Glimpses of heaven and hell
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 25: After the Crisis
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Hilary McPhee
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The Eighth Wonder of the World had already been proclaimed well before the grand opening in Dubai of Atlantis, The Palm, in November 2008. The thirteen acres of artificial palm-shaped archipelago jutting out into the shallow waters of the Arabian Gulf featured a forty-two-acre water park of sixty-five thousand fish and the soon-to-be controversial Dolphin Education Centre, the whole thing anchored by the vast pink luxury hotel, its 1,539 rooms full for the occasion with the world's celebrities and tycoons. This was to be an Event like nothing on earth, and the $20 million fireworks display would be clearly seen from outer space.
But the timing and scale of the opening of Atlantis, The Palm could not have been worse. International derision was guaranteed. ‘Dubai's Last Hurrah,' trumpeted the cover of Newsweek. The Guardian cited Ozymandias: ‘The dunes will reclaim the soaring folly of Dubai.' And The Independent kept putting the boot in: ‘The Shangri-la of the Middle East bites the dust...a city built on credit and ecocide, suppression and slavery.'
The news that Dubai, like everywhere else in the over-developed world, was feeling the force of the global recession was endlessly repeated. The real-estate bonanza had indeed slowed; some of Dubai's more spectacular projects were on hold, their indentured labour redeployed or returned to Pakistan and Bangladesh. But the tall tales about the end of the world rapidly assumed the shape of a manga: three thousand luxury cars abandoned at the airport, keys in the ignition, their owners fleeing to avoid jail; once-rich wives deserted, selling their bling and sleeping in the dunes in their SUVs; empty apartment buildings as far as the eyes could see; every second business retrenching staff and dishonouring contracts; not a crane moving on the horizon. And, through the cracks in the edifice, the desert sands had started to creep across the highways.
Emiratis and the professional expatriate community fought back as best they could on blogs and in interviews to Arab media, which was more inclined to listen. Dubai will not be allowed to fail, said the World Bank's Tariq Yusef on Al Jazeera. Dubai, he said, has become a model of accelerated growth for others in the region; its belief in itself as a grand hub of trade routes and ideas is an ancient one which the Arab world celebrates and intends to realise again. A failure of Dubai would be a failure of the whole United Arab Emirates.
Eventually the British government weighed in, distancing itself from the mockers. The British have longstanding links with the region. The seven sheikhdoms which form the United Arab Emirates were a British protectorate from 1820 to 1971. The UAE is one of Britain's top ten export markets, and 1,783 British companies operate in Dubai. The Brits, including the egregious Beckhams, have been the most enthusiastic purchasers – after the Russian mafia, so the stories go – of expensive and hyped real estate off the plans. Investors reaped huge returns in the good times, buying and selling when rents were leaping by up to 40 per cent a year, but the credit crunch caught the over-extended, major developments slowed, vacancies rose and rents began to fall. The place is now a renter's paradise, says Dubai's National, the impressively staffed and resourced Guardian-lookalike English-language newspaper – the world's newest print journal and surely its last.
THE DISCOVERY OF OIL in the mid-'60s transformed the small Bedouin fishing and pearling ports along the strip of land on the southern shore of what is now called the Arabian Gulf. Today the Emirates are essentially seven cities of varying sizes and strategic roles, with unimaginable amounts of money to invest in fast-tracking modernity.
Abu Dhabi, the conservative capital within commuting distance of Dubai that possesses most of the UAE's land and oil wealth, dominates the federation. It aims to be the cultural centre, investing heavily to develop institutions and cultural projects such as the prestigious and extraordinary Saadiyat Island, where Frank Gehry will deliver his biggest Guggenheim yet and for which the Louvre has accepted a billion dollars to share its exhibitions and its name. But it is Dubai, with limited oil and natural gas reserves accounting for less than 6 per cent of its revenues, which has embodied the narrative of globalisation – ahistorical, diverse, unsentimental, its economic goals transcending all others. Here the constraints of culture and nationalisms have melted into air and a ‘world-class' megalopolis has emerged in which Spider-Man would be at home.
By mirroring and exploiting the West's own excesses of consumption and greed, catering to every whim and fantasy of the newly rich, Dubai made itself a perfect target, rapidly becoming one of the world's greatest carbon footprinters. The green golf courses and lush parks and private gardens reaching down to the sea require more water per capita than anywhere else on the planet. But much of the criticism is rather like accusing the Arabs for doing at top speed, with maximum hubris and minimum regulatory impediments, what developers have been doing in the West for decades: knocking down, building up, producing skylines that look the same everywhere, creating cities that further deplete the world's finite resources, which isolate people whose chief value seems to lie in their capacity to consume.
Dubai is crass but it is not alone. Britain's developments on the Costa del Sol are neither pretty nor environmentally sensitive; nor is the Australian Gold Coast, nor the proliferation of gated communities on Egypt's Red Sea Riviera, nor Florida. The new Westfield Mall in London's Shepherd's Bush, ‘the largest urban shopping centre in Europe', which opened this year on the site of the 1908 Franco-British Exhibition halls, is a glass-roofed, climate-controlled cathedral to consumption and luxury, glittering with chandeliers, full of food flown in from around the globe, and featuring the same upmarket labels as the malls of the United Arab Emirates. Without the flack.