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Dubai: An Architectural Masterpiece layered on a Third World Country?
- Thread starter MetroMan
- Start date
Urban Shocker
Doyenne
Yes, something like that, except updated. Real movie stars and celebrities "trapped" in the tower, blogging furiously to the world while flames lick around them, the cast of a live Survivor Burj voting who jumps off the tower next, U2 and Lady Gaga headlining BurjAid from a safe distance while famous movie directors circle above in helicopters capturing it all, etc.
AlvinofDiaspar
Moderator
US:
A remake of Towering Inferno with merchandise tie-ins and obligatory product placements.
AoD
PS: I see adma has already beaten me to it.
A remake of Towering Inferno with merchandise tie-ins and obligatory product placements.
AoD
PS: I see adma has already beaten me to it.
Last edited:
Urban Shocker
Doyenne
Destroying it could be far more lucrative than building it.
AlvinofDiaspar
Moderator
Provided they hire James Cameron for the job.
AoD
AoD
scarberiankhatru
Senior Member
"After the feature presentation, Dubai some merchandise in the lobby..."
Tacoma
Active Member
This is an interesting question: what is point of Dubai? It's one of 7 E's of the UAE ruled by monarch. It's apparently a financial hub, but what is it a hub of? It's not like NY or London or Tokyo financial hubs helping to support citizens of its country. Most (over 80%?) of Dubai's population are expats from other countries brought here to help build the city (I guess this explains why males outnumber females here by about an astonishing 3:1), but for what end?
What happens when construction is complete and most everyone goes home, leaving so many supersized buildings? Is this Vegas on steroids but without the gambling? But Vegas without the gambling is pointless. Places like Rome are tourism destinations because of it's history has created a culture and infrastructure that people want to come and see. Places in the Caribbean are tourist hot spots because of the weather and beaches. But Dubai is different; it seems to have been artificially created in an otherwise not very hospitable place just to become a tourism destination, no?
Obviously, I'm misunderstanding. Can someone please explain?
Urban Shocker
Doyenne
On the contrary, I think your identification of Dubai as a place that rejects traditional Arab heritage tourism for manufactured hyperreality hits the nail on the head.
Here's a paper that deals with the issues you raise:
http://www.staff.uni-mainz.de/steinec/Publikationen/Steiner_Heritage to Hyperreality_2009_WP.pdf
Here's a paper that deals with the issues you raise:
http://www.staff.uni-mainz.de/steinec/Publikationen/Steiner_Heritage to Hyperreality_2009_WP.pdf
deerparker
Active Member
dt_toronto_geek
Superstar
I grew up in a house in Scarborough, elevator rides were infrequent in my youth. When I was a kid in the 70's my uncle took us to the Commerce Court (West) - pre-CN tower - to the observation deck that used to be at the top of the building. On the way up or down (I can't recall now) the elevator cab came to a screeching, sudden halt and we were stranded for a time although I don't recall for how long - perhaps 20-30 minutes. Having recently seen a made-for-TV network disaster movie called something like "Elevator" I was scared to death. No lights went out and they got us out safety and without any drama but I was truly scared to death. When I read a story like this it still sends a shiver down my spine.
Archivist
Senior Member
To be fair to Dubai, I imagine that what they are doing is looking at their future and trying to develop a role for itself, post-oil. The Emirate of Dubai long ago experienced its peak in oil production, and nothing will ever bring that back. While they are part of a federation in which oil remains, for the moment, plentiful, they are in my view attempting to leverage that existing resource to build a life for themselves after it is gone in all the Emirates.
They have opted for tourism and finance as a means of doing so, but this has ended up being mostly about property speculation. In the last little bit, it hasn't gone so well for them. I understand tourism numbers are well down, and at some point in the near future when oil becomes increasingly scarce, or if god forbid there is a war just north of the city in Iran, the numbers will drop farther. As for finance, I imagine it would be more sustainable, if that word can be used for such an activity in such a location, but I don't really know the extent to which the financial services industry in Dubai did much beyond financing property development. Nonetheless, I can say without cynicism that Dubai, like some other gulf states, have looked in the mirror and are trying to fashion a life for themselves in a scenario when oil is not so plentiful, which they surely know is coming.
What they have not done is welcomed strangers - as has been pointed out, the UAE is 15% Emiratis with a mix of others itinerants, seeking to profit in any way they can, at the moment. For those people, there is no route to Emirati citizenship. It seems clear to me that when the going gets tough, as it certainly will (and to some extent has) the majority of people living there will seek opportunities elsewhere. I don't see any other outcome. That won't bode well for the property market, which until recently has been a huge part of the UAE's economy.
But what are the options for this place, which has almost no water and can grow almost none of its own food. Without inexpensive oil to fuel the economy there, what is left? A bit of pearl-diving, and some trading. If I were them, I'm not sure what steps I would take, with my current set of resources, to build a better, enduring life for my people. It frankly doesn't seem possible to me, and if I were to try, it might end up looking something like Dubai does right now.
Apparently, a standing joke among Emiratis is to say "My grandfather rode a camel, my Dad a Toyota, I drove a Mercedes, my son will drive a Toyota and his son will drive a camel". They're not stupid, and they must fear the eventual peaking of the sole resource that currently brings them riches, which is their oil. Tourism, especially without oil, only brings you so far, and you might end up being Atlantic City rather than Macao.
I've always said that I think Dubai will be a fascinating place in 50 years. I wonder if the Burj Khalifa will endure like the pyramids?
They have opted for tourism and finance as a means of doing so, but this has ended up being mostly about property speculation. In the last little bit, it hasn't gone so well for them. I understand tourism numbers are well down, and at some point in the near future when oil becomes increasingly scarce, or if god forbid there is a war just north of the city in Iran, the numbers will drop farther. As for finance, I imagine it would be more sustainable, if that word can be used for such an activity in such a location, but I don't really know the extent to which the financial services industry in Dubai did much beyond financing property development. Nonetheless, I can say without cynicism that Dubai, like some other gulf states, have looked in the mirror and are trying to fashion a life for themselves in a scenario when oil is not so plentiful, which they surely know is coming.
What they have not done is welcomed strangers - as has been pointed out, the UAE is 15% Emiratis with a mix of others itinerants, seeking to profit in any way they can, at the moment. For those people, there is no route to Emirati citizenship. It seems clear to me that when the going gets tough, as it certainly will (and to some extent has) the majority of people living there will seek opportunities elsewhere. I don't see any other outcome. That won't bode well for the property market, which until recently has been a huge part of the UAE's economy.
But what are the options for this place, which has almost no water and can grow almost none of its own food. Without inexpensive oil to fuel the economy there, what is left? A bit of pearl-diving, and some trading. If I were them, I'm not sure what steps I would take, with my current set of resources, to build a better, enduring life for my people. It frankly doesn't seem possible to me, and if I were to try, it might end up looking something like Dubai does right now.
Apparently, a standing joke among Emiratis is to say "My grandfather rode a camel, my Dad a Toyota, I drove a Mercedes, my son will drive a Toyota and his son will drive a camel". They're not stupid, and they must fear the eventual peaking of the sole resource that currently brings them riches, which is their oil. Tourism, especially without oil, only brings you so far, and you might end up being Atlantic City rather than Macao.
I've always said that I think Dubai will be a fascinating place in 50 years. I wonder if the Burj Khalifa will endure like the pyramids?
Ervin
Active Member
I'm sorry for beating on a dead horse, but I was just recently thinking about the incredible irony of this. For ages now the Muslims in the middle east have been crying about how the west is soooo greedy, that Europe and N.A care about nothing other than money. But the moment they got their chance (Dubai), they jumped on it like a bunch of vultures.
simply Dan
Active Member
The Saudi royal family don't exactly conjure up images of austerity...
G
gabe
Guest
Well this comes as no surprise 
World's tallest building still 90 percent unoccupied
"Nine months after Burj Khalifa was inaugurated with a water-and-firework display, about 825 of the tower’s 900 apartments remain unoccupied, said Laura Adams, a residential sales and leasing adviser at Dubai-based Better Homes. The building is within walking distance of The Address, which offers serviced apartments at similar rates."
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-...artment-rents-slashed-to-attract-tenants.html
Uploaded with ImageShack.us
World's tallest building still 90 percent unoccupied"Nine months after Burj Khalifa was inaugurated with a water-and-firework display, about 825 of the tower’s 900 apartments remain unoccupied, said Laura Adams, a residential sales and leasing adviser at Dubai-based Better Homes. The building is within walking distance of The Address, which offers serviced apartments at similar rates."
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-...artment-rents-slashed-to-attract-tenants.html
Uploaded with ImageShack.us
alklay
Senior Member
A great article on the failure of Dubai (fanboys of Dubai and all those who think that all we need are lots of tall buildings, ready up please)
Dubai on Empty
Its skyline erupting from the desert in just two decades, Dubai is a cautionary tale about what money can’t buy: a culture of its own. After gorging on the Viagra of easy credit, the emirate has the world’s tallest building, the world’s most expensive racetrack, and a financial crisis to match. From the Western mercenaries and Asian drones who maintain the gaudy show to 100-odd families who are impervious to any economic reality, A. A. Gill discovers that no one truly belongs in Dubai, where the legacy of oil has made everything worthless.
BY A. A. GILL•
WEB EXCLUSIVE APRIL 2011
Locals stand in front of the royal enclosure at the track.
The only way to make sense of Dubai is to never forget that it isn’t real. It’s a fable, a fairy tale, like The Arabian Nights. More correctly, it’s a cautionary tale. Dubai is the story of the three wishes, where, as every kid knows, with the third wish you demand three more wishes. And as every genie knows, more wishes lead to more greed, more misery, more bad credit, and much, much, much more bad taste. Dubai is Las Vegas without the showgirls, the gambling, or Elvis. Dubai is a financial Disneyland without the fun. It’s a holiday resort with the worst climate in the world. It boils. It’s humid. And the constant wind is full of sand. The first thing you see when you arrive is the airport, with its echoing marble halls. It’s big enough to be the hub of a continent. Dubai suffers from gigantism—a national inferiority complex that has to make everything bigger and biggest. This includes their financial crisis.
Outside, in the sodden heat, you pass hundreds and hundreds of regimented palm trees and you wonder who waters them and what with. The skyline, in the dusty haze, looks like the cover of a dystopian science-fiction novella. Clusters of skyscrapers lurch out at the gray desert accompanied by their moribund cranes, propped up with scaffolding, swagged in plastic sheeting. Dubai thought it was going to grow up to be the Arab Singapore—a commercial, banking, and insurance service port on the Gulf with hospitality and footballers’ time-shares, an oasis of R&R for the less well endowed. But it hasn’t quite worked out. The vertical streets of offices are empty. A derelict skyscraper looks exactly the same as one that’s teeming with commerce. They huddle around the current tallest building in the world—a monument to small-nation penis envy. This pylon erected with the Viagra of credit is now a big, naked exclamation of Dubai’s fiscal embarrassment. It was going to be called Burj Dubai, but as Dubai was unable to make their payments, they were forced to go to their Gulf neighbor, head towel in hand, to get a loan. So now it’s called Burj Khalifa, after Abu Dhabi’s ruler, who coughed up $10 billion to its over-extended neighbor.
Dubai has been built very fast. The plan was money. The architect was money. The designer was money and the builder was money. And if you ever wondered what money would look like if it were left to its own devices, it’s Dubai.
My driver gets lost more than once. He’s lived here all his life. He says he always gets lost. The roads keep changing. It’s a confusion of orange traffic cones and interlocking barriers; access roads peter out into long drops to rubble and dust. Nothing actually goes anywhere. The wide lanes loop around endlessly, and then there’s no place to go. No plaza or square, no center. Nowhere to hang out, nowhere to walk. Why would you walk? In this heat? You pull over and throw your keys to a valet, and get indoors as quickly as possible, generally in one of the countless shopping centers that look like the airports of lesser nations or Egyptian tombs. They echo with the slow footfalls of the security guards. In the boutiques, the glossy assistants stare at mannequins with a mutual mime of cashmere-folding despair. Dubai has been mugged by its own greed. Its consumer economy is being maintained by oil-rich families to whom depressions, booms, lottery wins, and recessions mean little. Riches and wealth are relative terms. But not ones we’re related to. There is an indoor ski mountain, probably the biggest indoor ski mountain in a desert, where the Arab boys queue for suits and boots and skis. The smarter locals arrive in their own designer après-ski gear, with fur and moon boots. You walk through the doors and it’s like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe—the land of permanent winter. The fat boys push past carrying their snowboards toward the Tyrolean chocolate shop and Swiss fir trees and slide down the hill with a practiced arrogance. The girls slither, splay-legged, hijabs fluttering, in the manufactured snow.
Pre-race at the nearly $3 billion Meydan Racecourse, in Dubai.
No one dreamed of this. Twenty years ago, none of this was here. No Narnia. No seven-star hotels. No tallest prick buildings. Just a home of pastoralist tented families herding goats, racing camels, shooting one another. And a handful of greasy, armed empire mechanics in khaki shorts, drilling for oil. In just one life span, Dubai has gone from sitting on a rug to swiveling on a fake Eames chair 100 stories up. And not a single local has had to lift a finger to make it happen. That’s not quite fair—of course they’ve lifted a finger; to call the waiter, berate the busboy. The money seeped out of the ground and they spent it. Pretty much all of it. You look at this place and you realize not a single thing is indigenous, not one of this culture’s goods and chattels originated here. Even the goats have gone. This was a civilization that was bought wholesale. The Gulf is the proof of Carnegie’s warning about wealth: “There is no class so pitiably wretched as that which possesses money and nothing else.” Emiratis are born retired. They waft through this city in their white dishdashas and headscarves and their obsessively tapered humorless faces. They’re out of place in their own country. They have imported and built a city, a fortress of extravagance, that excludes themselves. They have become duplicitous, schizophrenic. They don’t allow their own national dress in the clubs and bars that serve alcohol, the restaurants with the hungry girls sipping champagne. So they slip into Western clothes to go out.
The Gulf Arabs have become the minority in this country they wished out of the desert. They are now less than 20 percent of the total population. Among the other 80-plus percent are the white mercenary workers who come here for tax-free salaries to do managerial and entrepreneurial jobs, parasites and sycophants for cash. For them money is a driving principle and validation. They came to be young, single, greedy, and insincere. None of them are very clever. So they live lives that revolve around drink and porn sex and pool parties and barbecues with a lot of hysterical laughing and theme nights, karaoke, and slobbery, regretful coupling. In fact, as in all cases of embarrassing arrested development, these expats on the short-term make don’t expect to put down roots here, have children here, or grow old here. Everyone’s on a visa dependent on a job.
Then there is a third category of people: the drones. The workers. The Asians: Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, and Filipinos. Early in the morning, before the white mercenaries have negotiated their hangovers, long before the Emiratis have shouted at the maid, buses full of hard-hatted Asians pull into building sites. They have the tough, downtrodden look of Communist posters from the 30s—they are both the slaves of capital and the heroes of labor. Asians man the hotels; they run the civil service and the utilities and commercial businesses; they are the clerks and the secretaries, the lawyers, the doctors, the accountants; there isn’t a single facet of this state that would function if they didn’t maintain it. No one with an Emirati passport could change a fuse. Yet, the workers, who make up roughly 71 percent of the population, have precious few rights here. They can’t become citizens, though some are the third generation of their family to be born here. They can be deported at any time. They have no redress. Many of the Asian laborers are owed back pay they aren’t likely to get. There are reams of anecdotal stories about the abuse of guest workers. I’m told about the Pakistani shop assistant who, picking up an Arab woman’s shopping bags, accidentally passed gas, got arrested, and was jailed.
Out-of-towners getting ready for the Dubai World Cup.
The Arabs live in their own ghettos, large, dull containments of big houses that are half garage behind security walls, weighed down with satellite dishes. We drive by an empty lot, and my driver tells me that this was the site of the house of the second son of a high-ranking official. Daddy had it bulldozed when his boy was caught having a Western-style rich-brats’ party. There is a growing, unspoken problem with the indigenous youth here. Fat, and spoiled beyond reason, they are titanically rude. They have reportedly taken to forming slovenly gangs that have been responsible for random attacks on foreign workers and women simply for the computer-game fun of it. This is a generation of kids who expect to never seriously work—but do expect secure jobs. An Indian manager who runs hotels in Dubai told me that everybody dreads the call from some royal Arab telling them to expect a nephew who will be coming to work. The boy will demand an office, a secretary, a car, wages, deference, and an empty schedule. It’s a sort of protection shakedown that you pay to do business here.
The Al Maktoums are secretive and autocratic, as most Arab despots are. The emir is always prime minister. Abu Dhabi’s ruler is always president. The royal family’s public exposure is universally adoring, supine, sycophantic, and breathlessly bland. There are rumors, always rumors, about disappeared princesses, abducted children, madness, and suicide. The royal family owes its power to an intricate web of family alliance, patronage, and operatic charity. It is sincerely respected.
A reveler at the Dubai World Cup, the most lavish horse race in the world. The winner walks away with a $10 million prize.
The Al Maktoums have taken to horse racing. They practically own the British and Irish bloodstock business. It’s a clever and self-serving hobby. Horses are one of the very few upper-class American and European enthusiasms that are shared with Arabs. All racehorses have a little Arab in them. So the Al Maktoums can mix in the West without that stigma that the Saudis suffer from back home—the public decorum with a private, Western decadence. The simple business of betting is of course ignored with a disdainfully turned shoulder. Since Dubai’s construction-based economy stumbled, the prince has obliviously opened a massive and spectacularly hideous hippodrome, the Meydan Racecourse. The biggest racetrack in the world, it cost almost $3 billion to build. It’s home to the Dubai World Cup, the most expensive horse race in the world, naturally. This place couldn’t have the second-most expensive horse race in the world. The winner pockets $10 million.
The track sits in a wasteland surrounded by the exhausted squirm of motorways. I walk around it and look not at the galloping horses and their bright jockeys but back up at the stands. Here in one long panorama is the Dantean vision of modern Dubai—the Arabs huddled in a glass dome, looking like creatures from a Star Trek episode in their sepulchral winding-sheet dishdashas. Next to them are the stands for Westerners, mostly British, loud and drunk, dressed in their tarty party gear. The girls, raucous and provocative, have fat thighs that wobble in tiny frocks. Cantilevered bosoms lurch. The boys, spiky and gelled, glassy-eyed and leering. In the last enclosure, the Asians, packed in with families and picnics, excited to be out of the Portakabin dormitories and the boredom and the homesickness of Internet cafés. In front of them all are the ranks of wired-up security guards, making sure the layers of this mutually dismissive society don’t pollute each other. After the horses have run, Elton John will perform.
Dubai is the parable of what money makes when it has no purpose but its own multiplication and grandeur. When the culture that holds it is too frail to contain it. Dubai is a place that doesn’t just know the price of everything and the value of nothing but makes everything worthless. The answer to everything in Dubai is money. In the darkness of the hot night, the motorways roar with Ferraris and Porsches and Lamborghinis; the fat boys are befuddled and stupefied by sports cars they race around on nowhere roads, going nowhere. Taxi drivers of their ambitionless, all-consuming entitlement. Shortchanged by being given everything. Cursed with money.
Inside Ski Dubai, an indoor ski resort in the middle of the desert.
Read More http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/f...ntable=true&mbid=social_retweet#ixzz1GOqpAtzR
Dubai on Empty
Its skyline erupting from the desert in just two decades, Dubai is a cautionary tale about what money can’t buy: a culture of its own. After gorging on the Viagra of easy credit, the emirate has the world’s tallest building, the world’s most expensive racetrack, and a financial crisis to match. From the Western mercenaries and Asian drones who maintain the gaudy show to 100-odd families who are impervious to any economic reality, A. A. Gill discovers that no one truly belongs in Dubai, where the legacy of oil has made everything worthless.
BY A. A. GILL•
WEB EXCLUSIVE APRIL 2011
Locals stand in front of the royal enclosure at the track.
The only way to make sense of Dubai is to never forget that it isn’t real. It’s a fable, a fairy tale, like The Arabian Nights. More correctly, it’s a cautionary tale. Dubai is the story of the three wishes, where, as every kid knows, with the third wish you demand three more wishes. And as every genie knows, more wishes lead to more greed, more misery, more bad credit, and much, much, much more bad taste. Dubai is Las Vegas without the showgirls, the gambling, or Elvis. Dubai is a financial Disneyland without the fun. It’s a holiday resort with the worst climate in the world. It boils. It’s humid. And the constant wind is full of sand. The first thing you see when you arrive is the airport, with its echoing marble halls. It’s big enough to be the hub of a continent. Dubai suffers from gigantism—a national inferiority complex that has to make everything bigger and biggest. This includes their financial crisis.
Outside, in the sodden heat, you pass hundreds and hundreds of regimented palm trees and you wonder who waters them and what with. The skyline, in the dusty haze, looks like the cover of a dystopian science-fiction novella. Clusters of skyscrapers lurch out at the gray desert accompanied by their moribund cranes, propped up with scaffolding, swagged in plastic sheeting. Dubai thought it was going to grow up to be the Arab Singapore—a commercial, banking, and insurance service port on the Gulf with hospitality and footballers’ time-shares, an oasis of R&R for the less well endowed. But it hasn’t quite worked out. The vertical streets of offices are empty. A derelict skyscraper looks exactly the same as one that’s teeming with commerce. They huddle around the current tallest building in the world—a monument to small-nation penis envy. This pylon erected with the Viagra of credit is now a big, naked exclamation of Dubai’s fiscal embarrassment. It was going to be called Burj Dubai, but as Dubai was unable to make their payments, they were forced to go to their Gulf neighbor, head towel in hand, to get a loan. So now it’s called Burj Khalifa, after Abu Dhabi’s ruler, who coughed up $10 billion to its over-extended neighbor.
Dubai has been built very fast. The plan was money. The architect was money. The designer was money and the builder was money. And if you ever wondered what money would look like if it were left to its own devices, it’s Dubai.
My driver gets lost more than once. He’s lived here all his life. He says he always gets lost. The roads keep changing. It’s a confusion of orange traffic cones and interlocking barriers; access roads peter out into long drops to rubble and dust. Nothing actually goes anywhere. The wide lanes loop around endlessly, and then there’s no place to go. No plaza or square, no center. Nowhere to hang out, nowhere to walk. Why would you walk? In this heat? You pull over and throw your keys to a valet, and get indoors as quickly as possible, generally in one of the countless shopping centers that look like the airports of lesser nations or Egyptian tombs. They echo with the slow footfalls of the security guards. In the boutiques, the glossy assistants stare at mannequins with a mutual mime of cashmere-folding despair. Dubai has been mugged by its own greed. Its consumer economy is being maintained by oil-rich families to whom depressions, booms, lottery wins, and recessions mean little. Riches and wealth are relative terms. But not ones we’re related to. There is an indoor ski mountain, probably the biggest indoor ski mountain in a desert, where the Arab boys queue for suits and boots and skis. The smarter locals arrive in their own designer après-ski gear, with fur and moon boots. You walk through the doors and it’s like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe—the land of permanent winter. The fat boys push past carrying their snowboards toward the Tyrolean chocolate shop and Swiss fir trees and slide down the hill with a practiced arrogance. The girls slither, splay-legged, hijabs fluttering, in the manufactured snow.
Pre-race at the nearly $3 billion Meydan Racecourse, in Dubai.
No one dreamed of this. Twenty years ago, none of this was here. No Narnia. No seven-star hotels. No tallest prick buildings. Just a home of pastoralist tented families herding goats, racing camels, shooting one another. And a handful of greasy, armed empire mechanics in khaki shorts, drilling for oil. In just one life span, Dubai has gone from sitting on a rug to swiveling on a fake Eames chair 100 stories up. And not a single local has had to lift a finger to make it happen. That’s not quite fair—of course they’ve lifted a finger; to call the waiter, berate the busboy. The money seeped out of the ground and they spent it. Pretty much all of it. You look at this place and you realize not a single thing is indigenous, not one of this culture’s goods and chattels originated here. Even the goats have gone. This was a civilization that was bought wholesale. The Gulf is the proof of Carnegie’s warning about wealth: “There is no class so pitiably wretched as that which possesses money and nothing else.” Emiratis are born retired. They waft through this city in their white dishdashas and headscarves and their obsessively tapered humorless faces. They’re out of place in their own country. They have imported and built a city, a fortress of extravagance, that excludes themselves. They have become duplicitous, schizophrenic. They don’t allow their own national dress in the clubs and bars that serve alcohol, the restaurants with the hungry girls sipping champagne. So they slip into Western clothes to go out.
The Gulf Arabs have become the minority in this country they wished out of the desert. They are now less than 20 percent of the total population. Among the other 80-plus percent are the white mercenary workers who come here for tax-free salaries to do managerial and entrepreneurial jobs, parasites and sycophants for cash. For them money is a driving principle and validation. They came to be young, single, greedy, and insincere. None of them are very clever. So they live lives that revolve around drink and porn sex and pool parties and barbecues with a lot of hysterical laughing and theme nights, karaoke, and slobbery, regretful coupling. In fact, as in all cases of embarrassing arrested development, these expats on the short-term make don’t expect to put down roots here, have children here, or grow old here. Everyone’s on a visa dependent on a job.
Then there is a third category of people: the drones. The workers. The Asians: Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, and Filipinos. Early in the morning, before the white mercenaries have negotiated their hangovers, long before the Emiratis have shouted at the maid, buses full of hard-hatted Asians pull into building sites. They have the tough, downtrodden look of Communist posters from the 30s—they are both the slaves of capital and the heroes of labor. Asians man the hotels; they run the civil service and the utilities and commercial businesses; they are the clerks and the secretaries, the lawyers, the doctors, the accountants; there isn’t a single facet of this state that would function if they didn’t maintain it. No one with an Emirati passport could change a fuse. Yet, the workers, who make up roughly 71 percent of the population, have precious few rights here. They can’t become citizens, though some are the third generation of their family to be born here. They can be deported at any time. They have no redress. Many of the Asian laborers are owed back pay they aren’t likely to get. There are reams of anecdotal stories about the abuse of guest workers. I’m told about the Pakistani shop assistant who, picking up an Arab woman’s shopping bags, accidentally passed gas, got arrested, and was jailed.
Out-of-towners getting ready for the Dubai World Cup.
The Arabs live in their own ghettos, large, dull containments of big houses that are half garage behind security walls, weighed down with satellite dishes. We drive by an empty lot, and my driver tells me that this was the site of the house of the second son of a high-ranking official. Daddy had it bulldozed when his boy was caught having a Western-style rich-brats’ party. There is a growing, unspoken problem with the indigenous youth here. Fat, and spoiled beyond reason, they are titanically rude. They have reportedly taken to forming slovenly gangs that have been responsible for random attacks on foreign workers and women simply for the computer-game fun of it. This is a generation of kids who expect to never seriously work—but do expect secure jobs. An Indian manager who runs hotels in Dubai told me that everybody dreads the call from some royal Arab telling them to expect a nephew who will be coming to work. The boy will demand an office, a secretary, a car, wages, deference, and an empty schedule. It’s a sort of protection shakedown that you pay to do business here.
The Al Maktoums are secretive and autocratic, as most Arab despots are. The emir is always prime minister. Abu Dhabi’s ruler is always president. The royal family’s public exposure is universally adoring, supine, sycophantic, and breathlessly bland. There are rumors, always rumors, about disappeared princesses, abducted children, madness, and suicide. The royal family owes its power to an intricate web of family alliance, patronage, and operatic charity. It is sincerely respected.
A reveler at the Dubai World Cup, the most lavish horse race in the world. The winner walks away with a $10 million prize.
The Al Maktoums have taken to horse racing. They practically own the British and Irish bloodstock business. It’s a clever and self-serving hobby. Horses are one of the very few upper-class American and European enthusiasms that are shared with Arabs. All racehorses have a little Arab in them. So the Al Maktoums can mix in the West without that stigma that the Saudis suffer from back home—the public decorum with a private, Western decadence. The simple business of betting is of course ignored with a disdainfully turned shoulder. Since Dubai’s construction-based economy stumbled, the prince has obliviously opened a massive and spectacularly hideous hippodrome, the Meydan Racecourse. The biggest racetrack in the world, it cost almost $3 billion to build. It’s home to the Dubai World Cup, the most expensive horse race in the world, naturally. This place couldn’t have the second-most expensive horse race in the world. The winner pockets $10 million.
The track sits in a wasteland surrounded by the exhausted squirm of motorways. I walk around it and look not at the galloping horses and their bright jockeys but back up at the stands. Here in one long panorama is the Dantean vision of modern Dubai—the Arabs huddled in a glass dome, looking like creatures from a Star Trek episode in their sepulchral winding-sheet dishdashas. Next to them are the stands for Westerners, mostly British, loud and drunk, dressed in their tarty party gear. The girls, raucous and provocative, have fat thighs that wobble in tiny frocks. Cantilevered bosoms lurch. The boys, spiky and gelled, glassy-eyed and leering. In the last enclosure, the Asians, packed in with families and picnics, excited to be out of the Portakabin dormitories and the boredom and the homesickness of Internet cafés. In front of them all are the ranks of wired-up security guards, making sure the layers of this mutually dismissive society don’t pollute each other. After the horses have run, Elton John will perform.
Dubai is the parable of what money makes when it has no purpose but its own multiplication and grandeur. When the culture that holds it is too frail to contain it. Dubai is a place that doesn’t just know the price of everything and the value of nothing but makes everything worthless. The answer to everything in Dubai is money. In the darkness of the hot night, the motorways roar with Ferraris and Porsches and Lamborghinis; the fat boys are befuddled and stupefied by sports cars they race around on nowhere roads, going nowhere. Taxi drivers of their ambitionless, all-consuming entitlement. Shortchanged by being given everything. Cursed with money.
Inside Ski Dubai, an indoor ski resort in the middle of the desert.
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