Follow the money as it builds the future
The numbers are staggering: 3m jobs, 15m tourists, hundreds of billions in investment. We get our heads around a brave new world
In the searing Gulf sunshine, hotelier Sol Kerzner’s soft-pink Atlantis Hotel sits atop the Palm Jumeirah island like a crown. When Dubai’s ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum announced that he was building the reclaimed island in the shape of a giant palm tree in the Persian Gulf, critics sniggered. “Arabs selling sand!” they scoffed. But when the Atlantis opens its doors in a few weeks’ time, the Palm will be complete – on time and to budget.
The Palm, and its razzle-dazzle neighbours, the seven-star Burj Al Arab hotel and the 2,684ft-high Burj Dubai, the tallest building in the world, form the centrepiece of Dubai’s attempt to build itself – literally – onto the map. They are the most dramatic developments in the biggest programme of infrastructure spending the world has seen. “This city is a New York in the making,” says Mohammed bin Ali Alabbar, the boss of the state-backed property giant, Emaar, that is behind the Burj Dubai.
As well as the Palm Jumeirah, two other palm islands, and 300 islands arranged in the shape of a map of the world and a map of the solar system, are rising from the mint-choc-chip green waters of the Persian Gulf. The cost? £15 billion.
Another £20 billion is being sunk into completing the free-trade micro-cities in Dubai. There’s Aviation City, Cargo Village, Aid City, Exhibition City, Silicon Oasis, Festival City and Health-care City. Sports City, home to a Manchester United Soccer Academy and the International Cricket Council, cricket’s governing body, will be the centrepiece for a bid for the 2020 Olympics.
Downtown, the Dubai International Finance Centre, Arabia’s answer to Wall Street, is growing so fast that two new towers are being built to house western banks. A 6.5 square-mile office development in downtown Dubai, called Waterfront City, will feature an urban island inspired by a section of Midtown Manhattan.
Inland, Dubailand, a £50 billion enclave of 24 theme parks, villages, and shopping malls four and a half times the size of Manhattan, will be the Middle East’s answer to Disneyworld. There will be Universal Studios’ Universal City, a Marvel Entertainment theme park, and an “authentic Dubai Old Town” – built, naturally, when all the new stuff is finished.
A £15 billion Las Vegas-style strip of celebrity-themed hotels and resorts is also rising from the dusty desert scrub near the new port of Jebel Ali. Brad Pitt is backing one hotel and Leonardo Di Caprio another. Jebel Ali will also be home to Dubai’s new six-runway airport, currently under construction. New eight-lane highways, railway lines and the Middle East’s first metro system carve oily-black streaks across the desert linking all the new developments. A maglev bullet train, similar to that in Shanghai, is planned to link Dubai with neighbouring emirates.
To meet the needs of the 3m workers who will flock to Dubai to build and market the new developments, almost 1m homes are being built. To cater for the 15m tourists expected to arrive in Dubai every year by 2015, more than 500 hotels are under construction, including the world’s first Armani hotel, the world’s second Palazzo Versace, Shangri-La properties and the first Mandarin Oriental, Banyan Tree and Four Seasons resorts in the UAE. Room numbers are predicted to swell from 50,306 in 2007 to more than 100,000 by 2015.
It’s hard to comprehend the scale of all this development, but if you imagine an airport six times the size of Heathrow, surrounded by 500 Canary Wharfs, with another dozen Canary Wharfs plonked offshore, you will get the picture.
The bill for this spending spree is an estimated £500 billion. “We want to be a global city by 2015,” says Sheikha Lubna bint Khalid al-Qasimi, the UAE’s foreign trade minister. “The position of Dubai, right in the middle between East and West, makes it very attractive. The more it gets built, the more it gets developed, you find more demand coming in.”
Dubai’s construction boom is just the start. Neighbouring Abu Dhabi, the largest of the seven emirates that make up the United Arab Emirates and the nation’s capital, is investing a similar amount in property and tourism ventures. More traditional, more religious and much, much richer than Dubai, Abu Dhabi wants to emerge as a refined, cultured desert oasis.
If the scale models are accurate, Abu Dhabi’s developments will out-gun most Dubai schemes – even the Palm Jumeirah – when they are completed two to three years from now. At Al Raha Beach, a £7 billion, 11km-long development of high- and low-rise waterfront apartment blocks, townhouses and marinas, the architecture is world class. The circular, drum-shaped Aldar building is as bleeding-edge modern as the Gherkin in the City of London.
If all the development goes on unchecked, Dubai and Abu Dhabi will eventually become one giant “Strip city” running along the southern coast of the Persian Gulf. Plans are afoot to enlarge that city by building a cause-way-cum-bridge linking Abu Dhabi with its neighbours, Qatar and Bahrain. The result? A United States of Arabia.
Meet me at the airtropolis There are airports. There are hubs. Now there is “the airtropolis”. Dubai is spending £17 billion building the first resort airport, with golf courses, swimming pools and even its own beach. The project’s backers say the leisure facilities and new innovations, such as luggage delivered directly to passengers’ hotels, will transform air travel from an ordeal into a pleasure.
“We’re building a complete airport-city, the kind of place travellers will look forward to going to, not dread, as is the case with so many airports today,” says Paul Griffiths, the British-born chief executive of Dubai airports.
Last week, an army of sun-dried Asian labourers started work on the second three-mile-long runway and the first of six terminals at Al-Maktoum International Airport. When it is finished in 2015 it will be able to handle 120m passengers a year, four times the figure at the existing Dubai airport.
The five main long-haul terminals will be the first to have separate storeys for both departing and arriving premium passengers. The pampered few will enjoy their own private airport on the upper level, with bespoke check-in, fast-track security and lounges.
Since most of the long-haul aircraft using the airport will be the new double-decker Airbus A380s – business and first-class passengers will get on and get off the aircraft separately and take their seats on the upper deck, without clapping eyes on the masses crammed in the cheap seats below.
All passengers using the new airport, that is being built near the port of Jebel Ali, 25 miles from Dubai’s existing international airport, will enjoy a number of “firsts”. They will be able to check in and leave their bags at railway stations in every major city in the UAE before travelling to the airport. For those who want to drive, there will be a dedicated motorway, with entrances but no exits until drivers reach the terminals or downtown.
The development will be a boon for British firms. The UK’s National Air Traffic Services has won the contract to design the flight paths in and out of the airport. Lord Rogers, whose architectural practice designed Heathrow’s Terminal 5, is expected to create one of the terminal buildings. Lord Foster, the architect behind Hong Kong’s futuristic Chek Lap Kok airport, is set to build another.
Emirates wants Dubai to replace Singapore, Hong Kong and Bangkok as a stopover on flights from Europe to Australia and New Zealand. By cutting prices aggressively, it is tempting passengers on the east coast of America to travel east, via Dubai, on their way to Asia and it wants Asian travellers to use Dubai as their transit on the way to Latin America and Africa.
However, with record oil prices making air travel more expensive and environmental concerns growing, critics question the projected passenger numbers. Political observers also point out that terrorism or fresh conflict in the Middle East could upset the extravagant plans. Griffiths argues that as aircraft become more-fuel efficient, passenger numbers will rise and larger airports will be needed.
So when will the new site open? Griffiths, who used to run Gatwick airport and watched with horror the chaos of the opening of Heathrow’s Terminal 5, pauses and smiles. “When it’s ready.”
DUBAI INC
Imagine that Britain was known as Windsor plc and ruled by the company’s chief executive, who gave orders to a board of loyal subordinates, who implemented policy without the need for approval from any elected body. Imagine, too, that most board members were either related to the chief executive or to each other and that multi-billion-pound decisions were made with a single mobile phone call.
That’s how Dubai works. Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum is the emirate’s chief executive and he owns or controls the companies that run almost everything of significance. He takes the decisions and they are implemented by members of the Executive Council – an informal board of directors or Cabinet.
Council members include Sheikh Mohammed’s uncle, Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed al-Maktoum, who runs Emirates airlines; brothers Sultan and Khalid bin Sulayem, who run Dubai World, the property and investment giant, and Dubai’s tourism marketing effort; and Mohammed al-Gergawi, boss of Dubai Holding, the firm behind the Burj Al Arab, who is married to the sister of fellow council member, Mohammed Alabbar, who runs Emaar, Dubai’s biggest property firm.
The Dubai government insists that the rapid-fire decision-making that comes with benign autocratic rule is the only way it can achieve its aim of building a city state from scratch in a generation.
By and large, Dubaians seem happy with the arrangement. “Sheikh Mohammed is our Maggie Thatcher,” says one businessman. “We may not like the way he does everything but we know he is going to make us rich.”
ISLA MODA
Fashion supremo Karl Lagerfeld will design 80 homes on Dubai’s Isla Moda (Fashion Island), part of the city’s The World development. It will feature a hotel, couture boutiques, design studios and event space for fashion product launches, as well as villas. Prices have not yet been announced. Lagerfeld signed the deal with Dubai Infinity Holdings this month along with four as yet unnamed designers who will contribute to the island’s design, with completion set for 2012. “Dubai is a fashion bud on the verge of blossoming into the next fashion hub of the world,” says Lagerfeld. “Isla Moda has tremendous potential to be the style icon of the future.”
