Rise and fall of the city of Dubai

[imomus]

Read today's papers and you'll find that there's another major financial crisis brewing, as banks like HSBC and the home of my own overdraft, RBS (now 84% owned by the British taxpayer) find themselves dangerously exposed to debt defaults, mostly in the construction industry, in the bling-bling dictatorship, Dubai.



Like everything else in Dubai (its highest building -- not, incidentally, the skyscraper sporting the huge portrait of the enclave's resident dictator, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum --is 40% taller than the next nearest rival), the debt crisis is one of elephantine proportions: $14 billion of syndicated loans to Dubai World are said to be looking very iffy indeed, and the total debt is estimated by some at about $90 billion, and others as far beyond that.

It would be tempting just to shrug this off, if it weren't for the fact that the Dubai hype reached even my post-materialist ears. Members of my family have been to Dubai, my bank lends my overdraft interest to the state's construction firms, my book editors are visiting with a view to writing books about the speculative bubble and the fascinating way in which it's burst.



"Was anywhere heading for a fall so obviously as Dubai?" asks Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. "Yet why did no one ever scream? Why did everyone just marvel?" The answer is partly that negative comment was actually a crime in Dubai; Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum told critics to "shut up" and media was closely controlled to exclude anything which might damage investments or stop the influx of rich foreigners and investors.

It's also undoubtedly true that a rising tide, even if it doesn't quite float all boats, brooks no opposition. Dubai's population of 1.37 million (2006) is comprised of a small conservative Muslim indigenous population, and 85% expatriates, most of whom are low-paid construction and service workers from India and the Philippines. The bling state rides -- I suppose we should say "rode" -- on the back of unorganised, unregulated labour.



The people close to me -- editors, writers I know here in Berlin -- were interested in Dubai not just as a speculative bubble and a sort of Brechtian fable (The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny played out in a 21st century which seems to have forgotten the 1920s), but because they're close to architect Rem Koolhaas, who was preparing to unleash his own sort of bubble on the city. Truly the architecture it deserved, you might say, but will now never get.

Here's a fairly superficial and, I'd say, immoral TV documentary by Piers Morgan about Dubai:

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Watching that, my first reaction is "You'd have to pay me a lot of money to get me to live in a place like that!" It looks like everything I hate and avoid in the cities I know: endless anaemic shopping malls with ludicrously inflated prices, vapid celebrities and self-made, flabby entrepreneurs, absolutely zero culture you'd want to spend any time with (unless you're really into Kylie shows punctuated with "the world's largest fireworks display"), Sunday Times Rich List types with parasitic hangers-on, people with dyed blonde hair who talk about money and drink champagne, people who've never encountered a single interesting idea (let alone an idea critical of the kind of world they inhabit) in their lives, bubble-headed people floating about in a bubble economy.

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Burst, Dubai, burst! And take your dictator with you! But don't take my bank, my sister, my editor, or the entire world financial system down into hell with you, please.

Comments

[aberrantangels]

a 21st century which seems to have forgotten the 1920s

From your fingers to God's eyes, squire.

[loveishappiness.livejournal.com]

Did you ever read that weird propaganda comic in 032c about Dubai? I like that magazine but it has at least three bubble-headed articles in every issue.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I write for 032c, so I'll have to be careful how I answer that! But no, I don't recall that particular article. I like some of their loopier articles, actually, like the 2007 one that compared and contrasted Sana'a (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sana%27a) -- the incredible ancient city in the Yemen -- with SANAA, the Japanese architects.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

[(Anonymous)]

It was great meeting you and all the others at the Oorutaichi show last night, thanks for inviting me over to your table!

Robert

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the beer, Robert!

Deadland.

[(Anonymous)]

I hope the ninnies in the second video loose their 50 million.

George Saunders

[(Anonymous)]

George Saunders wrote an excellent piece on Dubai in his book Braindead Megaphone. I think you can even download a free kindle sample to your ipod touch. It's really worth the read!

David Holl

Re: Deadland.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

They pretty much already have. That artificial islands project is one of the ones mentioned in the FT (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/46b4065c-d9f7-11de-b2d5-00144feabdc0.html) as halted:

"Nakheel, the developer behind the city’s Palm Islands that boast celebrity owners such as David Beckham, has had to shed thousands of staff and left contractors out of pocket as local property prices halved and credit dried up. A symbol of Dubai’s pre-crunch excess, the government company has had to cancel plans for the world’s tallest tower and a constellation of reclaimed islands, as collapsing cash flow left the developer on the brink."

[(Anonymous)]

Dubai's that place in the pictures of imaginary architecture? It's a real place? Ah well, still got the pictures.

I checked out the papers, like you said. OMG Tiger Woods crashed his parked car! Twice!

[(Anonymous)]

I believe that UAE is oil-less within a generation, and needed to find some alternative form of wealth generation for its future. Property inflation - the ever-smart move for the thick, the soulless and lazy - seemed to be the solution, in the absence of producing anything that anyone wants. Are there enough tasteless millionaires in the world? Enough celebrities and journalists who can be bought? Even without the crunch, Dubai made wealth enormously tacky. What do the ambitious do now?

[(Anonymous)]

I'm all in favour of criticizing excess but it's also fair to say that one of the most socially destructive bubbles was the one in Japan, a society you generally admire.

[(Anonymous)]

Well, they also tried to expand their global ports management portfolio until the US blocked them, calling it a security risk.

[eptified.livejournal.com]

I heard a fantastic piece on the radio about Dubai's slave construction industry but I can't find it at the moment. This is some pretty clear-cut evil.

[eptified.livejournal.com]

Dubai imports labor from other countries, then confiscates their passports, pays them a fraction of what they were promised and houses them in open barracks in the middle of the desert - Dubai has no bankruptcy laws, which means that if as a foreigner you run out of money there your passport is (once again) confiscated and you either go to prison or become homeless - Dubai has the highest carbon footprint per capita of any nation because they have to desalinize every last ounce of water that they drink - etc

I don't think there's a comparison to be made there, actually

Deadland.

[(Anonymous)]

It will do them good. An equivalent to being kicked in the behind I should think.

dubai-singapore

[(Anonymous)]

what about singapore with its tightly controlled media that shores up negative comments, and officially promoted bubble-headed lifestyles? would you be able to live there?

Re: dubai-singapore

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Singapore would be much easier for me, personally.

[thomascott.livejournal.com]

Burst indeed, the place sounds like everything I despise on even a superficial level.
A look below the surface reveals something altogether chilling..
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/the-dark-side-of-dubai-1664368.html

not equal but still wasteful

[(Anonymous)]

no, it's not dubai, but japan has an extremely wasteful culture. and being a "first world" country," it's shameful how they treat immigrant workers too, especially brazilians.

[st-ranger.livejournal.com]

Japan also imports labor from other countries. They are now trying to deport that labor back to South America along with their Japanese children.

[subalpine.livejournal.com]

Your description of the shopping malls sounds like the way my friend Sandy (who moved there from HK) describes the food served in Chinese restaurants there!

[(Anonymous)]

this is phuckd

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Very telling article, and I'm much more inclined to believe what it says than those documentaries by Piers Morgan, which contents itself with saying idiotic things like "the migrant workers' conditions have improved vastly since the introduction of a complaints hotline".

The article makes clear how insensitive foreigners are to the conditions around them, as long as they profit by them. These foreigners are totally willing to snap back into a 19th century paleo-colonial mindset (assisted by an indigenous population profiting by the situation). On the other hand, the article fails to examine how closely the "democracy" and "human rights" it proposes as a remedy might, themselves, be the acceptable face of a neo-colonial mindset. The two wars of conquest we've seen so far this century have both used "democracy" and "human rights" as their justifying ideologies.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Thought exercise: you can invade certain nations citing security, democracy and human rights as your justifications. What if other criteria were paramount: self-determination, global diversity, the eradication of inequality within nations?

[(Anonymous)]

Ah, cheap globalised labour! Condemned if you don't let it in, condemned if you do, and condemned if you send it home! Can't live without it, can't kill it!

[(Anonymous)]

but you can shamelessly exploit it, whilst priding yourself on being civilized and "first world."

[(Anonymous)]

The squashed sphere tower in the third image is in Baku, Azerbaijan, not Dubai, and was designed by Heerim Architects, not OMA. Its called Full Moon Rising.

[cementloveriot.livejournal.com]

Have you ever seen the movie Pleasantville? From what I hear from my friend Kunal who has lived there all his life, it seems like a very sterile/man-made/materialistic society, much like eponymous town in the movie. And by sterile, I do also mean that literally. Over the course of hearing him describe his country's effective and "free health care system", I began to realize that the "free annual checkup" that his country-people enjoyed was actually mandatory and that it REALLY was a health screening used to weed out (deport!) the sick and aging. As a result of effective, albeit inhumane, health care, Dubai has no AIDS. Maybe I am paradoxically aghast, seeing another society as it "should be" through my glasses of American democracy, but it all seemed pretty awful.

I should probably educate myself about Dubai's economy beyond my one friend, but I find it interesting that what you call a "bling-bling dictatorship", he calls a "tax-free government run like a cooperation". They're probably not mutually exclusive views, but the difference is still notable nonetheless.

"Judging by his cars... life is GOOD!"

[bonsai-human.livejournal.com]

Can we execute these people? I think it would be the moral thing to do.

[armoredbaby.livejournal.com]

Absolutely in agreement on the fad that was or lingers Dubai. It is like a dictatorship mall -- so ridiculous and plastic. I lostened on the radio to various shows that pointed to Dubai's hope to re-invent itself as a playground, landing destination for the rich and lord was that uninteresting.

[g13media.livejournal.com]

i have always thought of dubai as land of the rich with all the videos they have floating around on youtube in exotic cars. such a pitty.