Ever met a guy who’s trying to be too mature, too soon, too fast? You know – the 8th grader who carries around a smartphone and a PDA, brings his laptop to class for note-taking, and regularly tries to give stock recommendations to his uncaring friends acquintances over break?
It’s funny/creepy when a kid grows too mentally big to fit his own prepubescent shoes, but it’s kind of scary when a country decides to take that route and grow itself much bigger and more grandiose than it was 20 years ago. I’m talking specifically about the country and city of Dubai, one of the fastest growing places in the world. A country in the middle east that decided it couldn’t rely on its punitive oil reserves, the government started to go po-mo back in the early ninties and has been continuously building ever since, creating a booming tourist industry.
You might have heard of these guys; they’re the ones who built the sailboat-like 7-star luxury hotel Burj Al Arab with $1,000-$23,000 nightly suites, the ones who seem to love making artifical islands off the coast (the grand projects are known as The Palms and The World) and selling them for ridiculous amounts of money, and the ones who are strangely enamored having the best in the world, from the biggest mall to the tallest tower. Yea, there’s a lot of building going on, with people estimating that 15%-25% of the world’s cranes are currently in the country.
And it certainly looks very nice, something an American or European town couldn’t pull off nowadays due to the probable outcry of the environmental destruction. Doesn’t it seem a little…too much to take on for a country with only a million people? As I was driving home from work, I was thinking of how the greater Bay Area’s building and road infrastructure came from gradual, steady growth from San Francisco and to a lesser extent San Jose and Oakland. There are a few sore points (I-101, Eastbound 92/I-880 junction, East Palo Alto, I’m looking at you guys) here and there, but we have it pretty good compared to most major east coast, European, or Asian metropolitans.
Back to Dubai, though, it seems like the focus on building the world’s largest/tallest/biggest/grandest structures have blinded them to everything else that comes with being a city. Reportedly prostitution is common, roads are congested as they were never designed for this influx of people, urban overcrowding and housing inflation is barely kept in control, and the cheap workers these construction firms are hiring from India and Pakistan (unsurprisingly) don’t like their $5/day pay. Then there’s the environmental impact and the sheer cost of maintaining something as fancy as The Palm Islands; what is it with people trying to build oasises in deserts and then spending an obscene amount of energy and manpower to keep the illusion that they are, in fact, not in the middle of a desert?
Being nowhere near an expert on these matters, I can say with absolute certainty that Dubai will be a failed experiment in 20 years or so, when the government realizes it has taken on way more than it can possibly handle. Until then, though, I’m going to chalk down Dubai as a place I want to visit someday…soon.