|
|
The new Dubai, soaring 50 to 100 storeys above the old; spreading to the man-made islands off-shore; and with a new hotel design, placing a top floor on the beach and apartments under the sea. Nearby you can snow-ski in the Arabian desert. |
Dubai - 2006
A city still trying to design an 'earthly paradise'.
DUBAI is a fantasy of the future, splurging billions of dollars in its rush to come true.
In 1960 it was a British protectorate on the edge of the Arabian
Desert; part of a trio of fishing villages and camel stations. When I
first visited it in the early 1990s it was evolving into a small, rich sheikdom, without much oil, but with a gold souf, a dusty palace, and an air-conditioner in every mud-walled home.
Today it is the chrysalis of sanitised modernity and luxury, displayed in hundreds of urgently rising 50-storey-plus towers.
The city’s traffic is controlled by computers. Its citizenry is
regulated by ten thousand unseen human eyes, countless cameras,
human-heat detectors and other devices.
The locals boast that there are no illegal drugs and no violence in the ‘global city’.
They claim there is no organized gambling and no detectable drunkenness in the planet’s first truly international pleasure metropolis.
No crime. No poverty. No rain. Money makes the flowers bloom and the desert lush with lawns and palms.
This is the fantasy world into which billions of dollars are being invested by China, Europe, America, Russia, the Middle East – and now yet more investors from India, Malayasia and Vietnam.
The speed and excess of Dubai’s growth must cause it to implode one day, surely?
Yet, because of the wealth which is frantically being poured into the fantasy, it cannot be allowed to fail. More billions of dollars must always be available to shore up the vision and protect the investment. Work continues apace, without a break 24 hours a day for six days a week. Just a few days delay in building a skyscraper or creating an island at sea could cost its contractors millions of dollars. Dubai has been growing frantically in the past three years, and will be for the next seven, from a miniature Hong Kong into a 21st-century Manhattan. It is planned as a metropolis containing at least three emerging skyscraper cities and several ‘water worlds’ containing palaces, shopping heavens, barrier reefs and under-water hotels. One artifical island off a relatively empty coast has a 17-kilometre shoreline. The next island is scheduled to be much bigger – if they can find enough stone in the Emirates to throw into the Gulf. The coral reefs are being artificially stimulated by electrolysis to grow rapidly into an underwater wonderland.
A new airport, spreading its wings beside a new sea-port, will be able to handle 150 million anticipated tourists a year. More than 16,000 South Africans, mainly offering professional skills, are already working here. So are a million other non-nationals. The silver needle of the Burj tower has reached the first 30 of its 196 (or 224) floors. . At about 800metres, (its final height is kept secret) it aims to be the highest building in the world. That superlative won’t last – but it should remain, for the foreseeable future, the tallest occupied structure on Earth. In close-by Jumeirah, 150 gleaming towers are rising simultaneously around artificial lakes beside the sea.
Within minutes you can visit a world champion golf course, a Formula One race-track, a six-km camel-racing course and ‘the world horse-racing centre’ which– despite the ludicrous rule “No Gambling”(?) - is already creating major traffic jams on race days The unsolved traffic problem is one thing threatening the vision of a ‘perfect’ future.
The fantastic architecture and the size of Dubai’s developments are too big to sound credible. It trumps several times Donald Trump (one of the smaller investors), and it attracts property-owners like David Beckham and Hollywood’s richest stars. It rivals the descriptions of science-fiction writers.
NOTE: The future here envisages a sanitised society tolerating no vices, no votes and no human rights. Try not to think about this obvious and gloomy future, and cast your eye instead on a few of its already existing assets:
- a mile-long string of modern mansions devoted solely to medical science and post-modern practice. You can expect the best health treatment in the world here.
-
Mile-long rows of temples dedicated to Mercedes, Rolls Royce, BMW and the toys of flashy automobile moguls.
-
A separate ‘city’ built for the IT industry alone
-
A glass-enclosed 30-storey suburb for exclusive use of the world’s media
-
A network of skyscrapers capped with five or ten storey ‘golfballs’, denoting the property of the communications infrastructure of Dubai.
Did I mention the future shopping heaven?
By 2009, fifty percent of Dubai’s GDP will come from its ever-growing chain of the largest shopping malls in the world. The Emirates Mall already offers a permanent funfair and circus for the kids to play in – and a grade-one, genuine snow ski-run for daddies who don’t like shopping. While the temperature rises to 50degC outside, you can toboggan in snowdrifts under snow-covered cedars while your partner shops in perfectly regulated clean air. Dubai Mall, covering well over 1,000,000 square metres, is set to be the biggest in the world. Saks 5th Avenue, Harvey Nichols and all other top luxury retail outlets and fashion-setters are moving from Paris, New York and London into what will be the planet’s most luxurious shopping centre, rising at the new cross-roads of the world.
You are urged by giant advertisements and property developers to buy, now, your own five-acre palace in the sea on one of the artificial archipelagos under construction off-shore in the Gulf. And Berlin’s famous Hotel Kempinski, for instance, is offering a 500m private beach to the owners of its “luxury apartments, grand villas, and penthouses” as well as accommodation in its Palladian-domed Emerald Palace on property covering a million square feet of one of the island ‘Palms”. You can scuba dive among reefs modeled on those of the Cayman Islands, or the Great Barrier Reef, or the Maldives.
Or you can develop your own country – a Mexico; a Monaco; a Java jungle or an Italian Riviera on “The World” that is rising from the sea not far away. If that’s too much (nothing is in Dubai), you can opt for a night under the sea in a hotel currently under construction beneath the waves.
And I haven’t yet mentioned the splendorous and futuristic style of its architecture. It is rising in edifices of baroque, arabesque ornamentation – and in 100-storey-high needles as clean and uncluttered as sword blades. The world’s current tallest hotel rises from the beach and floats in the sky like a sail, reminiscent of the little Opera House in Sydney. Beside it is another hotel, shaped like a whale and large enough to swallow a village.
Wherever you look along Dubai’s coast there are skyscrapers rising in strange shapes; hollowed out in the middle, or with glass towers-within-steel-towers; or with islands of trees growing up there in the sky.
Dubai began by aiming big. Now it aims biggest (such as a proposed theme-park bigger than the biggest Disneyland). It is now being challenged in the rich-dream stakes by its neigbouring Emirates. The 45km Qatar-Bahrain Friendship Bridge, for instance, will soon be the world’s longest ‘fixed link’ . . . whatever that claim means.
But Dubai has many other boasts. Where else can you go water ski-ing on flat water for unlimited miles; Sand ski-ing nearby in the Arabian desert;. Snow ski-ing in the middle of town, or whale and dolphin watching off a coast rich in marine life? You can also dive for pearls not far from your hotel in an area that was once the centre of the world’s pearl trade.
Already there is no place in the world like it, and by 2010 it hopes to unfold wonders hardly dreamed of.
But, personally, I wouldn’t dream of staying there. Unless they made an offer I couldn’t refuse – such as chief of the secret police.
|
