Dubai . . . eleven years on.

[River Ape]

How many years before the fountains stop working, the trees and lawns shrivel, the towers begin to crumble, and Dubai's only future is as a movie lot for scifi stories set in the aftermath of a global disaster?

I see that I made the above post to sciforums when Dubai was struggling in 2009. It made quite a comeback, but the road has always seemed strewn with hazard. Now the tourists have stopped coming, the residents have begun leaving, property prices are falling, its "world" islands are unoccupied and silting up, and its debts are probably unpayable.
How bad can things get?
Or maybe someone has some good news . . .

 

[Seattle]

I see that I made the above post to sciforums when Dubai was struggling in 2009. It made quite a comeback, but the road has always seemed strewn with hazard. Now the tourists have stopped coming, the residents have begun leaving, property prices are falling, its "world" islands are unoccupied and silting up, and its debts are probably unpayable.
How bad can things get?
Or maybe someone has some good news . . .

I don't know that much about it but like many of the projects in that part of the world, it's just stupid planning. You raise from nothing but desert to riches due to air and the other diversification is to build such "luxurious" nonsense.

 

[exchemist]

I don't know that much about it but like many of the projects in that part of the world, it's just stupid planning. You raise from nothing but desert to riches due to air and the other diversification is to build such "luxurious" nonsense.

Dubai was originally a pearl diving port and trading post with Iran (across to Bandar Abbas). It has always considered itself a trading hub, not just an oil-fuelled synthetic city like so many in the Gulf. When I was there in the 80s, under Sheikh Rashid, that is more or less what it still was, albeit by then bolstered with oil money. It was growing rapidly and had some pretension to be the Singapore of the Gulf. Under Sheikh Mohammed, things have gone rather crazy, though. He overdid it, suffered a crash and had to go cap in hand to Abu Dhabi for a bailout.

But it is still far more than a just tourist place. It has a lot of finance and trading, attracted largely by the religious and cultural tolerance that Rashid practised and Mohammed has continued. Even when I was there, non-muslims could get an alcohol licence, to use at certain designated shops, and there was both a Catholic and and a Church of England church. The Catholic one used to hold huge open air masses every Sunday, to which the thousands of Goan and Filipino Catholic workers used to go. (When I had the Filipino Chief Chemist come from our Riyadh plant, for a training course I was running, he wanted more than anything to go to mass. So I took him.) They also have the free port down at Jebel Ali and the dry dock (heavily used when I was there to repair tankers hit by exocets during the Iran-Iraq War.)

So they have more than one string to their bow. I think DXB will survive in some form, even if there are, for now, no tourists.

 

[iceaura]

Under Sheikh Mohammed, things have gone rather crazy, though. He overdid it, suffered a crash and had to go cap in hand to Abu Dhabi for a bailout.

The first I took an interest in it, fleeting, was after learning that Dick Cheney had bought a hide hole there (does he still own it? His legal vulnerability would seem to have dissipated in American amnesia). It reminded me of UK Leguin's poem "The City Of The Plain" ("This is transgression made concrete - - This is the Gonetofar - - - After ( ) you have to go into the desert for a long, for a long, for a long time. Years. Generations. )

 

[exchemist]

The first I took an interest in it, fleeting, was after learning that Dick Cheney had bought a hide hole there (does he still own it? His legal vulnerability would seem to have dissipated in American amnesia). It reminded me of UK Leguin's poem "The City Of The Plain" ("This is transgression made concrete - - This is the Gonetofar - - - After ( ) you have to go into the desert for a long, for a long, for a long time. Years. Generations. )

I wouldn't know about Cheney, I'm afraid. That would have been well after my time there.