogether.

Dubai is a twenty-first century dream city sold hard on a handful of facts, a sprinkling of spin and lashings of conjecture. Dubai's spectacular growth is impressive, but the city-state on the edge of the Persian Gulf remains unknowable, tinged by the lingering exoticism and fear which shadow the Middle East.

Dubai embodies an urban development philosophy which embraces acceleration and dispersion as opposed to high density. Like other post-modern cities – Las Vegas, Los Angeles and the Gold Coast, which have all claimed to be the fastest growing cities in their territories at some point in their short histories – Dubai also emerged from sand. But its claim is greater: it is now the fastest growing city in the world. Forty years ago, Dubai was little more than a small fishing and pearling town of fifty-eight thousand people on the edge of the desert. Following the discovery of oil in 1966, it began to be transformed, and after the British left and the federation of seven emirates formed the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in 1971, its population grew threefold in less than a decade. It has since doubled every ten years. Dubai is now home to just under one and half million people; eight hundred new residents arrive every day.

Although Dubai's creation as a global city was initially fuelled by oil, black gold only accounts for about 6 per cent of its US$37 billion gross domestic product. If oil were the magic ingredient, then neighbouring Oman and Qatar (which have larger oil reserves) or Saudi Arabia (with three-quarters of the world's remaining oil) would have produced cities of international calibre. They have not.

Dubai has made itself. It is largely the vision of His Highness Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, Prime Minister and Vice-President of UAE, and ruler of Dubai, whose family has reigned since 1833. When Sheik Mohammed became Crown Prince in 1995, he was determined to create a relatively open and tolerant city-state, although critics say his dream is based on the oldest business plan – slave labour. Yet Dubai flourishes, growing faster even than China, surrounded by hard-line Islamic republics and the nightmare of Iraq. The ‘anything is possible' attitude and absence of personal, corporate and sales taxes has resulted in phenomenal foreign migration and investment. Diversification from an oil economy to one based on service and tourism has had an unprecedented impact in a region otherwise locked in stasis.

In Dubai, play is big business.

Luxury and its rhetoric flood the landscape. Competition is fierce. The Wallpaper City Guide suggests that service in Dubai is ‘exceptional', the epitome of ‘traditional Arab hospitality even if for the most part it is dispensed by Asians not Arabs'. Nightclubs in five-star hotels are replete with personal butlers, high-end designer furniture and panoramic views through giant apex ceilings and seamless glass walls. Just ordering a fruit juice can become a salubrious experience. Immaculate attendants in starched white aprons and hats deftly inlay exotic fruits inside a glass finished with (imported) wildflowers.

Like some Western cities which have developed rapidly across two or three cultural movements – expressionism, modernism and post-modernism – Dubai is fuelled by money from an interlocking nexus of leisure, entertainment and development. Nearly six thousand international construction companies operate here – the affinity between it and the Gold Coast is underlined by the high-level presence of Gold Coast-based construction companies such as Emirates Sunland (a subsidiary company of Sunland Group Australia) and the troubled MFS Group, both engaged in large-scale projects in the city. Of the more than two hundred Australian companies registered with the Dubai Chamber of Commerce, over sixty are involved in construction. Joel Hicks, the Australian Trade Commissioner in Dubai, offers a prosaic explanation: ‘Australia is well experienced in building on sand, soft soil and construction of infrastructure ...'

Local companies are also well versed in the development of luxury resort and hotel complex design and construction – skills in high demand in Dubai. The Gold Coast claims an official sister-city relationship with Dubai, a relationship reflected in accelerating tourism (136 per cent increase in 2007). Sunland, which has put its stamp on the ‘new millennium' reimagining of Surfers Paradise, has over $1.6 billion invested in large-scale projects in Dubai, including the recently completed $600 million Versace resort, a sister to the Versace resort it build on the Gold Coast in 2004. Sunland's newest venture, D1, is touted as a ‘sister tower' to the Q1, the world's tallest residential tower located on the Gold Coast. ‘There's a synergy in the decision to replicate Q1 ... in Dubai. Both [cities] share a reputation as a tourism and lifestyle destination ... both are seeking to expand their economic base, through tourism and as a preferred location to live and work.'

Capitalising on international expertise allows Dubai to sell the accoutrements of the ‘Western' lifestyle more successfully than the petrochemicals that fuel it.

In contrast to other global centres, Dubai has not evolved via industrial processes or revolutions; it is its own creation, having engineered an accelerated growth in an inhospitable landscape, midway between the old world and the new. Its stature as a global city has been achieved without historical or religious subtext – a remarkable overwriting of its history and geography.

Dubai, like other frontier territories, has been ‘created' – first by dredging the Dubai Creek to create one of the largest ports in the world, and then by following the logic of construction capitalism. Importantly, it is a product of poetic invention, of words and images coupled with money, technology and know-how. A city founded and sold on promises – the tallest building in the world, the first seven-star hotel, the first underwater hotel, the largest amusement park, biggest floating hotel, even replication of the world itself. All appropriated, derivative and iconic because Dubai is a borrowed, temporary landscape where the vision of the city overwrites every experience of it; it is a city engaged permanently in its own creative act.

The hyper-reality demanded by the simulated industries of leisure and entertainment results in dispersed, smooth and stretched notions of urbanity. New frontier landscapes like Dubai are not complicated, turbulent metropolitan structures piled on top of themselves like Euro-styled cities. They do not evolve, decay or fall into nostalgic ruin. They are not highly textural, sculptural or monumental: reverence is not directed to the prominence and permanence of the centralised town hall or square. Instead, new frontier cities create reverential expression and then replace it – shopping precincts, entertainment sites, residential and tourist towers run in strips or erupt in clusters and shift constantly to meet new demands. Like massive reflectors, these cities are as sleek as flat screens, virtual billboards projecting the extremes of attainable excess. This cinematic vernacular is most marked in the entertainment and pleasure strips which dominate cities like Dubai – spectacle and impermanence define and drive the shifting landscape.