ON DUBAI'S MIRACULOUS GROWTH





The traffic in Dubai nowadays moves throughout the day at the speed of camel caravans - slowly, head to tail, in seemingly endless streams of single-minded commerce. Despite the efforts being made by its Administration to improve the road network – it plans to invest Dhs 25 bn. (over $6 billion) in roads alone by 2008 – and the ambitious underground network system that burrows in the sand beneath, Dubai will remain what its planners fear: ‘an automobile-oriented, automobile-dependent city’. Almost 96% of its movement is by private or commercial vehicles; the remaining 4% use public buses or the traditional abra or ferry boats that criss-cross its creek.


Were by some unlikely happen-stance the late Sheikh Rashid Bin Saeed Al Maktoum to revisit the sheikhdom he coaxed into the UAE federation in 1971, there would be a few buildings he would still recognize, such as the Deira Tower or the Al-Futtaim building in Deira Dubai or the Dubai Trade Centre on the Bur Dubai side that he himself commissioned. It prided itself once on being the tallest in the Gulf but when it was completed and then stood embarrassingly empty, many sand-bound locals derided their shaikh’s pretentiousness. Shaikh Rashid solved this problem of his own making by renting it to anyone who aspired to do business in Dubai.


What Sheikh Rashid would find more difficult to do today is to reach these buildings. His roads have been dug up, his roundabouts decimated, his highways highjacked to fulfill the lofty ambitions of his son and the present ruler of Dubai Shaikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum. Although Shaikh Mohammed had been part of a family conclave governing Dubai during the ten year illness of Shaikh Rashid, it is only since January 2006 that he has become the sole ruler of Dubai. Like his canny father, he is prepared to play second fiddle to Abu Dhabi so long as he can play First Violin in his own emirate – a 4,114 square kilometer handkerchief of real estate that is rapidly becoming another Manhattan, this one built on sand. [EXTRACT]





Published in DAWN magazine section, 28 Jan. 2007.