Why Dubai always confounds the oracles of doom

Peter Hellyer

• Last Updated: April 01. 2009 8:30AM UAE / April 1. 2009 4:30AM GMT

Throughout the years that I have been working in the Emirates I have always lived in Abu Dhabi; I have come to call it home. My work has taken me all over the UAE – to deserts, islands and mountains, as well as to other cities. I’ve seen it all, changing, developing and growing, each emirate at its own particular pace.

However, I’ve never quite fallen in love with Dubai as many of my friends have done. Indeed, my daughter is happily settled there.

To some extent that’s because I’ve never become familiar with it in the way that I have done with Abu Dhabi. I’ve rushed in and out on short visits, or driven through it, or now, thanks to the Emirates Road and the outer bypass, I drive past to other destinations. I will go to great lengths to avoid a trip to its malls. And like many Abu Dhabi residents I’ve been mildly miffed over the years by the feeling that somehow Dubai (and Sharjah) residents looked upon us as country cousins – a bit behind the times. I remember a member of the Sharjah ruling family telling me in the mid-1980s that although he was in Dubai almost every day, he hadn’t been to Abu Dhabi for ten years, and didn’t feel motivated to drive down the road. I haven’t seen him here since.

Over the years I have often wondered whether the pace of Dubai’s development was sustainable and whether there would come a time that a slowdown would occur.

I wondered, for example, if the building of the world’s largest man-made port at Jebel Ali made sense, or if the construction of a massive drydock at Port Rashid was commercially viable. I was wrong, on both counts. The late Sheikh Rashid, who had the vision for both, had a far better grasp than I of what was possible. When the world’s top chess players visited more than 20 years ago and the emirate first began to talk about becoming a global sporting, conference and cultural venue, I wondered if it were really possible for Dubai to emerge as a centre for world-class tennis, or golf, or horse-racing. Well, those who had that vision were right, too, and I was wrong, once again. The idea of the city successfully hosting a meeting of the World Bank and IMF would never have occurred to me, and nor for that matter would the concept of a major international humanitarian initiative such as Dubai Cares.

So while I have continued over the years to have my doubts about the pace of development, I have also become aware that there is something about Dubai that means an idea that might seem at first glance inconceivable, impracticable or simply impossible, could actually come to pass.

I won’t pretend to like it all. I wish more of the coastline had been preserved in its natural state. I wish the recent development had been a little bit slower, guided by a demand based more on local need than on a desire to attract foreign property purchasers with no commitment to the country other than a financial one. When markets change, as we can now see, they’re off in the blink of an eye, leaving problems behind them. I wish there had been less hyperbole, since I generally prefer traditional English understatement. The traffic drives me up the wall (although we now have that in Abu Dhabi too). The way in which many European expatriates behave without any consideration for the culture and heritage of the Emirates can drive me into a state of incoherent fury. And yes, I welcome the drive to teach people to behave a little better. Such efforts are long overdue.

But at the same time I do feel a little bit defensive about Dubai, in the current climate where uninformed overseas commentators are suggesting that it will soon decay and collapse – often without even bothering to come and pay a visit, let alone trying to check the accuracy of the “facts” they so blithely scatter throughout their stories.

As one commentator in the UK’s Guardian newspaper put it the other day: “The towers of Dubai will become casualties not of human greed, but of architectural folly… their colossal facades will shed glass. Sand will drift around their mindless legs. Animals will inhabit their basements. Thousands of residential buildings, if occupied at all, will be squatted by a migratory poor… gangs will seize the gated estates and random anarchy will rule the soulless boulevards… but mostly the dunes will reclaim the place.”

Oh, come on! There’s no reason to believe that the Apocalypse is nearly upon us. Dubai has been a trading centre for centuries, with a history that goes back thousands of years. It’s not simply going to disappear. There’s a good reason for it being where it is, and there are good reasons, too, for the way in which it has grown over the past few decades, quite apart from the efforts of its leadership: geography, its proximity to major markets to the north and east, the underpinning it enjoys from being a part of one of the world’s largest producers and exporters of oil and gas – all these have made it possible for Dubai to flourish. Those advantages are not going to go away.

Like the rest of the world it will suffer from the global economic crisis in the short term, or even a little longer, but the doomsayers are overstating their case. The Dubai of tomorrow may be different from the one that appeared to be emerging a year ago, but there will be a tomorrow – and the dunes are not going to “reclaim the place”. Much of it was never dunes anyway – just one more egregious mistake in the wave of sloppy comment that appears to be the current vogue.

Peter Hellyer is a writer and consultant specialising in the UAE’s heritage and environment. He has also written extensively on the country’s social, political and economic development