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WE BUILT THIS CITY STATE

Talk about making something out of nothing. Dubai has turned a desert wasteland into a glittering oasis.

Text: DOUGLAS BELL

1 | 2 | 3 | OCT '04

Here are a couple of important things to remember if and when you fly into Dubai.

First: Lose any goofy cartoon prejudices you may harbour, rife with images of Bedouins, camels and Peter O’Toole traipsing through the desert. This way you won’t look quite as agog as I did walking through the pristine, ultramodern, ultrahuge, ultraswank Dubai International Airport. The facts are that the shopping at the airport rivals Fifth Avenue and, for the price, the food is a hell of a lot better.

Second: If you do step beyond the terminal’s sliding doors anytime save the cooler months of January through March, be prepared. The heat is a palpable force and will actually knock you backwards. I would suggest that, in the spirit of Dubai, you shrug it off and move on to your next appointment. After all, it was in the midst of these same steamy conditions that the denizens of this desert port built up this city of over a million souls from less than 10,000 in 30 years. If you can’t stand their heat, I’m pretty sure they don’t need you in their kitchen.

Dubai is by every reasonable standard an avatar of modernity. It is wildly cosmopolitan (less than 20 percent of its residents are nationals) and aggressively entrepreneurial. (There’s no income tax, and Jebel Ali – the world’s largest man-made port, 30 kilometres west of the city – is the largest tax-free industrial zone in the Middle East.) As a result, Dubai is growing like wildfire. And the thing about its growth is that like that other desert monolith – Las Vegas – the place has become a kind of advertisement for itself. It isn’t good enough for Dubai to grow; it must be seen to be growing.

Highways, suburban sprawl, massive new industrial and office complexes are punctuated by developments whose audacious scale and design mark them as a "symbol" of Dubai’s ambition. Mammoth residential and resort islands built from scratch off the coast – one in the shape of a palm tree, the other replicating a map of the world – are well off the drawing boards. Two thousand villas on Palm Island, Jumeirah, sold out in less than a week last year. (Among the early buyers was soccer’s global superbrand David Beckham.) These landfill projects will more than quadruple Dubai’s 40-kilometre coastline.

My most intimate experience of this phenomenon was during my two-night stay at the Burj Al Arab. Depending on which of the hotel’s PR people you speak to, the Burj is variously described as the world’s tallest hotel (with the world’s tallest hotel atrium); the world’s most expensive hotel (that covers both the cost of construction and the room rate); and the only hotel in the world where you have to take a fake submarine ride in order to get to the hotel’s underwater restaurant.

It’s impossible to get past the publicity about the building, which, I suspect, is because the building itself is advertising. It’s mammoth, built on its own island hundreds of metres offshore. During a stop on the PGA European Tour at this year’s Dubai Desert Classic, Tiger Woods hit balls off the helipad on top of the hotel. The photographs taken from different angles suggested the similarity in Woods’ arched follow-through and the shape of the building. As symbols go, Dylan Thomas it ain’t, but there was a kind of poetry to these images. The kind that lures people to spend thousands of dollars a night to stay in the hotel where Tiger Woods hit balls off the roof.

And yet none of this impressed me as much as my first conversation with a member of the staff. (A note here: Even the labourers are a kind of brand. Driving through Dubai, you’ll often see gangs of East Indian men, moving between work sites, all dressed in identical blue coveralls.) On a ride up to the hotel’s foyer, past an elaborate dancing water fountain and a massive aquarium running the length of the escalator, was an East Indian fellow named Joseph who I discovered is from Goa. This interested me because Goa was at one time a way station for Portugal’s far-flung empire. I mentioned this, and, in a moment, Joseph was offering to rent me his house there. "I have a brochure I can show you," he said. "Also I’m on the Internet."

Joseph gave voice to a ferocious commercial instinct that permeates the air in Dubai as surely as the heat and humidity. Everyone is working a deal. Land, a condo, office space, a Boston whaler and a berth in a marina that hadn’t been built yet were all offered to me in the course of conversations that may have started mundanely enough – "Do you know where the bathroom is?" – but quickly ratcheted up to a commercial fever pitch. I can’t say I ever took anybody up on these offers, but hardly anyone seemed to take it personally. In a city that now boasts 272 hotels with 30,000 rooms and an airport that is gearing up to handle 60 million passengers a year, the next deal is always just around the corner. The question is, why is this happening here? Unlike so many of the other so-called trust fund states in the region, Dubai receives only a fraction of its revenue from oil and gas (around six percent). By necessity, it is positioning itself as a trade hub servicing the business and tourism needs of a region where 1.5 billion people live within two hours flying time.

1 | 2 | 3 | OCT '04