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Slowly going crazy in Dubai

By Rahul Jacob

How do you get from The World to the real world, asked a Frenchwoman while peering at an enormous model of Dubai’s most audacious real estate development yet: 300 islands that will rise out of the sea on reclaimed land in the shape of a map of the world and be ready by 2008.

The Frenchwoman and her husband were in the sales office of Nakheel, the developer behind all three projects off the coast of Dubai, an Atlantis in reverse. Apartments and bungalows – variously called Santa Fe Garden and Grand Foyer Greek Garden villas – will be handed over to their owners in November this year when the first of these projects, the Palm, is completed. The projects are engineering marvels but the Anglo-French couple had a more everyday concern: commuting.

This question of how to get from Dubai to the real world stayed with me while I rushed around this vast construction site of a city watching a $50bn-$100bn building boom take shape. The world’s tallest building, Burj Dubai, expected to be more than 700m high and to include apartments and an Armani hotel, will also be ready in 2008. Hydropolis, the world’s first underwater hotel, is on its way and an indoor ski resort with an “authentic” ski mountain became operational late last year. You start to yearn for terra firma, even when you are on land.

The £ 3 billion Dubailand, Dubai’s answer to Disney World, is to cover 2bn sq ft and consist of, according to a government PR pamphlet, “45 mega-projects and 200 sub-projects creating six main zones” and hotels such as the Space Hotel and the Sand Dune Hotel. Concepts and skyscrapers sprout so fast in the city that no one appears to have time to think about names beyond reaching for the nearest cliché.

As it was intended to, this ceaseless construction and self-aggrandisement has caught the imagination of the world’s media – and international property buyers. Many have lined up to buy properties such as The Palm before they were built, creating a flywheel of feverish property promotion and speculation that is a developer’s dream. A week before I travelled there in late February, a report in the Guardian newspaper breathlessly asked, “Given the scale of its ambition, could [Dubai] become the most important place on earth?”

If only it were that easy, you think, but who could have predicted a few years ago that Dubai would be on its way to becoming the financial centre for the Middle East, boast one of the world’s largest airlines and be the playground of its neighbours and northern Europeans? (Britons made up the largest share of the more than 5m tourists who travelled to Dubai last year, proving that no one, to mangle H.L. Mencken, ever went bankrupt by underestimating the taste of the British public in their search for sunshine.)

And all this has been done mostly without being blessed with a large share of people or land – and with a good deal less of its own money than many observers suppose. Dubai’s far-sighted rulers have diversified much more energetically than their neighbours. “Dubai says and Dubai does. Dubai is about committing and delivering,” says James Wilson, chief executive of Nakheel.

Eager that I gained an insight into Dubai’s roots and not just its futuristic fantasies, my hosts, a friend’s parents who had lived in the city for a couple of decades, dropped me at the old gold souk one morning. Sitting on a bench in between rows and rows of gold jewellery stores, I watched the market with fascination. Banners with pictures of delighted winners of a gold raffle hung from the steel arcade. “Buy the city of the gold coin – your key to 115 kilos of gold.Win one kilo of gold every two days,” read one.

The notice that listed the winners of the weekly prize since January included a Sri Lankan, a Thai, Indians, Emiratis and an Iraqi, all of whom appeared to be living in Dubai. A little later, as I looked at boats laden with sacks destined perhaps for the Indian subcontinent or for Iran as I crossed the creek, I experienced an epiphany of sorts. Dubai’s future, I suspect, is rooted in its past: as an entrepôt. That is a future more modest than all that frenetic press hype might suggest but a perfectly good living can be made as a regional financial and tourism hub for the Middle East takes shape, a Beirut for the 21st century without Beirut’s style and sex appeal – but also without its strife.

“Dubai will not overtake the west in 100 years. It does not have proper laws,” a Pakistani cab driver grumbles to me after recounting the fines – sometimes as high as a fifth of their monthly salaries– that he and his co-workers incurred for arriving late to pick up a passenger or picking up the wrong one. I realised he had a point as I leafed through the newspapers with baffling stories of a 14-year sentence for a foreign national caught selling hashish while letters protested about a two-year sentence for the Emirati rapists of a British stewardess. Last week, a lawyer for one of the men asked the court to reconsider the case and charge the flight attendant with committing adultery.

And, no developed world city would treat its construction labour the way Dubai developers do. Surveying the plight of the sun-baked workers toiling on another monstrosity, I am uncomfortably reminded of the slaves who built the pyramids. Obviously, the workers are not slaves – in fact they pay premiums to unscrupulous agents in India and Pakistan to obtain jobs in Dubai – but they have little by way of workers’ rights. Unions are not allowed and there is no minimum wage. The workers earn less than $200 a month and live in gulag-style camps. A huge riot broke out in late March after workers protested about poor working conditions on the site of the Burj Dubai project and the adjacent housing development.

For professional expatriates, however, Dubai is a seductive place to live. At a dinner party one Thursday night, I found myself among a mixed crowd that included Lebanese, Indians, an Iranian and a Palestinian. A Citibanker, who has lived there for eight years, said he had received a job offer in London a couple of years ago but had decided to stay on. Dubai had much to recommend it, he said – cheap servants, no income tax and good schools. When I remarked at how cosmopolitan the gathering was, the Iranian tobacco executive I was speaking to said this was a rarity; the host had known most of the guests from high school in Dubai. Expat socialising tends to be ghettoised.

I had never been to Dubai before but I felt as if I had. The rush to buy new developments that are hyped as “sold out” in a couple of days perfectly recalled Hong Kong’s property bubble in the early 1990s. Dubai’s edifice complex – the obsession with building the world’s biggest, well, anything really – is not so different from Kuala Lumpur’s own journey down this road in the 1990s or Shanghai’s flashiness more recently. (Try and guess where the world’s tallest building is. For anyone who cares – Taipei.)

Watching this spectacle unfold in the Middle East is interesting as a historical phenomenon but, as a tourist destination, Dubai is not for everybody. The clatter of construction is hard to escape wherever you are. My shoes were always covered with dust as I picked my way through the detours and the vast areas of pavement ringed off by plastic cones. After my second day there, I stopped cleaning them. Dubai’s top hotels reputedly have excellent service and excellent food too but they are expensive. The rack rate for an Arabian deluxe single room at the Mina A’ Salam is Dh3,300 (£515).

There is also not that much to do if you happen to like theatre or art. The Gulf News the Friday I was there in early March had a section entitled “The Week Ahead” – attractions included an exhibition of Islamic Art, an RSC production of As You Like it and contemporary art from Iraq. But when I looked at the small print, I found the events were in Canberra, London and Minneapolis respectively. Go figure.

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