City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism (40 page)

But the Metro, too, has seen coordination problems. In 2004, Dubai announced its latest palm-shaped island, the Palm Deira. It was to be enormous: the size of Manhattan with more than a million residents. It would rise offshore of densely populated Deira. The Roads and Transport Authority had just finished designing the Dubai Metro, and the route went nowhere near this significant future neighborhood. One planner told me he had no idea it was coming. The route had to be redrawn. This incident seems to have triggered a willingness to share Dubai’s project plans not just among developers and the ruler’s office but with municipal planners.

“Sheikh Mohammed now coordinates these projects with us,” Hattal says.

Dubai wouldn’t be what it is if Sheikh Mohammed was one to sweat the small stuff. In his book, he says, “if anyone asks me how Dubai achieved so much at such a record speed, I’ll simply say that it’s because we never drowned ourselves in detail. The key to a true and effective development process is a vision that doesn’t allow small details to cloud its basic goals.”

Dubai is nimble because the city-state is an autocracy, governed by one man. If projects had to be approved by a series of public committees, the public would know what to expect. Growth would be more coherent. It would also take a lot longer.

“Here the sheikh simply says, ‘That flyover isn’t big enough. Knock it down and double it,’ which is great,” says Anthony Harris. “They opened thirty-one new lanes over the creek in two years. That’s bloody
quick time. In Britain, the planning committee would discover that some rare bat is living in a tree nearby and the whole thing would be scrapped and it would take ten years to figure out what to do.”

Right up until the 1970s, Dubai was a walking city. It had a compact center and pedestrian souks. Its alleys were too narrow for cars. But Dubai embraced modernity and the automobile. Cars make sense. When it’s hot, you drive in cool comfort. But Dubai’s car fetish necessitated an urban redesign. Other ways of getting around, like walking or cycling, were tossed out.

Dubai’s streetscape is now actively hostile to walkers and cyclists. Most streets have no sidewalks. There is no custom of driver courtesy to pedestrians, even where there are marked crosswalks. One especially deadly design is the mile-long wall of skyscrapers on either side of the twelve-lane Sheikh Zayed Road. At the time of writing there was one pedestrian underpass. Fourteen people died in horrible fashion on that stretch in 2006 alone, trying to dash across. Pedestrians are cut down by cars far too often in Dubai.

Rashidi Sayfulin, a young man from Samarkand, Uzbekistan, is one of them. On December 5, 2005, he and his brother ran across a street in Deira. His brother didn’t make it. A car flattened him. When Sayfulin dashed back to help him, he, too, was struck down, his skull bashed open. Sayfulin’s brother recovered enough to return home. But Rashidi has spent the past two and a half years lying in the neurological ward at Rashid Hospital with severe brain damage. He’s fed through a tube in his nose, or when he gets visiting volunteers, someone squirts yogurt into his mouth with a syringe. Sayfulin struggles to say a few garbled words. He rubs his hands in frustration over his eyes and tilts his lopsided head to squint at his visitors. When I visited, a pair of volunteers from the Valley of Love charity helped him sit up in his bed and placed him into a wheelchair for a quick tour of the hospital lobby. He’s better off than the others in the ward, most of whom are in a vegetative state.

Dubai could be a great biking city. It’s flat and the weather is nice most of the year. But cyclists have to cope with highway overpasses and
jutting curbs that force them into traffic. Few take the chance. In 2007, I attended a convention for traffic planners. An engineer showed me how he’d redesigned a roundabout in Al Ain to a four-way intersection with a traffic light. It could now handle more vehicles and was better for pedestrians, who could wait for the light, and walk across.

“What about cyclists? Why not put in bike lanes?” I asked him.

His face darkened. “The locals won’t allow it. They don’t cycle. They say, ‘Indians are the ones who ride bicycles. Why should we pay for something that they use?’ It’s a backward mentality,” he says. The engineer pointed out that Indians and every other frustrated cyclist wind up driving and making traffic worse for everybody.

The man charged with designing a way out of the mess is Abdulla al-Nedhar, an Emirati who studied planning at Georgia State and had a hand in revitalizing downtown Atlanta. Back in Dubai he worked his way up from city hall until becoming the chief of strategy and planning for Sheikh Mohammed’s Executive Office. He runs a new outfit called the Dubai Center for Research and Urban Innovation.

Al-Nedhar carries himself with a can-do spirit, the sleeves of his
kandoura
rolled up and long sideburns poking from under his white
gutra
headscarf. He is a thoughtful man who watches over a busy patch of Dubai from his Aeron chair on the forty-third floor of the Emirates Office Tower.

Al-Nedhar travels a lot. He studies cities with an eye to bringing positive aspects home to Dubai. Asked which cities he likes best, he answers indirectly. “We look at all the cities in the world as models.”

Vancouver offers the best example for a mix of cars, bikes, and walkers. South London is doing interesting things for pedestrians, with its walkway along the south bank of the Thames. Copenhagen’s driverless Metro is an obvious inspiration. But those places are aspirations. For now, al-Nedhar compares Dubai with cities in his league: emerging behemoths in China and the former Soviet Union, and, of course, Singapore.

Now that Dubai has been given over to the automobile, al-Nedhar wants to take bits of it back. His team has drawn up a master plan called “Dubai: The Human Environment,” which seeks pedestrian spaces and lanes for cyclists. One idea calls for a bike-only space beneath the
raised Metro platform. The scheme carries a number of advantages. One, cars can’t get near it. Two, it’s shaded.

“We see how important the human is in relation to vehicles and machines. We have to meet in the middle,” he says. “It’s very difficult to get people out of their cars. But there are a lot of advantages. It’s good for your health and the environment. We’re trying to see how we can get people to stop making short car trips and to start walking or biking.”

Al-Nedhar’s goal is to use design to lower the city’s stress levels. He wants a calm city that respects the needs of business without destroying the comfort and safety of families, children, vacationers—and those crossing the road.

“I have a dream that Dubai will be sustainable, that it will be livable and healthy for me and my kids,” he says, leaning forward, arms on his desk. “The important thing is that we keep going toward excellence. Martin Luther King said, ‘I have a dream.’ He innovated that, right? He said that if you don’t have a dream you won’t get what you want.”

DUBAI’S CHALLENGE

DANGER AHEAD

WHEN AMERICANS THINK
of immigration run amok, Miami comes to mind. More than 60 percent of Miamians were born outside the United States, mainly in Latin America. No other major U.S. city comes close. Foreign-born residents make up just over 40 percent of Los Angeles and 36 percent of New York and San Francisco, census figures show.
¹

Compared to Dubai, Miami is a bastion of nativity. Ninety-five percent of Dubaians are foreigners, and they come from 200 countries. There are only about 100,000 citizens among the city’s 2 million inhabitants.
²
Dubai is probably the world’s most cosmopolitan city.
³

In one way of looking at it, Dubai’s welcome to foreigners gives the city a competitive advantage over its resource-rich neighbors. Foreigners have started businesses and taken management jobs and the city’s workforce has benefited from their expertise.

But swarming immigration now extends beyond Dubai, and has left Emirati citizens a minority in every one of the UAE’s seven emirates. The million or so UAE citizens make up about 15 percent of the country’s total population of around 6 million.
⁴

The Gulf Arab and Persian culture that once radiated from the creekside alleys has been overwhelmed by a thorough globalization. The
dominant culture is South Asian, and the city’s streets are lined with neon-lit curry houses and tailor shops. Sidewalks teem with brown faces and slick black hair. Also conspicuous is the Western golf and yachting lifestyle of America and Australia, with its malls and gated communities. Arab fashion and staccato pop music streams in from Beirut and Cairo, coloring the street scenes. Urban Iran makes a stand: the soft Farsi chatter, the smoky outdoor kebab houses, and the Jackie O lookalikes in their Gucci headscarves and Tehran-chic
manteaus
. There are Ethiopians and Ghanaians parking cars and hustling fake watches, Filipinos strolling in shorts and tank tops, and a rising force of Chinese laborers and prostitutes.

The only people absent, it seems, are locals. Emiratis have retreated into walled mansions on the city’s outskirts. Once renowned for their gregarious hospitality, they’ve become clannish. Their simple meat-and-rice cuisine, drum-heavy music and male line dancing, and their guttural, tough-sounding dialect are difficult to find nowadays. It’s gotten to the point where citizens stick out, even attracting stares. Most Dubai expatriates have never held a meaningful conversation with a UAE citizen. Understanding of their historic struggle is almost nil.

“Every day when I roam the town I ask myself, ‘Where are my people? Where are the local citizens of my own country? Where are they? I can’t find them,’” Ebtisam al-Kitbi, a university professor, said on a radio talk show in May 2008.

Dubai isn’t just packed with foreigners, it’s also crammed with men. A recent census found that women make up less than a quarter of the population and just 14 percent of the workforce. “There is just too much male energy here,” says Rima Sabban, the sociologist. Most migrant men come from male-dominated places like India and Pakistan and bring conservative views toward women. There is no more macho city on the planet. Dubai clearly needs a woman’s touch. “We don’t just need to reduce the percentage of foreigners, we need a feminization policy,” Sabban says.