Dubai Watch

The articles and links here will represent all views. Of course, the best answer is to go and experience it for yourself.

The ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, likes to spy on his own people. In that, he is upholding a modern Arab autocratic tradition. Dubai's ruler, however, is not looking for conspirators, fifth columnists or political opponents. He's looking for talent.

Sheikh Mohammed's "spies", known as "mystery shoppers", fan out across government offices to observe and grade the efficiency, competence and attentiveness of local officials. Those who receive poor marks are quietly rebuked, while those who impress move into an informal Dubai fast-track, receiving increasingly more challenging tasks, greater responsibility and more scrutiny. If they survive those tests they gradually enter the rarefied air of the Dubai high-flyer executives, the dozen or so movers and shakers who are transforming the Persian Gulf city-state into a major regional and global trade, tourism, transport, technology and financial services hub.

This survival of the fittest produces a top-notch government elite, not one stocked with cronies and family members of the ruler--and might just be the key to Dubai's remarkable rise. While western capitals search for an Arab "democratic model", Dubai is providing an Arab "meritocratic model" that underpins its successful growth and development.

Growing at 15 percent a year, the largely meritocratic Dubai elite will be severely tested as the emirate's ambitions seem to have no limits: by the year 2015 it aims to treble its GDP, create nearly a million new jobs and continue its torrid pace of development and growth. It is currently building what aims to be the busiest and largest airport in the world, it already attracts more tourists than India, it remains the third largest global re-export hub, its real estate developments--from islands in the sea to towering skyscrapers--have grown legendary and its partially state-owned companies are plowing money into investments from Jakarta to Japan, from New York to New Delhi, matched and even outpaced at times by private Dubai-based developers and investors.

A key player in charting the rise of Dubai--some call him the chief operating officer of Dubai, Inc (with Sheikh Mohammed as the CEO)--is Mohammad al-Gergawi, the dynamic and influential minister of state for cabinet affairs, chairman of the state-owned conglomerate Dubai Holding and exhibit A of Dubai's meritocracy. Al-Gergawi was first discovered by a "mystery shopper" in the mid-1990s. He consistently outperformed in his government assignments. When tasked with creating a high-tech zone in the late 1990s he had a small office, a shoe-string staff and limited resources. Today, Dubai Internet City houses leading technology giants and al-Gergawi heads a conglomerate of some 30 companies with 30,000 staff.

In another Arab state, al-Gergawi might have become a frustrated bureaucrat or would have turned away from government to the private sector as do many of the elites in the Gulf Cooperation Council. Had he grown up away from the GCC, he might have become an Arab immigrant in Europe or the United States, joining the millions of Arabs who have left their homeland in search of greener economic pastures.

Yasar Jarrar, a Jordanian management expert who works as an advisor in the Dubai government's main strategy office headed by al-Gergawi, was one such immigrant in the year 2002 before he was scooped up by the Dubai recruiting machine and enticed away from his post as a newly minted professor in Cranfield, England. "Five years later, I'm still here," Jarrar says, recalling how his first visit to Dubai shattered the stereotypical view he had of Gulf Arabs as "unproductive and inefficient".

But it's not only business, management and investment high flyers who seek a piece of the Dubai dream. Indian middle class managers, Iranian techies, European architects, Chinese traders, Central Asian students, American engineers and, increasingly, global members of the media and creative class--film-makers, journalists, artists, production hands--have made their way to Dubai, contributing to what seems to be emerging as a critical mass of talent driving the city-state forward.

The "build it and they will come" model has served Dubai well in the past. From the dredging of the Creek in the late 1950s to allow larger ships to the creation of massive man-made ports and the more modern clustered "city" free trade zones, Dubai officials seem to have taken the motto of their late ruler, Sheikh Rashid, to heart: "What's good for the merchants is good for Dubai."

Of course, with a "local" population (UAE passport holders) that makes up only 10 percent of all Dubai residents, the Persian Gulf city-state is truly sui generic; thus talk of a Dubai "model" enters shaky ground. Egypt cannot suddenly import half a million South Asian workers to construct buildings, Saudi Arabia cannot import thousands of bankers when so many Saudis need jobs, and countries like Syria and Jordan do not have the luxury of being away from the frontlines of Middle East conflict as does Dubai.

While much of the Middle East remains burdened by a steady brain drain, Dubai has managed to cut against the prevailing grain by both nurturing local talent and drawing in leading regional money managers, traders, bankers and consultants in what is amounting to a brain regain. An ambitious young man in Karachi, Cairo, Tehran, Jeddah or Delhi no longer instinctively sets his sights on Europe or the US. The Dubai School of Government, for example, has managed to attract three leading Saudi women PhD professors away from Europe and the US along with an array of top thinkers from the Arab world and a smattering of World Bank executives. Whether or not Dubai might offer a model matters less in this instance than what it is actually doing: keeping Arab talent in the Arab world.

The DSG executive president, Nabil al-Yousuf, is an Emirati national who rose to prominence not through flattery or political intrigue but through his ability to chart government performance indicators. On the back of that success, he recently led the study for the 2015 Dubai Strategic Plan, pulling together a disparate array of advisors and consulting with some 3,000 individuals to produce a substantive document that resembles something that a major multinational company would generate.

Filled with graphs, charts and projections, the strategic plan lays out areas of projected growth and notes how the government intends to maximize those sectors. In the way it was presented--Sheikh Mohammed standing before an audience of some 2,000 people using power point and taking questions--and the detailed projections it offers, the strategic plan offers a level of transparency and expectation rarely seen in autocratic states.

And why not? The last time Sheikh Mohammed unveiled a ten-year strategic plan was in 2000, and Dubai had surpassed most of the targets by 2005. While other GCC states may have more wealth than Dubai, whose oil revenue accounts for less than five percent of GDP, its secret weapon is not so secret or mysterious at all: talent. To achieve its 2015 targets it will need to continue grooming local talent and attracting international and regional talent.

As a critical mass of the world's professional elite increasingly sees Dubai as an attractive destination to live and work, the city-state will benefit from this transient, mobile and knowledgeable pool of workers. "The hardest part about taking a job in Dubai," one former World Bank executive joked, "is the dozens of CVs I get from colleagues asking me to help them find one too."- Published 27/12/2007 © bitterlemons-international.org

Widely touted as the Middle East's very own Orlando, Dubailand, a cluster of mega-billion-dollar projects, is gradually emerging across the desert sands of the booming Gulf emirate.

Faced with a dwindling wealth of oil, Dubai has taken on a new challenge of larger-than-life projects in line with its ambition to become the region's main business and leisure hub.

Already primed as a holiday destination, it is fast executing plans to build a host of new hotels, golf courses, malls and leisure facilities in order to more than double the number of tourists to 15 million by 2015.

Initially planned to cover an area of two billion square feet (185 square kilometres), Dubailand, billed as the "world's most ambitious tourism, leisure and entertainment project," is expected to be a sprawling three billion square feet. This would make it larger than the entire city of Orlando, Florida -- home to Walt Disney World, Universal Resort, Sea World and a variety of other attractions and hotels.

"Dubailand is going to be a city within a city," said Mohammed al-Habbai, chief executive officer of Dubailand, a subsidiary of the government-owned Tatweer.

"We are very confident in what we are doing," he told AFP. "I would say that most of our projects are on time."

Western-oriented Dubai's bid to position itself on the world tourism map has propelled it way ahead of its oil-rich conservative Gulf neighbours.

It already prides itself on the sail-shaped Burj Al-Arab hotel and building three palm-tree shaped islands off the coast, where the ambitious island project in the shape of a world map has fast become yet another landmark.

On Monday, Dubai also announced its 100-million-dollar purchase of the Queen Elizabeth 2, one of the world's most majestic cruise liners, which it plans to turn it into a luxury floating hotel berthed at one of the palm islands.

A model version of Dubailand still shows its vast barren surroundings, which in three years time will be awash with even more golf courses, theme parks, mega-malls and residential towers.

"This area will definitely be completely different by 2010," when three million visitors a year are expected to Dubailand alone, said Habbai.

The entire 24-project venture, not scheduled for completion before 2025, is estimated to cost 235 billion dirhams (64 billion dollars, 48 billion euros), 60 percent of which is expected to come from private investors.

This does not even include the mammoth 'Bawadi' project, announced in 2006 as the world's largest hospitality and leisure development consisting of more than 50 themed hotels with 60,000 rooms, almost double the number currently available in Dubai.

In May, the emirate's ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, seen as the driving force behind Dubai's phenomenal economic growth, announced doubling the value of Bawadi to 54 billion dollars.

One of its hotels, AsiaAsia, tipped to be world's largest with 6,500 rooms, will be developed by Tatweer, with 45 percent of Bawadi already agreed upon with private investors, Habbai said.

Tatweer is part of Dubai Holding, a conglomerate owned by the government of Dubai which oversees mega-projects in the emirate, currently experiencing a burgeoning property boom.

In the throes of constructing the world's highest building, whose ultimate height remains a closely-guarded secret, Dubai also plans to house a Great Wheel, whose size will rival that of the London Eye observation wheel.

Dubailand will also house the world's largest transparent snow dome and a Universal Studio theme park, announced in March by Tatweer.

The latter will be part of a 2.2-billion-dollar Universal City Dubai, comprising 4,000 hotel rooms and some 100 restaurants.

Along with Tiger Woods Dubai -- a 25-million-square-foot golf course and community featuring palaces and mansions by September 2009 -- Universal City will be the only Dubailand projects funded by Tatweer.

Taking it one step further, the Falcon City of Wonders will boast replicas of the Pyramids, the Eiffel Tower and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

Several stadiums are being constructed in Dubailand's Sports City and a comprehensive Motor City is taking shape around the currently operational Dubai Autodrome.

Despite the frenetic expansion, Habbai dismissed fears of saturation in the market, which currently faces a hotel room shortage in peak periods.

"Dubailand is going to create a new segment in the market for leisure and entertainment," now mainly focused on beach and shopping holidays, he said.

Grandiose shopping malls are also well in the making in Dubai, a member of the seven-strong United Arab Emirates.

Tatweer announced in May a 2.7-billion-dollar deal with Al-Ghurair Investment to develop a four-million-square-foot mall in the Bawadi retail zone.

And the Mall of Arabia, expected to open its first phase in early 2009, aims to extend to become the world's largest at 10 million square feet.

Dubai cosmopolis

Dubai, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, is unique: a city whose decentred multiplicity informs and accommodates everything it touches, from the role of Islam to that of global capitalism in the region. Faisal Devji presents an acute analysis of a place where tradition functions not to forge a non-existent nationality, but to accommodate and naturalise change. In this, he suggests, Dubai is a global city of the post-national future. From openDemocracy.

By Faisal Devji for openDemocracy (20/04/07)

As the images of planes crashing into the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center were relayed across the world on 11 September 2001, throngs of shoppers stopped to watch this spectacle on the television monitors of Dubai's many malls. Surrounded by American fast-food outlets, and clutching just-bought items of American fashion like the baseball caps that are worn with Arab robes, these spectators cheered as if they were American fans watching a sporting event. What did this celebration mean for the prosperous citizens of the United Arab Emirates, a country that is not only an American ally but in love with American commodities and culture? A country where Twin Towers and World Trade Centers continue to be built, looking now like the growing children of a fallen parent?

Whatever the reasons for their unseemly cheering as the events of 9/11 unfolded on television, the shoppers of Dubai were not manifesting anti-American sentiments because of their economic deprivation, nor out of hatred for the west. They were not even motivated by Arab or Islamic politics, since that now familiar entity, the "Arab street", does not in fact exist in Dubai. Like other members of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), this wealthy principality has a resident population that is overwhelmingly non-Arab, also possessing therefore a substantial non-Muslim component. So perhaps what happens in Dubai should be judged by the city's very lack of Arabs and Muslims, which is perhaps why its citizens celebrated 9/11 in the way they did, as the vicarious members of a virtual community. Indians are the real national majority in Dubai, accounting for some 66 percent of its population, and are alone in occupying every rank in its society.

Emiratis themselves only comprise some 10 percent of their country's populace, though by law they dominate all public-sector enterprises there. Yet even the Arab domination of Dubai's public sector is due to an unusual policy of "emiratization" or affirmative action for the ruling minority, whose standards of living have been in relative decline over the last few years. Lacking the educational background and professional qualifications of the foreign experts who manage their country, let alone the skills of the laborers and technicians who make it function, Emiratis are now being reserved positions in private sector enterprises as well. Though they do not possess the numbers to displace foreigners from either public or private sector, Emiratis can no longer afford to live on state subsidies or on fees paid to be the local partners of foreign companies. It has also become clear that the presence of many successful businessmen among the Emiratis is no substitute for a ruling race, one whose dominance must be secured by quotas, and whose purity safeguarded by restrictions on intermarriage.

While the travails of this ruling minority are curious enough, much more interesting is the society they are part of. What does it mean that the most vibrant part of the middle east, in economic terms at least, is not in fact middle eastern? This paradoxical situation, or rather the novel society it brings to light, makes Dubai far more intriguing than its wealth or vulgarity might suggest. For it reveals to us one of the few societies not founded upon nationality. With a small number of locals outnumbered many times over by a large number of outsiders, most of whom are barred from becoming citizens of the UAE, the nation-state remains nothing but a mirage in Dubai's desert. The implications of this astonishing fact are far-reaching, and inform everything from the role of Islam to that of global capitalism in the region.

The spirit of capitalism

Dubai's cosmopolitanism rivals that of New York or London, the difference being that it is the local who's an exception here rather than the foreigner. But the privileges of Emirati citizenship can never become grounds for nationalist hysterics and xenophobia, as they sometimes do in Europe and America. Being itself a minority phenomenon, nationalism here cannot pitch itself against other minorities. Despite its huge numbers of immigrants, therefore, immigration as such is a non-issue in Dubai. However strong local feeling might be against the role that the United Kingdom and United States are playing in Afghanistan and Iraq, for example, the tens of thousands of Englishmen and Americans who live here have never become targets of general hostility. This is because nationality does not provide the basis for society in the UAE (see Faisal Devji, "Welcome to Dubai, the society that capitalism built", Financial Times, 5 February 2007).

Despite the regulations it imposes to give the impression of a national culture, Dubai plays host to what is possibly the most diverse society in the world. This was brought home to me on my frequent visits to Jumeirah Beach, whose clear waters get saltier by the day as desalination plants providing the city with its water continue to dump the salt they extract back into the Gulf - which is also where the fresh water thus produced is held in submarine reservoirs. All day until late afternoon the beach is populated by white-skinned sun-worshippers from places like Europe and North America. From about five in the evening it draws increasing numbers of Indians and Iranians, Pakistanis and Filipinos, Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans and Arabs who're more interested in maintaining a lighter complexion. Women veiled in black from head to foot mingle with those in the skimpiest of bikinis, while Frenchmen in thongs bob alongside Afghans dressed in tunics and baggy trousers. Egyptian youths form human pyramids in the water, as if from some atavistic impulse, and Russians chat to each other while floating in circles. And in all this no language or ethnicity predominates.

The Arab culture that is meant to give national form to a place like Dubai exists mostly in the form of advertising and commodities. It is to be found in the guise of leisure and entertainment, from shisha bars to desert safaris, whose designers, builders and consumers are generally foreigners. Similar is the use of Arabic in public life. From announcements on Emirates Airlines to street signs, Arabic serves as an exotic backdrop to the babble of Urdu, Russian, Persian and Tagalog that are the true languages of Dubai. Though it is possible to make one's way in the city using Hindi alone, there is only one common language here, English, which even local Arabs must use in their daily interactions with Chinese shopkeepers, Indian teachers and Iranian dentists. And rather than being diminished by the foreigner's length of residence in Dubai, this diversity is only compounded there, since even schooling is provided the children of migrant workers and expatriates according to British, Indian, Australian or Pakistani standards.

Given the fragility of national culture, it is Islam that lends moral and legal substance to the UAE. This is manifested in disparate ways like banning alcohol and pork products for Muslims and pornography for everybody, forbidding the missionary activity of religions other than Sunni Islam and legitimating certain legal decisions by reference to the sharia. Rather like the Church of England, Islam is the state religion of the UAE, though professed in its official form by a minority of the country's residents. Unlike the Anglican church, however, Islam replaces rather than defines national history in Dubai. This is evident from the city's religious architecture, with so many of its mosques built to imitate those from other Muslim lands, that I'm inclined to think the emirate's only distinctive religious environment is the shopping-mall. To hear the call to prayer broadcast amidst the glass and marble of upmarket European shops, with American fast-food outlets set alongside prayer rooms, is surely a distinguishing feature of the Gulf.

State-supported Islam functions like an iron mask meant to conceal the lack of a face, which is why not a single refinement in religious thinking, culture or practice has emerged from the UAE. In this respect Dubai is not the successor of medieval Baghdad, Cairo or Cordoba. There are, however, many attempts to make money from Islam in a global market where Dubai competes with countries like Malaysia, which is trying to corner the global market for halal food by patenting its standardization and certification on the model of kosher food. While Malaysia is rushing to become a "halal hub," Dubai is competing with London to become the hub for another moneymaking enterprise called Islamic banking that is estimated to be worth hundreds of billions of dollars. This offshoot of a mythical discipline called Islamic economics emerged during the dictatorship of Zia ul-Haq in Pakistan, as part of his effort to legitimize his rule in Islamic terms while gaining Saudi backing at the same time.

Founded by Pakistanis but now disseminated by big business the world over, Islamic banking is motivated on the one hand by perfectly genuine concerns over ethical investments and market practices, including abstaining from deals involving the manufacture or sale of alcohol and pork products. All this is quite in tune with the kind of ethical investment schemes already available in the West. On the other hand Islamic banking means abstaining from usury, incorrectly but popularly defined as interest. Of course it is impossible to operate in a capitalist market without either taking or giving interest at some level, so a great many euphemisms and often tortuous evasions are required to hide this fact, often to the financial detriment of those purchasing such sharia-compliant services - though of course to the benefit of its vendors.

Islam is in fact as modern as anything else in Dubai. Or rather Islam is more modern than anything else in the emirate, because like other religions it is the first institution to adopt new technologies and make itself at home in them. But of course it will survive long after these novelties have disappeared. One needs look no further than the veil that has fascinated and repulsed the west for so long to see how this happens. Unlike the burqas and chadors worn by poor women in other parts of the Muslim world, it is clear that its various forms, like the abaya, worn in the UAE are statements of fashion as much as anything else. Not only is there a plethora of changing styles for what might appear at first glance to be a standard garment, but veils are also very obviously part of an economy of seduction.

Emphasizing as they do the body's visible extremities, such clothes are often worn by women with heavily made-up eyes, painted lips, bright nail polish, hennaed hands or feet and eye-catching footwear. Veils allow these parts of a woman's body to become fetishes, and indeed there is nothing so overpoweringly feminine as the heavily perfumed, painted and bejeweled Muslim woman to be found strolling the corridors of Dubai's many shopping malls. But then veils have been the garments of seduction for centuries, with a vast literature dedicated to their allure. It is this, rather than any misogynist prescription of modesty or invisibility, that accounts for their enduring popularity in certain quarters.

In any case the habit is a sign of modernity not tradition, because it has put an end to the physical segregation of the sexes by allowing women to move about in relative freedom enveloped in their own cocoons of privacy. Indeed the veil permits its wearer to do things that many unveiled women would find impossible, like holding hands with their husbands in public or mingling with half-naked men at the beach. And of course what lies under the veil is often the most daring of European fashion. Instead of the familiar western distinction between a secular appearance in public and a religious one in private, we find the reverse in Dubai, with tradition signified in public and modernity in private. Instead of being kept at arm's length or reserved for the outside world, the west becomes the most intimate part of a Muslim woman's inner life.

Love's labor lost

Rather than seeing all this as some failure of modernity, the elimination of nationhood as a basis for identity, as well as the capitalization of religion as a replacement for it, might be viewed as the portent of a global future. For Dubai is the closest thing to a society organized by relations of capital. It is the nearest approximation of the urban and island communities that served as models in the early days of capitalism, from Thomas More's Utopia to Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Unlike these model communities, however, Dubai exists as a temporary home for most of its residents, who therefore repatriate the money they earn from a country that will rarely grant them citizenship. New laws giving permanent residence to those who buy property have been designed to lure a certain class of person and investment here, but these are the very people who will flee Dubai at the first sign of trouble, and who are unlikely in any case to invest in the public welfare of its residents. The emirate's financial success is built, paradoxically, upon capital flight not capital investment.

Because it is temporary, investment in Dubai is about short-term exploitation without much regard to social or ecological consequences, as so many of the emirate's grandiose building projects illustrate. What has resulted is the façade of a city, the urban version of a Potemkin village, much of which seems to be made out of cardboard. It is only in the older and poorer parts of Dubai that a genuine urban life can be glimpsed, in which pavements exist on which people walk and local businesses rather than international chains operate. Not that there is anything traditional about this, since old Dubai is as temporary as its younger sibling. It's just that the world of the clerk, laborer, petty merchant and shady operator has more autonomy and therefore creativity than that of the professional linked to an increasingly homogeneous corporate culture. The new city is a kind of Disneyland, full of pretend urbanity and even pretend infrastructure like the enormous and expensive system of roads, which are not only choked with traffic and populated by maniacal drivers, but also badly designed despite their beautiful quality.

Befitting a capitalist paradise, the UAE has a reputation for bad labor practices, with maids from the Philippines immured by their employers, and construction workers from Bangladesh laboring under harsh conditions. Recently there have been a number of disruptive protests by laborers who block highways, destroy company property or hold a manager hostage when they are not paid wages or deprived of water and electricity in the stifling desert camps where they are housed. These latter tend to be made up of hundreds of flimsy cabins, each one crowded with three or more workers, which have a tendency to burn down taking the lives and possessions of their inhabitants with them. Conditions at the workplace tend to be just as bad, with many injured and killed in accidents.

In these situations the government steps in promising to check conditions and impose penalties, though what they in fact do is act as mediators between management and labor. Companies are rarely if ever prosecuted even when they forcibly detain and beat their workers - who are rescued by police only to be deported. The UAE's labor regulations are routinely flouted and insufficiently policed. So even when companies do observe the law requiring a three-hour rest period for those working outdoors during the intensely hot summer, they sometimes release their employees onto the streets, where they may be found lying on grassy verges in their hundreds, as if stupefied by temperatures soaring well above a hundred degrees.

While strikes are forbidden the "temporary" workers who form the overwhelming majority of Dubai's labor, they seem to be occurring more and more, and now even among white-collar workers. The days of cheap and unregulated labor may in fact be coming to an end, because of a more assertive workforce as well as rising wages and opportunities in their home countries. But if labor practices in the UAE are still bad enough to drive the International Labour Organisation (ILO) to distraction, this has little to do with any local tradition of exploitation. Indeed most of the companies involved in violations are based in countries with strong workers' rights, and the managers in charge of laborers in Dubai are rarely locals. Even when it is a UAE company in charge of one of the gigantic, some would say megalomaniacal, building projects in the emirate, the actual work is sub-contracted to European or South Korean businesses, so that it is very difficult to determine where responsibility lies. From management to labor, everything here is outsourced.

It remains to be seen if government plans to create some kind of collective organization representing laborers to address the mounting problems that it recognizes in this sector of the economy. But whether they are for labor or for capital, laws and rights in the city are not phrased in the terms of national unity. Freed from cant about the greater good, workers and management here have recourse to a language beyond citizenship. It is not the greater good of the nation, but the good of the individual, as much as of humanity, that is invoked here. The kind of language that characterizes relations of all kinds in Dubai is one that is private instead of public, particular instead of general and religious instead of secular. Even when the state intervenes to affirm the right of one or another of its subjects, it does so not to represent some national will, which indeed it cannot, but as an arbiter possessing its own very particular judgment.

The state's judgment has little to do with neutrality, not because it is biased in some way, but because the emirate is unable to function as a third party at all. It is instead the first among equals as far as the great interests of Dubai are concerned. As owner, partner or large investor in almost all the big private companies that make their home here, the state acts as one owner, partner and investor among others. While this is not a phenomenon unique to Dubai, it has achieved an unprecedented success here, such that it is difficult to tell where the public sector ends and the private begins. This means that the state actually ends up competing with its own subjects - undercutting rival businesses or buying them out, rather than providing a congenial site for their work. It is, therefore, predator as much as protector of its subjects.

As the most powerful private interest in a society of such interests, the state presides over a marketplace rather than a country. It is not surprising, then, that this city should be the capital of other societies without states. Somalia, for instance, which has been without a government for more than a decade, is even more of a marketplace than Dubai, though obviously a much poorer one. Like other African cities, Mogadishu is supplied with goods largely through the emirate. More than this, Dubai actually provides the base for Somalia's airlines and banking, so that we might say Somalia itself has been outsourced to the UAE to become a business like any other.

Dubai functions as a technocracy rather than a democracy. To call it a monarchy is anachronistic despite a powerful ruling family, which exists as the simulacrum of monarchy. Having been granted their titles by imperial Britain, the rulers of the UAE derive their glamour from the vanished world of the Raj, while in fact working like presidents of corporations. Democracy is misplaced in Dubai, since it is only possible in a community of citizens. But if confining democracy to the small minority of Emiratis is nonsensical, offering citizenship to the country's majority is absurd, as it would entail the creation of a national culture and therefore proscribe the very diversity that makes Dubai possible.

In today's international order democracy means citizenship, citizenship means nationality, and nationality means the creation of a majority. But there is no ethnic, linguistic, religious or even political majority in Dubai, and nor can there be one given its lack of political representation. This makes for a bizarre situation in which demographic majorities and minorities do not translate into majority and minority interests or even consciousness. Though they are the largest national group in Dubai, for example, and probably the only one to occupy every rung of Dubai's class ladder, Indians neither think of themselves as a majority nor behave like one even in ways that are strictly non-political. One finds fewer signs in Hindi or Malayalam here than in London.

Tempests in a teapot

If democratic representation does not characterize political life in Dubai, public opinion certainly does, in the form of newspapers, radio and a welter of professional and community associations. The lively debates through which public opinion in the city are registered are not of course regulated by national interest, though they do sometimes include national loyalties from elsewhere - thus the many letters in the local media by well-paid American expatriates complaining about anti-United States bias. But unchained from the politics of citizenship, even these everyday loyalties luxuriate into strange growths. So the terrorist attacks on Mumbai's commuter trains in July 2006 were followed by at least three letters in one of Dubai's English-language newspapers pointing to the remarkable assistance that the city's residents rendered each other - but only to disprove a Reader's Digest poll some weeks previously that had named Mumbai one of the world's rudest cities.

Pakistani and Egyptian taxi-drivers will tell you of the bigotry they have started to experience following the arrival of the most recent group of expatriates: whites from Britain, Australia or South Africa. And highly educated professionals of Indian or Pakistani origin, often themselves British or American citizens, express their shock at the overt racism they face from their new compatriots. But then many of these white expatriates have been imported to Dubai precisely because they are white, and come to hold jobs and enjoy lifestyles here that their class and qualifications would bar them from at home. Their contribution to the city is their color, which fetches a high price in the bazaar, as white slaves always had in the region because of their rarity. They are, in this sense, the most racial group in the UAE.

Even racism, then, has become an effect of advertising and the market, with members of the master race being mere servants at another level. This is also why racism here is not founded upon a code of silence or denial but forms the subject of lively debate. Rather than have liberal and conservative factions of a dominant ethnic group argue over race relations, with a few minority voices thrown in, as is done in Europe and America, there is no racial majority here, or at least not a dominant one, so the newspapers are full of letters from all sides of the racial divide.

Here is a story from summer 2006. Someone writes to a local newspaper wondering why the city's Lebanese populace seems to have adopted the Brazilian colors as a kind of uniform during the soccer world cup. He suggests that these young men are a rather mercenary lot because they support a strong team only so that they can enjoy a vicarious triumph, something that they are obviously unable to do as Lebanese citizens. In response arrive a number of letters pointing out that since more Lebanese live in Brazil than in Lebanon itself, it makes perfect sense for them to support Brazil. The fact that the first writer did not know this fact, he is told, is because he is an arrogant westerner who takes his ignorance for wisdom. In any case, he is reminded, it is common for people whose national teams are not playing in the World Cup to support another.

More common than tales of racial discrimination are the relations of prejudice that structure social life in Dubai. These are often harmless, so the notion that Chinese are hardworking, for instance, is unlikely to effect them negatively in Dubai, just as the perception that Emiratis are lazy is unlikely to disadvantage them either. While everyone everywhere entertains stereotypes about other ethnic groups, these are generally cut across by the language of citizenship - which itself is often racially marked. But without ties of citizenship, only those of contract and prejudice bind as well as separate the disparate groups making up the population of the UAE. Stereotype, in other words, is as much a unifying factor in the city as a divisive one, since in the absence of a common or even a dominant nationality, it provides the only cultural background for social relations there. Prejudices are so highly developed in Dubai that they become signs of intimacy rather than estrangement.

A good illustration is provided by the story of Lebanese fans during the World Cup. Exchanges over their allegedly mercenary practice of supporting the stronger team continued for weeks in the newspapers. Once Italy had won the cup, a writer with an Anglo-Saxon name sent in a letter beginning with this sentence: "Congratulations to Lebanon on securing another remarkable World Cup victory. Particularly amazing after being knocked out at the Quarter, then Semi final stage". In response the next day came a letter wondering at the obsession with Lebanese fan behavior, which was put down to the first writer's shock at no longer being part of a dominant majority: "Maybe because the only place you saw apart from the suburbs of England is Dubai." What struck me about this response was its attribution of English nationality to the first writer. Why not American, Australian or South African? I suspect because his Englishness was derived from his wit.

That prejudice may be the product of knowledge rather than ignorance, and signal intimacy instead of estrangement, is an important point and one repeatedly borne out by the humor and sophistication with which it occurs in Dubai. Witness another exchange of letters: First, a lengthy complaint from "a non-British who is tired of people ruining the name of Asians," about a Pakistani couple boarding a flight to England so that the pregnant wife could give birth there and claim benefits. The letter ends with the words: "I can tell you what lazy, ungrateful spongers some of these immigrants can be." The next day's newspaper carried two responses, one from a British "expat for life" who agreed entirely and vowed never to return, and the other by a Pakistani refuting "the Indian person" and ending with: "I think the person must have been referring to an Indian passenger as I believe the security apparatus in India at airports is very lax and the butt of many a joke."

But intimacy comes in many forms, and among these the sexual one enjoys a high profile in this emirate. In a masculine population swollen to an absolute majority by large numbers of migrant male workers, sexual services are bought and sold as well as being forcibly procured. This city, which bans all material deemed pornographic, is nevertheless home to the most bewildering array of prostitutes. From Russian "Natashas" in the seedier hotels of Bur Dubai, to Filipina streetwalkers whose nocturnal pacing is watched by off-work Keralan men with hands wedged firmly in trouser pockets, sex workers are everywhere. Even shopping malls, whose air-conditioned passages surely provide Dubai with its true public spaces, accommodate prostitutes who advertise and make assignations by mobile-phone.

Yet the smallest sexual infraction with a "respectable" woman of any class or nationality often meets with swift reprisal, from jail terms to deportation. Indeed if labor practices in Dubai are unlikely to give the ILO much cheer, its laws on sexual harassment are as stringent as any a feminist would wish for. There are news items every other day about men in shops who use the cameras in their mobile-phones to look up women's skirts while supposedly bending to glance at products on bottom shelves. A woman squatting on a public toilet only realized she was being filmed by a camera-phone held above her head when it suddenly rang and she looked up to see an arm being quickly withdrawn.

What is interesting about acts of this kind is that they all have to do with the desire for privacy. Rather than purchasing the services of a prostitute or pornography from the black market, these men are interested in gaining access to some very personal image of privacy that would be adjudged as having little or no sexual content in the market. Though occurring for the most part in shopping malls, such acts seem opposed to the market in sex and other commodities that makes Dubai what it is. The mobile phone, which offers a prosthetic intimacy in any case, has simply had its range extended, allowing it to scan a privacy that can never be experienced.

Calling at all ports

Dubai is heir to a long history of free ports, from Zanzibar to Hong Kong. Such places have always provided the junctions along which international capital flowed. The city in fact is only the latest of the many ports that have garnered extraordinary riches in the region's past. It is the successor to Aden, not so long ago a vibrant and cosmopolitan centre that connected India to Britain. These city-states are also essential to the global capital of tomorrow. So Dubai is not only crucial in opening up the ex-Soviet republics of central Asia to business, it is also singularly important to countries already integrated into the global market.

This was brought home to me when I found myself on an Air Tajikistan flight between Delhi and Dushanbe a couple of years ago. The aircraft had originated in Sharjah and was bound for Moscow, so Tajikistan itself was only a pit-stop for its national carrier. What made the connection between these disparate cities possible? Goods from around the world were being re-exported from the UAE to India, central Asia and Russia. Buyers and sellers were moving between countries. And middle-class Indian students shut out from western universities by cost, and from Indian ones by quotas and competition, were traveling in the cheapest way possible from places like the Smolensk Medical Institute to the provincial towns from whence they came.

The importance that a small place like Dubai has for its much larger neighbors is nowhere more evident than in its relations with India. The Persian Gulf provides a huge country like India, Dubai's largest trading partner, with the bulk of its diasporic capital in the form of labor remittances. It also keeps India's national airline financially viable by ferrying these laborers back and forth. More than this the Gulf provides the world's largest film industry, Bollywood, with one of its major markets. And this is not even to mention the fact that many of the sub-continent's crime syndicates operate out of here.

Among other things Dubai serves as the transit point for pirated DVDs and other goods that are not allowed to move legally between India and Pakistan. In this sense it serves to repair the economic links between Mumbai and Karachi, as well as between the Ganges and the Indus, that were severed with the partition of British India in 1947. Indeed given the numbers of Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis who live here, Dubai has even managed to reproduce the Raj by bringing its dispersed inhabitants to live together as they do nowhere else in the world.

Media attention has focused on Dubai as a place full of marvels, indeed as a modern version of the marvelous East. But it is better viewed as a junction for traffic of all kinds. In this age of closed and patrolled borders, Dubai represents a highly monitored but remarkably open invitation to the world, though not of course an invitation to everyone. This is a city that plans to attract visitors who will outnumber its own shifting population by more than ten times. It lives by re-exporting not only automobiles and electronic goods, but also Russian dancers, Philippine lounge singers and British DJ's, who are now fixtures in every Asian city worth its name.

Along with its Gulf neighbors, Dubai even recycles the United States. Thus the fashion of building scaled down versions of the White House, which began in Kuwait after the first Gulf war and was exported throughout the region, as well as to places like Karachi. Here entire neighborhoods are filled with White House knock-offs, their pediments inscribed with gilded phrases from the Qur'an. But Dubai re-exports itself as much as it does the rest of the world, and may now be found in special economic zones all over the world. Yet the most important thing it recycles is a new kind of global society beyond the reach of nationality.

The future of an illusion

There are those who say the excessive publicity Dubai now receives, as well as its transformation into a destination for mass tourism, signal the end of its moment in the sun of global innovation. The energy and undoubted vision of its rulers in transforming this small port in the long-distance dhow trade crossing the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean must be acknowledged. From a town catering to pirates and pearl divers, Dubai has become one of the world's richest cities. But it is true that scale and vulgarity appear to be the only things that characterize the emirate's latest developments.

There is nothing innovative about the environmentally destructive and financially risky obsession with tourism, conventions and sports tournaments, all of which would dry up at the first sign of trouble in this volatile region. Even without a war or terrorist incident, however, Dubai cannot remain fashionable for long, since unlike a Paris or a London it has nothing to offer visitors sheer novelty apart, and this too is now entering a blowsy phase. Not all the luxury in the world will prevent fashions from changing and taking the celebrities this city woos elsewhere, followed in short order by the package tourists.

More dangerous is the possibility that Dubai's success today may be putting its future in peril. Quite apart from the threat posed by the spiraling costs of housing and commodities that will eventually reach the all-important labor sector, Dubai's latest fixation, property speculation fuelled by a construction boom, threatens to wipe out every attempt to create other forms of value. For instance eminently worthwhile efforts to make the city a hub for international media, medicine or e-commerce seem not to have borne fruit, with much-hyped projects like Dubai's Media City becoming zones for yet more property speculation.

Similarly, prestigious institutions like Harvard's medical school appear to operate here only as businesses, transferring services for cash rather than knowledge for development. Like upmarket European and American shops in the city's malls that send only their second-rate goods to Dubai, these prestigious institutions seem to be interested only in flogging their least successful products here. But how can it be otherwise given the abysmal quality of so much higher education in Dubai, where a number of plush universities function with ranks of indifferent faculty and students?

Yet it is precisely in sectors like higher education, now a huge growth industry as the establishment of profit-based British and American universities in Dubai demonstrates, that the emirate can take a lead. Dubai might easily become a hub for medicine, technology or design serving not only the entire Middle East, but also South Asia and much of Africa. The fact that it has not yet become a center for such enterprises, not even for publishing or music in the Arabic language, is surely a sign of the real failure behind Dubai's apparent success. For like many of the now-vanished cities of hurried riches before it, Dubai is still stuck in the first phase of an economic miracle and has been unable to entrench its gains at the next one.

Property speculation is the biggest business in Dubai today, and not only has the whole city been transformed into a construction site, but artificial islands in fanciful shapes are also being dredged out of the sea to provide more sites for speculation. Such speculation, of course, is not limited to the UAE, with companies like Emaar now taking on gigantic building projects in Turkey and Lebanon (where it rebuilds Beirut after each war) as well as in Pakistan and India. This is already a big jump from old-fashioned investments in prestige properties abroad, which still continue to buy Dubai financial security as much as political influence in London or New York.

Despite all the talk of economic diversification, the city does not produce value but remains a site for the adding of value. And for all its boasts about an economy that is not based on oil, Dubai depends precisely on cheap oil to keep its economy growing. It is still only a junction after all, and so at the mercy of financial speculators, such that the mere rumor of Saudi Arabia opening up its stock exchange is enough to wipe hundreds of millions of dollars off Dubai's market. While it is an extraordinary city by any measure, Dubai is caught in a time warp with nothing to offer but "bigger, better and more of the same". For innovation in the region we need look no further than Qatar, which changed the world with a single product - Al-Jazeera. This is the kind of productivity that should represent the next phase of Dubai's future.

In the everyday lives of its residents Dubai's novelty displays itself as tradition, and it is this taming of the new in habitual acts that gives the city its charm. One would think that such quotidian practices have been going on for centuries, as indeed they have in various forms, even if elsewhere and among other people. One of the most charming moments of Dubai's traditional life comes when dusk falls across the creek. As neon signs and naked bulbs flicker on in the twilight, the drone of motors heralds the return of Keralan clerks and Punjabi shop assistants, seated in rows on the wooden boats ferrying them home. Not far from where they disembark, the cathedral mosque receives Yemeni and Pakistani worshippers, streaming into its ablution hall while the call to prayer sounds out. And just behind the mosque is a Hindu temple, into which proceed Sindhi and Gujarati women clad in saris, some bearing coconuts and others with handkerchiefs fastidiously tucked in at their waists. Devotees of both faiths mingle briefly before disappearing each into their house of worship.

These humdrum practices are familiar to me from my childhood on the east African coast. If I recognize them here it is not only because Dubai and Zanzibar partake of the same history but also because such traditions are themselves mobile and not firmly attached to places - having escaped the clutches of national culture thus far. The fact that communities can migrate with their traditions and reconstitute them in different places and among different peoples makes these histories as modern and as flexible as the latest technological habit. For such traditions can coexist with others and include as many strangers as they exclude. It is the possibility of reconstituting everyday practices in this way that keeps them alive, allowing quotidian acts to naturalize the most novel of phenomena. I suspect it is this history of tradition outside the nation-state, rather than any system of governance, that makes Dubai the stable and peaceable society it is, despite the extraordinary transformations it has undergone.

Unlike the conservative role it plays in nation-states, tradition in the UAE functions not to forge a non-existent nationality, but to accommodate and naturalize change. In this sense it is in fact the most modern thing about a place like Dubai. This is a modernity that the official culture of the emirate tries desperately to colonies. My favorite example of such a colonized tradition is camel-racing, surely one of the great symbols of the UAE's Arab past. After receiving a great deal of criticism for the use of kidnapped or indentured child jockeys in this most traditional of sports, Dubai banned the practice only to replace the Indian or Pakistani boys with remote-controlled robots. And so a supposedly archaic custom was transformed into the most high-tech race in the world, one in which the animal element was combined with robotics to produce a cyborg. The use of remote-controlled robots in camel-racing also transforms this sport into a monstrous video game, becoming therefore the perfect example of Dubai's prosthetic modernity.

Never mind why U.S. oil giant Halliburton is moving to Dubai. That’s a whole separate discussion. From what I’m seeing on my four-day visit, this city is going to need more than a single U.S. oil giant to help it fill up all the new construction.

Although it’s the largest city in the United Arab Emirates, Dubai would probably need to attract at least ten major corporations with 300,000 employees to occupy all the buildings going up.

I came to Dubai with an open mind, to find out first hand what all the excitement is about. In a moment, I’ll tell you what I think about investing here. And I’ll tell you what I learned in Dubai’s gold market.

Dubai Is Great for Business and Travel, And Its Economic Numbers Reflect That

This city of 1.4 million people is a heaven for businesses! There’s no corporate tax (except for oil producing companies and branches of foreign banks) … no personal income tax … no capital gains taxes … and no withholding taxes.

Plus, there are no foreign exchange controls, quotas or trade barriers. The UAE’s currency, the dirham, is freely tradeable and linked to the U.S. dollar.

So all the right structural forces are in place to make this a booming city. And the numbers coming out of Dubai are certainly enticing:

You could say that Dubai has "arrived." Its port is now home to 120 shipping lines and 105 airlines, connecting 136 nations to the region. The Dubai International Airport is the second-fastest growing airport in the world, based on international passenger movement and cargo traffic.

No wonder Emirates Airlines is one of the most successful and profitable airlines in the world. It recently placed the largest order in aviation history for a total of $19 billion of new airplanes from Airbus and Boeing.

Dubai is the world’s fastest-growing tourist destination, with nearly six million visitors in 2006, and 15 million expected by 2010. The richest ones stay at the only seven-star hotel in the world, the famous Burj Al Arab, where one night costs more than $1,500.

The city has 14 million square feet of existing commercial space, and 98% of it is occupied. But another twenty-four million square feet of commercial office space is in the works!

The current pace of commercial office construction in Dubai makes it the largest and busiest new construction market in the world, even bigger than Shanghai, China! Dubai has more construction cranes per square mile than any other city in the world, new or old.

Just three of the enormous projects …

The Burj Dubai Tower: This, the most ambitious skyscraper in history, will reach as high as 800 meters (2,624 feet) when complete. That’s a whopping 300 meters higher than 101 Taipei, the tallest building in the world right now!

Dubailand: Set to become the most ambitious tourist destination ever created, Dubailand will be more than twice the size of the Walt Disney World Resort in Florida. This mega-project theme park will cover three billion square feet!

The Dubai Mall: When completed, this will be the largest mall in the world, with more than 1,000 stores spread over two million square feet of retail shopping space.

There’s also something like $100 billion in residential developments going up, including hundreds of man-made islands in the shape of palm trees and one project called "The World," which is an entire seascape of man-made islands arranged to look like a map of the world.

It all sounds great …

But Here’s the Big Problem I See in Dubai

Dubai’s boom is being driven by oil money, and an international gang of the rich and famous who are seeking a Middle Eastern paradise on the Persian Gulf.

None of this is being done by or for the common Arab, or the scores of construction workers and service employees that mostly come from Asia (the Philippines, in particular) looking for work.

In short, there’s a big divide between what’s happening in Dubai and the needs and desires of the resident masses.

What I’m seeing in Dubai differs dramatically from the events taking place in China, India or almost anywhere else in Asia. In those places, billions of people are just emerging from poverty. Here in Dubai, most people, including the working class, are already relatively well off.

That’s a huge distinction, and it’s recognized by almost everyone I spoke to here. I asked three separate taxi cab drivers, a half-dozen shopkeepers, and a few hotel employees what they thought of the situation in Dubai. They all said pretty much the same things to me:

"There’s way too much construction going on."

"The big money here is in for a fall."

"The elite here are out-of-touch with reality. So are the wealthy international business community, and the tourists."

As I said, most of the money building up Dubai is directly or indirectly oil money. It’s as if the ruling party in Dubai (the Maktoum royal family), and other wealthy groups within the UAE, have nothing better to do with their money but spend, spend, spend.

They say they’re aiming to diversify their economy away from oil revenues and into other forms of trade and tourism, but I have to wonder about their decisions. To me, it looks like there’s a lot of ego going into the projects here. I see wasteful spending, and big bets that a huge future is in the offing.

Mind you, I’ve enjoyed my stay here in Dubai. The climate is spectacular, the city breathtakingly clean, the people wonderful.

But there seems to be a big gulf between the rich and the not-so-rich in Dubai, and that worries me. They’re not on the same page. Contrast that with many parts of Asia, where the masses want to get rich, and the leaders are providing the means to do so.

Of course, there’s one thing that both the ultra-wealthy and the masses seem to agree on in Dubai …

Gold: Loads of It Being Bought By Almost Everyone in Dubai

Dubai’s Gold Souk, an open-air market that contains some 500 gold shops, is the largest retail gold market in the world. An estimated 500 metric tonnes of gold, or nearly 18 million ounces, are bought and sold each year.

I got to the market at three in the afternoon, about an hour before the Islamic afternoon prayer session was to end. It was really exciting to watch the shopkeepers pour out of the local mosques and hustle back to their gold shops for the afternoon and evening trading sessions.

As the shops opened, gold buyers started pouring in by the masses. An hour after opening, almost all the shops I visited were packed with buyers.

Gold in Dubai is either 20k or 22k, and can be found in ingots ranging from roughly 1/10th of an ounce all the way up to incredible hand-crafted pieces of Islamic jewelry weighing a pound and costing tens of thousands of dollars.

But here’s the most important point: In the gold souks of Dubai, both the ultra-rich and regular citizens are buying gold. I watched wealthy businessmen, construction workers, and imams all snatching up the yellow metal.

When I spoke with two Muslim women covered head-to-toe in their blue burqas, one of them said, "Gold never goes out of style, whether it’s jewelry or bars. It’s really money."

I couldn’t have said it better, nor could I have met a more gracious lady. It’s rare for a devout Muslim woman to even acknowledge a strange man trying to talk to her, but she even took that picture of me in front of the gold shop when I asked her to.

I will visit Dubai again, perhaps next year. But if there’s one conclusion I arrived at during my visit here, it’s that I wouldn’t make any big bets on the area. There’s no doubt that it’s booming, but the funding is coming from the richest of the rich, and the projects are mainly for the rich. They are not backed by demand from billions of people.

I Wouldn’t Bet on Dubai, But I Would Bet On Gold!

Gold’s recent performance has been terrific — it hit $673 last week, before falling back to $665. Right now, I expect it to enter a new choppy trading range between $645 and $670, lasting perhaps as long as another week.

But don’t let that bother you. In fact, consider buying on the dips! As long as the price of the precious yellow metal holds $610 on a closing basis, then gold’s next leg up is still forming. And I fully expect to see it back above $732 an ounce, its highest level in 27 years.

All the ingredients are in place. Record demand for gold continues. Meanwhile, available supplies are dwindling, as are new discoveries. On top of that, central bankers around the world continue to print money freely, depreciating their paper currencies in the process.

And then there’s the Iran situation. I’m sitting here in my hotel room, looking at the Persian Gulf, the coastline of Iran just 100 miles away. While I feel safe here in Dubai, I believe the Iran nuclear crisis is far from over. In fact, I expect it to soon go full tilt, especially after the recent Iranian detention of 15 British naval troops.

Bottom line: If you don’t own any gold, now looks like a good time to buy some.

Bright Lights, Boom City

"This is a fantasy land," says Rehmani, sitting down to a quiet morning cup of sweet Arabic tea. "You forget what is real."

Dubai: The Arab city of the future
BY MATEIN KHALID Opininion from the Khaleej Times

19 January 2007

Dubai Sports City in the United Arab Emirates is set to showcase the world’s first ever fully-integrated purpose built sports city at the Dubai Property Show at the Novotel London West, Hammersmith on the 20th and 21st January 2007.

The gigantic 50 million square foot City will be approximately twice the size of the City of London (Europe’s largest business district)! This mind-blowing concept will offer homebuyers an entirely new lifestyle model, specifically designed to support an outstanding quality of life.

The mouth-watering scheme will incorporate world class sports facilities, four magnificent stadiums, global brand sports academies, leisure facilities, hotels, cinemas, entertainment outlets, internationally renowned schools, healthcare and a sports themed shopping mall to name a few.

As part of this staggering project, Dubai Sports City will be showcasing one of many magnificent residential elements called Canal Residence West, an elegant collection of five buildings comprising studio, one, two and three bedroom penthouse apartments.

These, the schemes only waterfront homes, will boast unrivalled access to the worlds top sporting events and facilities all incorporated within the scheme. The 18-hole Ernie Els signature golf course, world class academies such as Manchester United Soccer School, the David Lloyd Tennis Academy, the International Cricket Council’s first ever ICC Global Cricket Academy, the worlds first ‘WorldHockey’ Academy, a Butch Harmon School of Golf and a world renowned health club will all be on the door step.

As for those other great passions; food, drink and other day-to-day social therapy – Canal Residence West will feature a vibrant waterside promenade where residents will find an exciting and eclectic mix of stylish restaurants and chic cafes to satisfy even the most demanding devotee of cosmopolitan urban living.

U.Balasubramaniam, CEO of Dubai Sports City comments: “Our vision and masterplan for Dubai Sports City will set new lifestyle standards across the world. Sports and leisure facilities will enable people to live life to the full by exercising every positive human emotion. Based on the scientific principle that a healthy life is a happier life, the scheme will cater for every aspect of well-being: physical, mental and emotional.”

Private resident facilities will include a state-of-the-art health club, beauty salons, elevated swimming pools and sundecks, children’s play areas, communal gardens and barbeque areas, 24 hour security and concierge and dedicated and secure private parking facilities.

Other essential amenities within a stones throw from the front door will include community centres, supermarkets, parks and open spaces.

Every element of human requirement is located either within Canal Residence West or is a short walk away making this a truly sustainable, self-contained development. What’s more, if you’re not in the mood to walk, or drive for that matter, an Arabian style pleasure boat will transport you down the canal to more sports or leisure venues, further accentuating the therapeutic nature of Canal Residence West.

The buildings at Canal Residence West will be designed in Arabic, Mediterranean, Classic European, Venetian and Spanish Andalusia architectural styles. Each apartment will benefit from balconies and terraces bringing natural light and space into the home and making the most of stunning views across Dubai Sports City.

Dubai Sports City has released apartments in three of the five buildings for sale – the Mediterranean, the Classic European and the Venetian buildings with apartments ranging from 488 sq ft to a sizeable 3,227 sq ft. Prices will start from approx. £55,000 for a studio apartment.

Put a Tiger in your oil tank

Not content with being the greatest golfer to ever draw breath Tiger Woods popped into Dubai yesterday to set himself yet another tough challenge.

The World No.1 dropped in to announce plans for ‘The Tiger Woods – Dubai’ – which, in typical marketing speak, will be an “exclusive golf community that will include ‘Al Ruwaya’, a Tiger Woods designed golf course, professionally-staffed golf academy; a 60,000-square-foot clubhouse with the latest amenities and comforts; an 80-suite boutique hotel for VIP guests; 300 luxury villas; 20 mansions and a community retail area.”

All sounds rather impressive doesn’t it? But I cannot help feeling that maybe he has bitten off more than he can chew. Don’t get me wrong, the idea of being able to play on a Tiger Woods’ designed course here in Dubai is an exciting one. When he says: “I am excited about the challenge of transforming a desert terrain into a world-class golf course,” and “I have a vision of creating something that is uniquely mine”, which golfer, be they hacker like me or low-handicapper wouldn’t get a buzz standing on the first tee in Tiger’s vision of a perfect golf course?

And aren’t we privileged that the current Dubai Desert Classic champion has chosen to begin his designing here?

But, Tiger, not averse to a challenge, really has set himself a tough one here. While the 7,700 yards, par 72 ‘Al Ruwaya’ course with its dramatic elevation changes, lush landscaping, stunning water features, sounds impressive there is no getting away from the fact that in Dubai alone the competition for the ‘best course tag’ is stiff. And, with a host of new developments, such as Ernie Els’ ‘The Dunes’ and the earth, fire, water and wind courses due to be located just off the Emirates Road, coming up, it is only going to get stiffer.

But does he really need the hassle? Surely he can settle for just being the best golfer, leaving the locker room chinwag over who’s designed the best course (not the most interesting chat I admit) to the likes of Greg Norman, Vijay Singh and Nick Faldo.

While those boys need course designs in order keep them in their learjets and marriage payoffs Tiger has already made enough cash to live the life of a legend forever. Why put himself through the extra workload?

Well, the answer to that little conundrum is illuminating and may well depress the likes of Jim Furyk, Phil Mickelson.

I know a plethora of people who like nothing more than escaping the daily grind of their jobs by doing something completely different.

Some lawyer chums escape days of pouring over dull documents by playing rugby or going sailing.

That Tiger has decided to get away from the golf course by, err, designing one, highlights the focus of the man and suggests his stay at the top could be an extremely long one. If I was being harsh I would say it shows him to be rather dull. But if being dull means you are head and shoulders above anyone in your field then good luck to him. What is not in doubt is that Tiger rarely prowls far away from the game he has revolutionised.

Even The Tiger Woods Foundation, the charity he and his father set up, has a strong focus on golf - getting under-privileged kids off the streets and on to a fairway. There is little doubt that Furyk et al would prefer him to escape the rigours of play by taking up something like bungee jumping or shark-diving - anything to take his mind off the game, winning yet more Majors, and showing he is more than a fairway ahead of the rest in world golf.

RACE IS ON TO BE THE MAIN COURSE IN DUBAI

With Tiger Woods announcing that his first course is to be built in Dubai the question as to which player will have designed the Emirate’s best course will be a tough one.
Here 7DAYS gives Tiger an insight into what he has to beat.

The Montgomerie - Unsurprisingly, given its name, designed by Ryder Cup star Colin ‘Monty’ Montgomerie, this course, with the ‘largest green in the world’, has already established itself as one of the best here.

The Wadi by Faldo - Located at Emirates Golf Club, this course has just recently opened for play having been redesigned by British golfing legend Nick Faldo. He has challenged the Dubai golfer by creating many well-protected greens.

Arabian Ranches – Designed by former British Open winner Ian Baker Finch, the concept for this course was to build a true desert style course similar to those found in Palm Springs, California and Scottsdale, Arizona. It has its own unique character.

And there are more on the way over the next few years. Ernie Els’ The Dunes course will be in Dubai Sports City, while Greg Norman and Vijay Singh are adding their visions for Nakheel’s Jumeirah Golf Estates.

Those that bought early in the Dubai property market made a very good investment, and the doom merchants missed the opportunity of a lifetime. But that does not mean that later comers will enjoy the same success, or that early winners who are now loading up on property again will be a winner for a second time.

For property moves in cycles and anyone who ignores this fact of life is going to get burned as truly as if they stuck their hand into a fire. Some people say it never rains in the UAE but it did so yesterday.

Readers of this column will recall its bullish comment which lasted until a couple of months ago. Those who took this advice and bought property have generally had a good experience. But nothing lasts forever, and more and more players have entered the Dubai property market creating what can only be described as an investment bubble.

In such circumstances there are two choices for individual investors: sell out before others decide to do so; or take a long term view of the cost of renting as an alternative to owning and stick it out.

Error of optimism

What you should not be doing at or near the top of a real estate cycle is borrowing a lot of money and buying more property, especially if you are doing so by putting down a small deposit thinking that you will always be able to sell out at a profit.

The investors who are going to get really caught out by a reversal of this market - and all history suggests that what goes up just has to come down - are those buying off-plan units on a five per cent or even zero deposit basis from a developer without a good track record.

For in a downturn they will find themselves liable for 100 per cent of a property and at best owning units bought at the highest prices with few potential buyers; and at worse without property at all because the developer has vanished, or has announced an indefinite construction delay.

So any real estate buyer should now be very cautious about how far they stretch their finances, as well as being exceedingly careful with whom they are doing business. Beware of novel ideas from new developers and projects that are self-financing because no bank will touch them.

Bubble, what bubble?

Last week at the 'Leaders in Dubai' the world-respected forecaster Harry S. Dent thought the Dubai property bubble was obvious from even a casual inspection of the skyline.

But such is the enthusiasm of the moment that few people care to acknowledge this simple reflection. They find comfort in the rush of money into this sector, and think that so many investors can not be wrong.

In the real world those that have done well should concentrate on paying down debts and consolidating their holdings into a long term portfolio strategy. And those considering entering the market should recall the recent losses experienced by local stock market investors, also a bullish crowd who argued that this time was different.

NASA has released new images showing artificial islands being constructed in Dubai, a city-state in the United Arab Emirates.

The sand islands, which are the largest human-made islands in the world, are being built at an incredible cost in both monetary -- "The World" alone will cost more than $14 billion -- and environmental terms.

Two of the islands -- Palm Jebel Ali and Palm Jumeirah -- resemble encircled palm trees, while "The World" island will resemble a world map once completed, though this will only be apparent from aerial photos.

Palm Jumeirah when complete will have 17 huge fronds framed by a 12-kilometer protective barrier. When completed, the resort will sport 2,000 villas, 40 luxury hotels, shopping centers, cinemas, and other facilities. When completed, the resort is expected to support a population of approximately 500,000 people.

Dubai's crown prince, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, has given Michael Schumacher a piece of the man-made island paradise The World. located off the coast of the United Arab Emirates, as a parting gift after his last grand prix in Brazil. Schumacher's island, apparently part of "Antarctica" on the artificial globe, is worth about $7 million.

From south to north the artificial island sites in this image are Palm Jebel Ali, Palm Jumeirah, The World, and Palm Deira. Palm Jebel Ali and Palm Jumeirah appear largely complete in this image, looking like giant palm trees enclosed in huge arcs. Palm Deira, intended to be an even bigger palm tree when complete, is in the earliest stages of construction. In between Palm Jumeirah and the site for Palm Deira is the site for The World, which, when complete, will resemble a world map. NASA images courtesy of the NASA/GSFC/MITI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team.

More pictures of Dubai from the sky can be seen here.

Trying to balance growth and identity in Dubai

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates South Asians call it "the best-run Indian city," Arabs celebrate it as a model of Arab accomplishment, and Westerners have embraced it for its endless sunshine and luxury lifestyle.

With more than 150 nationalities and almost as many expressions of culture, Dubai is one of the most diverse cities in the Middle East. But after decades of selling dreams to foreigners, this Gulf emirate has begun debating the limits of multiculturalism.

Tensions burst into the open in early October when an English-language newspaper published an article decrying the growing disrespect for Muslim customs here during the holy month of Ramadan, setting off a rare public debate about Dubai's cultural identity.

"Too much flesh on show is wrong in a Muslim country at any time - but offense is being felt especially during Ramadan," said the front-page editorial in 7Days, a free daily tabloid.

The article included photographs of women walking in sleeveless tops and shorts at a shopping mall under the headline "Show Some Respect." 7Days, which is run and edited largely by Westerners, advised its readers to "please remember that this is a Muslim country and many of us are guests here."

Within hours, the newspaper was flooded with e-mails and phone calls, many praising the paper for acknowledging the sensitivities of Muslims but many others lambasting it for seeming to toe an official line.

"We fear that the expatriate is going to impose his culture on us," said Maya Rashid Ghadeer, a columnist with the daily Al Bayan in Dubai, who writes about the local community. "Most locals are afraid that they are losing their basic identity forever."

For decades the emirate, part of the federation of seven principalities that make up the United Arab Emirates, sought to broaden its economy by welcoming foreigners and their investment dollars, turning itself into a shipping hub, a regional business hub and, more recently, a tourist hub with luxury hotels and resorts.

The city's openness has helped produce dramatic economic growth and development, with wide swaths under construction and more projects in the works. The boom has brought big-city problems like inflation, rising crime, higher divorce rates and traffic.

But beyond that, it has taken a toll on local culture as many young Emaratis have begun looking abroad, abandoning many traditions and even marrying foreigners. With only about 200,000 local citizens, the demographics are daunting, said Abdulkhaliq Abdallah, a professor of political science at United Arab Emirates University.

"Usually minorities assimilate into the majority," Abdallah said. "But we don't want to assimilate into the majority. We want to preserve the localness, the Emaratiness of this city."

At the same time, Dubai is famous for offering a kind of Disneyland fantasy to its tourists. In December, luxury resort hotels have large Christmas trees, and it can be hard to orient oneself. Many outsiders say that is what makes Dubai stand out in the region, and that the reaction to the article on Muslim modesty involved some pushing back.

"Hello, this is 2006, not 1666," wrote one critical reader, who demanded to know what was wrong with the clothing styles. "Does Dubai want to move forward in time where women are no longer regarded as second-class citizens?"

Dubai has implemented strict rules about public behavior - a man and woman kissing in public can be arrested; it is an offense to dress inappropriately during Ramadan; and altercations with locals can land expatriates in detention.

But with millions of tourists passing through here, few of the laws are actually implemented. Ramadan, which ends this weekend, is a month when Muslims fast during daylight as part of what is supposed to be an intense focus on spirituality, then eat at night. This Ramadan, however, stores stayed open throughout the day, rather than closing during the afternoon, and many restaurants continued to serve during fasting hours. Locals and expatriate Muslims have continued to complain of a lack of Ramadan spirit compared with previous years.

"This is still a salad platter with a tomato and cucumber that don't mix," Abdallah said, stressing that Dubai could never be a melting pot because foreigners are ineligible for citizenship. "It is a massive experiment in social tolerance, and it should be promoted as such. But being tolerant should not come at the expense of the local and national identity."

At least part of the tensions stem from the deep cultural divide here. For the most part, locals tend to live apart from expatriates and rarely interact socially with them.

As in many Gulf states, Dubai's ethnic groups also exist in clearly defined socioeconomic stratifications - locals are typically owners, Westerners earn the top salaries, and south Asians generally do the menial labor.

"Here you don't taste the cultural food and you don't have a chance to wear the clothes, because there is no mandate to do so," said Rima Sabban, a sociologist at Emirates University. "There is nothing for you to do; there is no one culture for you to learn. The model that nationals have provided is that it's OK to stay close to your community."

Seizing on that division, the Sheikh Muhammed Center for Cultural Understanding, financed by Dubai's ruler, Sheik Muhammed Al Maktoum, has invited expatriates to locals' homes for dinner and organized tours and meals throughout the city. Inside a local shopping mall this month, Khulood al Atiyat and several other college students have manned a booth inviting shoppers to meet and speak with an Emarati.

"This is a place where they can come and talk to us and ask questions," Atiyat said.

FEAR AND MONEY IN DUBAI

New Left Review 41, September-October 2006

On the rim of the war zone, a new Mecca of conspicuous consumption and economic crime, under the iron rule of Sheikh al-Maktoum. Skyscrapers half a mile high, artificial archipelagoes, fantasy theme parks—and the indentured Asian labour force that sustains them.

‘As your jet starts its descent, you are glued to your window. The scene below is astonishing: a 24-square-mile archipelago of coral-coloured islands in the shape of an almost-finished puzzle of the world. In the shallow green waters between continents, the sunken shapes of the Pyramids of Giza and the Roman Colosseum are clearly visible. In the distance, three other large island groups are configured as palms within crescents and planted with high-rise resorts, amusement parks and a thousand mansions built on stilts over the water. The ‘Palms’ are connected by causeways to a Miami-like beachfront crammed with mega-hotels, apartment skyscrapers and yachting marinas.

‘As the plane slowly banks toward the desert mainland, you gasp at the even more improbable vision ahead. Out of a chrome forest of skyscrapers soars a new Tower of Babel. It is an impossible half-mile high: taller than the Empire State Building stacked on top of itself. You are still rubbing your eyes with wonderment as the plane lands and you are welcomed into an airport shopping emporium where seductive goods entice: Gucci bags, Cartier watches and one-kilogram bars of solid gold. The hotel driver is waiting for you in a Rolls Royce Silver Seraph. Friends had recommended the Armani Inn in the 170-storey tower, or the 7-star hotel with an atrium so huge that the Statue of Liberty would fit inside it, and service so exclusive that the rooms come with personal butlers; but instead you have opted to fulfill a childhood fantasy. You always have wanted to play Captain Nemo in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

‘Your jellyfish-shaped hotel, the Hydropolis, is, in fact, exactly 66 feet below the surface of the sea. Each of its 220 luxury suites has clear plexiglass walls that provide spectacular views of passing mermaids and of the famed ‘underwater fireworks’: a hallucinatory exhibition of ‘water bubbles, swirled sand and carefully deployed lighting’. Any initial anxiety about the safety of your sea-bottom resort is dispelled by the smiling concierge. The structure has a multi-level fail-safe security system which includes protection against terrorist submarines as well as missiles and aircraft.

‘Although you have an important business meeting at Internet City with clients from Hyderabad and Taipei, you have arrived a day early to treat yourself to one of the famed adventures at the ‘Restless Planet’ themepark. After a soothing night’s sleep under the sea, you board a monorail for this Jurassic jungle. Your first encounter is with some peacefully grazing brontosaurs. Next you are attacked by a flock of velociraptors, the animatronic beasts—designed by experts from the British Natural History Museum—so flawlessly lifelike that you shriek in fear and delight. With your adrenaline pumped up by this close call, you round off the afternoon with some snowboarding on the local indoor snow mountain (outdoors, the temperature is 105°). Nearby is the world’s largest mall—the altar of the city’s famed Shopping Festival, which attracts millions of frenetic consumers each January—but you postpone the temptation. Instead, you indulge in some expensive Thai fusion cuisine. The gorgeous Russian blonde at the restaurant bar stares at you with vampirish hunger, and you wonder whether the local sin is as extravagant as the shopping . . . ’

Fantasy levitated

Welcome to a strange paradise. But where are you? Is this a new Margaret Atwood novel, Philip K. Dick’s unpublished sequel to Blade Runner or Donald Trump on acid? No. It is the Persian Gulf city-state of Dubai in 2010. After Shanghai (current population 15 million), Dubai (current population 1.5 million) is the planet’s biggest building site: an emerging dreamworld of conspicuous consumption and what the locals boast as ‘supreme lifestyles’. Despite its blast-furnace climate (on typical 120° summer days, the swankier hotels refrigerate their swimming pools) and edge-of-the-war-zone location, Dubai confidently predicts that its enchanted forest of 600 skyscrapers and malls will attract 15 million overseas visitors a year by 2010, three times as many as New York City. Emirates Airlines has placed a staggering $37-billion order for new Boeings and Airbuses to fly these tourists in and out of Dubai’s new global air hub, the vast Jebel Ali airport. Indeed, thanks to a dying planet’s terminal addiction to Arabian oil, this former fishing village and smugglers’ cove proposes to become one of the world capitals of the 21st century. Favouring diamonds over rhinestones, Dubai has already surpassed that other desert arcade of capitalist desire, Las Vegas, both in sheer scale of spectacle and the profligate consumption of water and power.

Dozens of outlandish mega-projects—including the artificial ‘island world’ (where Rod Stewart has reportedly spent $33 million to buy ‘Britain’), the earth’s tallest building (Burj Dubai, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill), the underwater luxury hotel, the carnivorous dinosaurs, the domed ski resort and the hyper-mall—are already under construction or about to leave the drawing board. The 7-star hotel, the spinnaker-shaped Burj Al-Arab—looking much like the set of a James Bond film—is already world-famous for its $5,000 per-night rooms with 100-mile views and an exclusive clientele of Arab royalty, English rock stars and Russian billionaires. And the dinosaurs, according to the finance director of the Natural History Museum, ‘will have the full stamp of authority of the Museum in London, and will demonstrate that education and science can be fun’; and profitable, since the ‘only way into the dinosaur park will be through the shopping mall’.

The biggest project, Dubailand, represents a vertiginous new stage in fantasy environments. Literally a ‘themepark of themeparks’, it will be more than twice the size of Disney World and employ 300,000 workers who, in turn, will entertain 15 million visitors per year (each spending a minimum of $100 per day, not including accommodation). Like a surrealist encyclopaedia, its 45 major ‘world class’ projects include replicas of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Taj Mahal and the Pyramids, as well as a snow mountain with ski lifts and polar bears, a centre for ‘extreme sports’, a Nubian village, ‘Eco-Tourism World’, a vast Andalusian spa and wellness complex, golf courses, autodromes, race tracks, ‘Giants’ World’, ‘Fantasia’, the largest zoo in the Middle East, several new 5-star hotels, a modern art gallery and the Mall of Arabia.

Gigantism

Under the enlightened despotism of its Emir and ceo, 58-year-old Sheikh Mohammed al-Maktoum, Dubai has become the new global icon of imagineered urbanism. Multi-billionaire Sheikh Mo—as he is known to Dubai’s expats—has a straightforward if immodest goal: ‘I want to be Number One in the world’. Although he is an ardent collector of thoroughbreds (the world’s largest stable) and super-yachts (the 525-foot-long ‘Project Platinum’, which has its own submarine and flight deck), his consuming passion is over-the-top, monumental architecture. Indeed, he seems to have imprinted Scott and Venturi’s bible of hyper-reality, Learning From Las Vegas, in the same way that pious Muslims memorize the Qur’an. One of his proudest achievements, he often tells visitors, is to have introduced gated communities to Arabia, the land of nomads and tents.

Thanks to his boundless enthusiasm for concrete and steel, the coastal desert has become a huge circuit board upon which the elite of transnational engineering firms and retail developers are invited to plug in high-tech clusters, entertainment zones, artificial islands, glass-domed ‘snow mountains’, Truman Show suburbs, cities within cities—whatever is big enough to be seen from space and bursting with architectural steroids. The result is not a hybrid but an eerie chimera: a promiscuous coupling of all the cyclopean fantasies of Barnum, Eiffel, Disney, Spielberg, Jon Jerde, Steve Wynn and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Although compared variously to Las Vegas, Manhattan, Orlando, Monaco and Singapore, the sheikhdom is more like their collective summation and mythologization: a hallucinatory pastiche of the big, the bad and the ugly.

The same phantasmagoric but generic Lego blocks, of course, can be found in dozens of aspiring cities these days (including Dubai’s envious neighbours, the wealthy oil oases of Doha and Bahrain), but al-Maktoum has a distinctive and inviolable criterion: everything must be ‘world class’, by which he means Number One in the Guinness Book of Records. Thus Dubai is building the world’s largest theme park, the biggest mall (and within it, the largest aquarium), the tallest building, the largest international airport, the biggest artificial island, the first sunken hotel and so on (see below). Although such architectural megalomania is eerily reminiscent of Albert Speer and his patron’s vision of imperial Berlin, it is not irrational. Having ‘learned from Las Vegas’, al-Maktoum understands that if Dubai wants to become the luxury-consumer paradise of the Middle East and South Asia (its officially defined ‘home market’ of 1.6 billion), it must ceaselessly strive for visual and environmental excess. If, as Rowan Moore has suggested, immense, psychotic assemblages of fantasy kitsch inspire vertigo, then al-Maktoum wants us to swoon.

From a booster’s viewpoint, the city’s monstrous caricature of futurism is simply shrewd branding for the world market. As one developer told the Financial Times, ‘If there was no Burj Dubai, no Palm, no World, would anyone be speaking of Dubai today? You shouldn’t look at projects as crazy stand-alones. It’s part of building the brand’. And its owners love it when architects and urbanists, like George Katodrytis, anoint it as the cutting edge:

In its exponential quest to conquer the architectural record-books, moreover, Dubai has only one real rival: China—a country that now has 300,000 millionaires and is predicted to become the world’s largest market for luxury goods (from Gucci to Mercedes) in a few years. Starting from feudalism and peasant Maoism, respectively, both have arrived at the stage of hyper-capitalism through what Trotsky called the ‘dialectic of uneven and combined development’. As Baruch Knei-Paz writes in his admirable précis of Trotsky’s thought:

In the cases of Dubai and China, all the arduous intermediate stages of commercial evolution have been telescoped or short-circuited to embrace the ‘perfected’ synthesis of shopping, entertainment and architectural spectacle, on the most pharaonic scale.

As a sweepstake in national pride—Arabs versus Chinese—this frantic quest for hyperbole is not of course, unprecedented; recall the famed competition between Britain and imperial Germany to build dreadnoughts in the early 1900s. But is it an economically sustainable strategy of development? The textbook answer is probably not. Architectural gigantism has always been a perverse symptom of economies in speculative overdrive, and each modern boom has left behind overweening skyscrapers, the Empire State Building or the former World Trade Center, as its tombstones. Cynics rightly point out that the hypertrophic real-estate markets in Dubai and urban China are the sinks for global excess profits—of oil and manufacturing exports, respectively—currently being pyramided by rich countries’ inability to reduce oil consumption and, in the case of the United States, to balance current accounts. If past business cycles are any guide, the end could be nigh and very messy. Yet, like the king of the enigmatic floating island of Laputa in Gulliver’s Travels, al-Maktoum believes that he has discovered the secret of eternal levitation.

The lodestone of Dubai, of course, is ‘peak oil’ and each time you spend $50 to fill your tank, you are helping to irrigate al-Maktoum’s oasis. Fuel prices are currently inflated by industrial China’s soaring demand as well as growing fears of war and terrorism in the global oil patch. According to the Wall Street Journal, ‘consumers will [have paid] $1.2 trillion more in 2004 and 2005 together for oil products than they did in 2003’ As in the 1970s, a huge and disruptive transfer of wealth is taking place between oil-consuming and oil-producing nations. Already visible on the horizon, moreover, is Hubbert’s Peak, the tipping point when new petroleum reserves will no longer offset global demand, and thereafter oil prices will become truly stratospheric. In some utopian economic model, perhaps, this windfall would become an investment fund for shifting the global economy to renewable energy while reducing greenhouse gas output and raising the environmental efficiency of urban systems. In the real world of capitalism, however, it has become a subsidy for the apocalyptic luxuries that Dubai is coming to epitomize.

Miami of the Persian Gulf

According to his hagiographers, Dubai has arrived at its blessed state thanks largely to the entrepreneurial vision that al-Maktoum inherited from his father, Sheikh Rashid, who ‘committed himself and his resources to turning his emirate into a modern world-class entrepôt where free enterprise flourished’. In fact, Dubai’s irresistible rise, like that of its parent, the United Arab Emirates, owes as much to a sequence of fortuitous geopolitical accidents. Dubai’s chief regional advantage, paradoxically, has been its modest endowment, now rapidly being exhausted, of offshore oil. With a tiny hinterland lacking the geological wealth of Kuwait or Abu Dhabi, Dubai has escaped poverty by a Singaporean strategy of becoming the key commercial, financial and recreational hub of the Gulf. It is a postmodern ‘city of nets’—as Brecht called ‘Mahagonny’—where the super-profits of the international oil trade are intercepted and then reinvested in Arabia’s one truly inexhaustible natural resource: sand. (Indeed, mega-projects in Dubai are typically measured by volumes of sand moved: one billion cubic feet in the case of the ‘island world’.) If the current mega-project blitzkrieg, exemplified by Dubailand, succeeds as planned, Dubai will derive all of its gdp from non-oil activities like tourism and finance by 2010.

The platform for Dubai’s extraordinary ambitions has been its long history as a haven for smugglers, gold dealers and pirates. A late-Victorian treaty gave London control over Dubai’s foreign affairs, keeping the Ottomans and their tax collectors out of the region, but otherwise allowing the al-Maktoum dynasty to exploit their ownership of the only natural deepwater port along 400 miles of what was then known as the ‘Pirates’ Coast’. Pearl fishing and smuggling were the mainstays until oil wealth began to generate increased demand for Dubai’s commercial savvy and port services. Up to 1956, when the first concrete building was constructed, the entire population lived in traditional ‘barastri’ homes made from palm fronds, drawing water from communal wells and tethering their goats in the narrow streets.

After the British withdrawal from East of Suez in 1968, Sheikh Rashid joined with the ruler of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Zayed, to create the United Arab Emirates in 1971, a feudal federation bound together by the common threat of the Marxists in Oman and, later, the Islamists in Iran. Abu Dhabi possessed the greater share of the uae’s oil wealth (almost one-twelfth of the world’s proven hydrocarbon reserves) but Dubai was the more logical port and commercial centre. When the city’s original deep-water ‘creek’ proved too small to handle burgeoning trade, the uae’s leadership used some of their earnings from the first ‘oil shock’ to help Dubai finance construction of the world’s largest man-made port, completed in 1976.

Following Khomeini’s revolution in 1979, it also became the Persian Gulf’s Miami, providing refuge to a large community of Iranian exiles, many of whom specialized in smuggling gold, untaxed cigarettes and liquor to their puritanical homeland, and to India. More recently, Dubai under the tolerant gaze of Tehran has attracted large numbers of wealthy Iranians who use the city—more like Hong Kong than Miami —as a base for trade and bi-national life-styles. They are estimated to control as much as 30 per cent of Dubai’s current real-estate development. Building on such clandestine connections, Dubai in the 1980s and early 1990s became the Gulf’s principal dirty-money laundry as well as a bolthole for some of the region’s most notorious gangsters and terrorists. As the Wall Street Journal recently described the city’s underside:

In early 2006 the us Congress erupted in a furore over Dubai Port World’s imminent takeover of the London-based Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, which operates docks from New York to Miami. Despite support from the Bush Administration, Dubai was forced to withdraw from the deal after a firestorm of accusations on cable news programmes and radio talk-shows about the supposed dangers of ceding control of American commercial ports to a Middle Eastern government. Much of the controversy was unquestionably fuelled by anti-Arab bigotry pure and simple (us port operations are already largely under management of foreign-owned firms), but Dubai’s ‘terrorist connection’, an outgrowth of its role as the Switzerland of the Gulf, has been well documented.

Indeed, since 9/11 a huge investigative literature has explored Dubai’s role as ‘the financial hub for Islamic militant groups’, especially al-Qaeda and the Taliban: ‘all roads lead to Dubai when it comes to [terrorist] money’, claims a former high-ranking us Treasury official. Bin Laden reportedly transferred large sums through the government-owned Dubai Islamic Bank, while the Taliban used the city’s unregulated gold markets to transform their opium taxes, paid in gold bullion, into laundered dollars.In his best-selling Ghost Wars, Steve Coll claims that after the catastrophic al-Qaeda bombings of the us embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, a cia scheme to target bin Laden with cruise missiles while he was falcon hunting in southern Afghanistan had to be aborted because he was in the company of unnamed Emirati royalty. Coll adds that the cia ‘also suspected that C-130s flying out of Dubai carried weapons to the Taliban’.

In addition, al-Maktoum for almost a decade provided luxurious sanctuary for Bombay’s Al Capone, the legendary gangster Dawood Ibrahim. His presence in the sheikhdom in the late 1980s was hardly low-key. ‘Dubai’, writes Suketu Mehta, ‘suited Dawood; he re-created Bombay in lavish parties, flying in scores of the city’s top film stars and cricketers as guests, and took a film starlet, Mandakini, as his mistress’. In early 1993, according to the Indian government, Dawood, working with Pakistani intelligence officials, used Dubai as a base for organizing the infamous ‘Black Friday’ bombings in Bombay that killed 257 people. Although India immediately requested Dubai to arrest Dawood, he was allowed to flee to Karachi, where he is still sheltered by the Pakistani government; his criminal organization, ‘D-Company’, meanwhile, has reportedly continued to be active in the sheikhdom.

War zone

Dubai now enjoys high marks from Washington as a partner in the War on Terror and, in particular, as a base for spying on Iran; but it is probable that al-Maktoum, like the other Emirati rulers, still keeps a channel open to radical Islamists. If al-Qaeda so desired, for example, it could presumably turn the Burj Al-Arab and Dubai’s other soaring landmarks into so many towering infernos. Yet so far Dubai is one of the few cities in the region to have entirely avoided car-bombings and attacks on Western tourists: eloquent testament, one might suppose, to the city-state’s continuing role as a money laundry and upscale hideout, like Tangiers in the 1940s or Macao in the 1960s. Dubai’s burgeoning black economy is its insurance policy against the car-bombers and airplane hijackers.

In many complex and surprising ways, Dubai actually earns its living from fear. Its huge port complex at Jebel Ali, for example, has profited immeasurably from the trade generated by the us invasion of Iraq, while Terminal Two at the Dubai airport, always crowded with Halliburton employees, private mercenaries and American soldiers en route to Baghdad or Kabul, has been described as ‘the busiest commercial terminal in the world’ for America’s Middle East wars. Post-9/11 developments have also shifted global investment patterns to Dubai’s benefit. Thus after al-Qaeda’s attacks on America, the Muslim oil states, traumatized by the angry Christians in Washington and lawsuits by wtc survivors, no longer considered the United States the safest harbour for their petrodollars. Panicky Saudis alone are estimated to have repatriated at least one-third of their trillion-dollar overseas portfolio. Although nerves are now calmer, Dubai has benefited enormously from the continuing inclination of the oil sheikhs to invest within, rather than outside, the region. As Edward Chancellor has emphasized, ‘unlike the last oil boom of the late 1970s, relatively little of the current Arab oil surplus has been directly invested in us assets or even deposited in the international banking system. This time much of the oil money has remained at home where a classic speculative mania is now being played out.’

In 2004, the Saudis (500,000 of whom are estimated to visit Dubai at least once a year) were believed to have ploughed at least $7 billion into al-Maktoum’s major properties. Saudis, together with investors from Abu Dhabi, Kuwait, Iran and even emulous Qatar, bankroll the hubris of Dubailand (officially developed by Dubai’s billionaire Galadari brothers) and other colossal fantasy projects. Although economists stress the driving role of equity investment in the current Gulf boom, the region is also awash with cheap bank credit thanks to a 60 per cent increase in the local deposit base and the slipstreaming of the us Federal Reserve’s easy money policies (the currencies of the Gulf emirates are all linked to the dollar).

Much of this money, of course, dances to an old tune. ‘A majority of new Dubai properties’, explains Business Week, ‘are being acquired for speculative purposes, with only small deposits put down. They are being flipped in the contemporary Miami manner.’ But what is too often ‘flipped’, some economists predict, may ultimately flop. Will Dubai someday fall from the sky when this real-estate balloon bursts, or will peak oil keep this desert Laputa floating above the contradictions of the world economy? Al-Maktoum remains a mountain of self-confidence: ‘I would like to tell capitalists that Dubai does not need investors; investors need Dubai. And I tell you that the risk lies not in using your money, but in letting it pile up.’

Dubai’s philosopher-king (one of the huge offshore island projects will actually spell out an epigram of his in Arabic script) is well aware that fear is also the most dynamic component of the oil revenues that turn his sand dunes into malls and skyscrapers. Every time insurgents blow up a pipeline in the Niger Delta, a martyr drives his truck bomb into a Riyadh housing complex, or Washington and Tel Aviv rattle their sabres at Tehran, the price of oil (and thus Dubai’s ultimate income) increases by some increment of anxiety in the all-important futures market. The Gulf economies, in other words, are now capitalized not just on oil production, but also on the fear of its disruption. According to a recent survey of experts by Business Week, ‘the world paid the Persian Gulf oil states an extra $120 billion or so last year because of the premium in prices due to fear of unexpected supply disruptions. Some cynics argue that oil producers welcome the fear of disruption because it boosts their revenues’. ‘Fear’, according to one of the senior energy analysts that the magazine consulted, ‘is a gift to oil producers’.

But it is a gift that the oil rich would rather spend in a tranquil oasis surrounded by very high walls. With its sovereignty ultimately guaranteed by the American nuclear super-carriers usually berthed at Jebel Ali, as well as by whatever secret protocols (negotiated during falcon hunting trips in Afghanistan?) govern the Emiratis’ relationship to Islamic terrorism, Dubai is a paradise of personal security, from the Swiss-style laws governing financial secrecy to the armies of concierges, watchmen and bodyguards who protect its sanctums of luxury. Tourists are customarily ordered away by the security guards if they attempt to sneak a peek at Burj Al-Arab on its private island. Hotel guests, of course, arrive in Rolls Royces.

Milton Friedman’s beach club

Dubai, in other words, is a vast gated community, the ultimate Green Zone. But even more than Singapore or Texas, it is also the apotheosis of the neo-liberal values of contemporary capitalism: a society that might have been designed by the Economics Department of the University of Chicago. Dubai, indeed, has achieved what American reactionaries only dream of—an oasis of free enterprise without income taxes, trade unions or opposition parties (there are no elections). As befits a paradise of consumption, its unofficial national holiday, as well as its global logo, is the celebrated Shopping Festival, a month-long extravaganza sponsored by the city’s 25 malls that begins on 12 January and attracts 4 million upscale shoppers, primarily from the Middle East and South Asia.

Feudal absolutism—the Maktoum dynasty owns the land area of Dubai —meanwhile has been spruced up as the last word in enlightened corporate administration, and the political sphere has been officially collapsed into the managerial. ‘People refer to our crown prince as the chief executive officer of Dubai. It’s because, genuinely, he runs government as a private business for the sake of the private sector, not for the sake of the state’, says Saeed al-Muntafiq, head of the Dubai Development and Investment Authority. Moreover, if the country is a single business, as al-Maktoum maintains, then ‘representative government’ is besides the point: after all, General Electric and Exxon are not democracies and no one—except for raving socialists—expects either to be so.

The state, accordingly, is almost indistinguishable from private enterprise. Dubai’s top managers—all commoners, hired meritocratically—simultaneously hold strategic government portfolios and manage a major Maktoum-controlled real-estate development company. ‘Government’, indeed, is really an equities management team led by three top players who compete with one another to earn the highest returns for al-Maktoum (see Table 2). ‘In such a system’, writes William Wallis, ‘the concept of a conflict of interest is barely recognized’. Because the country has one ultimate landlord, and myriad streams of rent and lease payments all flow to a single beneficiary, Dubai is able to dispense with most of the sales, customs and income taxes essential to governments elsewhere. The minimal tax burden, in turn, leverages the sale or lease of Dubai’s golden sands. Oil-rich Abu Dhabi, meanwhile, subsidizes the residual state functions, including foreign relations and defence, entrusted to the Emirates’ federal administration—itself a condominium of the interests of the ruling sheikhs and their relatives.

In a similar spirit, personal liberty in Dubai derives strictly from the business plan, not from a constitution, much less ‘inalienable rights’. Al-Maktoum and his executives have to arbitrate between lineage-based power and Islamic law, on the one hand, and Western business culture and recreational decadence on the other. Their ingenious solution is a regime of what might be called ‘modular liberties’ based on the rigorous spatial segregation of economic functions and ethnically circumscribed social classes. To understand how this works in practice, it is necessary briefly to survey Dubai’s overall development strategy.

Although tourist development and its excesses generate most of the ‘buzz’ about Dubai, the city-state has extraordinary ambitions to capture as much value-added as possible through a series of specialized free-trade zones and high-tech clusters. ‘One of the ways that this trading town along a creek has reformulated itself into a megalopolis’, writes an abc News commentator, ‘is by throwing in everything and the kitchen sink as incentives for companies to invest in and relocate to Dubai. There are free-trade zones where 100 per cent foreign ownership is allowed, with no individual or corporate taxes or import/export duties whatsoever.’ The original free-trade zone in the port district of Jebel Ali now has several thousand resident trading and industrial firms, and is the major base for American corporations selling to the Saudi and Gulf markets.

Most future growth, however, is expected to be generated within an archipelago of specialized ‘clusters’. The largest of these cities-within-the-city are Internet City, already the Arab world’s principal information technology hub, with local subsidiaries of Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, and others; Media City, home to the Al Arabiya satellite network and various international news organizations; and the Dubai International Financial Centre, whose dfix al-Maktoum hopes will grow into the largest stock exchange between Europe and East Asia as foreign investors rush to tap the Gulf’s vast reservoir of oil earnings. In addition to these mega-enclaves, each with tens of thousands of employees, Dubai also hosts or is planning to build a Humanitarian Aid City, as a base for disaster relief; a free-trade zone dedicated to the sale of used cars; a Dubai Metals and Commodities Centre; a ‘Chess City’ headquartering the International Chess Association and designed as a vast chess board with two ‘King’ towers, each 64 storeys high; and a $6 billion Healthcare Village, in collaboration with the Harvard Medical School, that will offer the wealthy classes of the Gulf region state-of-the-art American medical technology.

Other cities in the region, of course, have free-trade zones and high-tech clusters, but only Dubai has allowed each enclave to operate under regulatory and legal bubble-domes tailored to the specific needs of foreign capital and expat professionals. ‘Carving out lucrative niches with their own special rules’, claims the Financial Times, ‘has been at the heart of Dubai’s development strategy’.Thus press censorship (flagrant in the rest of Dubai) is largely suspended inside Media City, while internet access (regulated for content elsewhere) is absolutely unfettered inside Internet City. The uae has permitted Dubai to set up ‘an entirely separate, Western-based commercial system for its financial district that would do business in dollars, and in English’. Although not without ensuing controversy, Dubai even imported British financial regulators and retired judges to bolster confidence that dfix plays by the same rules as Zurich, London and New York. Meanwhile, to promote the sell-off of Palm Jumeirah mansions and the private islands that make up the ‘island world’, al-Maktoum in May 2002 announced a ‘freehold revolution’, unique in the region, that allows foreigners to buy luxury property outright and not just as a 99-year lease.

In addition to these enclaved regimes of greater media and business freedom, Dubai is also famously tolerant of Western vices, with the exception of recreational drugs. In contrast to Saudi Arabia or even Kuwait City, booze flows freely in the city’s hotels and expat bars, and no one looks askance at halter tops or even string bikinis on the beach. Dubai—any of the hipper guidebooks will advise—is also the ‘Bangkok of the Middle East’, with thousands of Russian, Armenian, Indian and Iranian prostitutes controlled by various transnational gangs and mafias. The Russian girls at the bar are the glamorous façade of a sinister sex trade built on kidnapping, slavery and sadistic violence. Al-Maktoum and his thoroughly modern regime, of course, disavow any collusion with this burgeoning red-light industry, although insiders know that the whores are essential to keeping the 5-star hotels full of European and Arab businessmen. When expats extol Dubai’s unique ‘openness’, it is this freedom to carouse and debauch—not to organize unions or publish critical opinions—that they are usually praising.

An indentured, invisible majority

Dubai, together with its emirate neighbors, has achieved the state of the art in the disenfranchisement of labour. In a country that only abolished slavery in 1963, trade unions, most strikes and all agitators are illegal, and 99 per cent of the private-sector workforce are immediately deportable non-citizens. Indeed, the deep thinkers at the American Enterprise and Cato Institutes must salivate when they contemplate the system of classes and entitlements in Dubai.

At the top of the social pyramid, of course, are the al-Maktoums and their cousins who own every lucrative grain of sand in the sheikhdom. Next, the native 15 per cent of the population (many of them originally Arab-speakers from southern Iran) constitutes a leisure class whose uniform of privilege is the traditional white dishdash. Their obedience to the dynasty is rewarded by income transfers, free education, subsidized homes and government jobs. A step below are the pampered mercenaries: more than 100,000 British expatriates (another 100,000 uk citizens own second homes or condos in Dubai), along with other European, Lebanese, Iranian and Indian managers and professionals, who take full advantage of their air-conditioned affluence and two months of overseas leave every summer. The Brits, led by David Beckham (who owns a beach) and Rod Stewart (who owns an island), are probably the biggest cheerleaders for al-Maktoum’s paradise, and many of them luxuriate in a social world that recalls the lost splendour of gin-and-tonics at Raffles and white mischief in Simla’s bungalows. Dubai is expert at catering to colonial nostalgia.

The city-state is also a miniature Raj in a more important and notorious aspect. The great mass of the population are South Asian contract labourers, legally bound to a single employer and subject to totalitarian social controls. Dubai’s luxury lifestyles are attended by vast numbers of Filipina, Sri Lankan and Indian maids, while the building boom (which employs fully one-quarter of the workforce) is carried on the shoulders of an army of poorly paid Pakistanis and Indians, the largest contingent from Kerala, working twelve-hour shifts, six and a half days a week, in the asphalt-melting desert heat.

Dubai, like its neighbours, flouts ilo labour regulations and refuses to adopt the international Migrant Workers Convention. Human Rights Watch in 2003 accused the Emirates of building prosperity on ‘forced labour’. Indeed, as the Independent recently emphasized, ‘the labour market closely resembles the old indentured labour system brought to Dubai by its former colonial master, the British.’ ‘Like their impoverished forefathers’, the London paper continued, ‘today’s Asian workers are forced to sign themselves into virtual slavery for years when they arrive in the United Arab Emirates. Their rights disappear at the airport where recruitment agents confiscate their passports and visas to control them.’

In addition to being super-exploited, Dubai’s helots—like the proletariat in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis—are also expected to be generally invisible. The local press (the uae ranks a dismal 137th on the global Press Freedom Index) is restrained from reporting on migrant workers, exploitative working conditions, and prostitution. Likewise, ‘Asian labourers are banned from the glitzy shopping malls, new golf courses and smart restaurants.’ Nor are the bleak work camps on the city’s outskirts—where labourers are crowded six, eight, even twelve to a room, often without air-conditioning or functioning toilets—part of the official tourist image of a city of luxury, without poverty or slums.In a recent visit, even the uae Minister of Labour was reported to be shocked by the squalid, almost unbearable conditions in a remote work camp maintained by a large construction contractor. Yet when the labourers attempted to form a union to win back pay and improve living conditions, they were promptly arrested.

Dubai’s police may turn a blind eye to illicit diamond and gold imports, prostitution rings, and shady characters who buy 25 villas at a time in cash, but they are diligent in deporting Pakistani workers who complain about being cheated out of their wages by unscrupulous contractors, or jailing Filipina maids for ‘adultery’ when they report being raped by their employers. To avoid the simmering volcano of Shiite unrest that so worries Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, Dubai and its uae neighbours have favoured a non-Arab workforce drawn from western India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and the Philippines. But as Asian workers have become an increasingly restive majority, the uae has reversed course and adopted a ‘cultural diversity policy’—‘we have been asked not to recruit any more Asians’, explained one contractor—to reinforce control over the workforce by diluting the existing national concentrations with more Arab workers.

Discrimination against Asians, however, has failed to recruit enough Arabs willing to work at the lowly wages ($100 to $150 per month) paid to construction labourers to meet the insatiable demands of the exploding skyline and half-built mega-projects. Indeed the building boom, with its appalling safety record and negligence of workers’ most basic needs, has incubated Dubai’s first labour rebellion. In 2004 alone, Human Rights Watch estimated that as many as 880 construction workers were killed on the job, with most of the fatal accidents unreported by employers or covered up by the government. At the same time, the giant construction companies and their subcontractors have failed to guarantee minimum facilities for sanitation or adequate supplies of potable water at remote desert labour camps. Workers also have been exasperated by longer commutes to worksites, the petty tyranny (often with a racial or religious bias) of their supervisors, the spies and company guards in their camps, the debt-bondage of their labour contracts, and the government’s failure to prosecute fly-by-night contractors who leave Dubai or declare bankruptcy without paying back wages. As one embittered labourer from Kerala told the New York Times, ‘I wish the rich people would realize who is building these towers. I wish they could come and see how sad this life is.’

The first tremor of unrest came in fall 2004 when several thousand Asian workers courageously marched down the eight-lane Sheikh Zayed Highway toward the Ministry of Labour, only to be met by riot police and officials threatening mass deportations. Smaller demonstrations and strikes, protesting unpaid wages or unsafe working conditions, continued through 2005, drawing inspiration from a large uprising of Bangladeshi workers in Kuwait during the spring. In September, an estimated 7,000 workers demonstrated for three hours, the largest protest in Dubai history. Then, on 22 March 2006, bullying security men ignited a riot at the vast Burj Dubai tower site.

Some 2,500 exhausted workers were waiting after the end of their shift for long overdue buses to take them back to their dormitories in the desert, when the guards began to harass them. The enraged labourers, many of them Indian Muslims, overwhelmed and beat the guards, then attacked the construction headquarters: burning company cars, ransacking offices, destroying computers and smashing files. The following morning, the army of labourers defied police to return to the site, where they refused to work until Dubai-based Al Naboodah Laing O’Rourke raised wages and improved working conditions. Thousands of construction workers at a new airport terminal also joined the wildcat strike. Although some minor concessions along with draconian threats forced most of the labourers back to work at the Burj Dubai and the airport, the underlying grievances continue to fester. In July, hundreds of labourers at the Arabian Ranches project on Emirates Road rioted to protest the chronic shortage of water for cooking and bathing at their camp. Other workers have held clandestine union meetings and reportedly threatened to picket hotels and malls.

The unruly voice of labour echoes louder in the deserts of the uae than it might elsewhere. At the end of the day, Dubai is capitalized just as much on cheap labour as it is on expensive oil, and the Maktoums, like their cousins in the other emirates, are exquisitely aware that they reign over a kingdom built on the backs of a South Asian workforce. So much has been invested in Dubai’s image as an imperturbable paradise of capital that even small disturbances can have exaggerated impacts on investors’ confidence. Dubai Inc. is thus currently considering a variety of responses to worker unrest, ranging from expulsions and mass arrests to some limited franchising of collective bargaining. But any tolerance of protest risks future demands not just for unions, but for citizenship, and thereby threatens the absolutist foundations of Maktoum rule. None of the shareholders in Dubai—whether the American Navy, the Saudi billionaires, or the frolicking expats—want to see the emergence of a Solidarnosc in the desert.

Al-Maktoum, who fancies himself the Gulf’s prophet of modernization, likes to impress visitors with clever proverbs and heavy aphorisms. A favourite: ‘Anyone who does not attempt to change the future will stay a captive of the past.’ Yet the future that he is building in Dubai—to the applause of billionaires and transnational corporations everywhere—looks like nothing so much as a nightmare of the past: Speer meets Disney on the shores of Araby.

Dubai cosmopolis

The spirit of capitalism

Love's labor lost

Tempests in a teapot

Calling at all ports

The future of an illusion

Dubai skyscraper climbing 1 story every 3 days

Trying to balance growth and identity in Dubai

FEAR AND MONEY IN DUBAI

New Left Review 41, September-October 2006

Fantasy levitated

Gigantism

Miami of the Persian Gulf

War zone

Milton Friedman’s beach club

An indentured, invisible majority