“vulgarity, greed and financial meltdown”

More casual bitterness and off-hand prejudice against Dubai today in the UK press. This throw-away line, from the Guardian’s Middle East Editor no less:

In the west Dubai may be a byword for vulgarity, greed and financial meltdown but it also represents modernity and efficiency. These qualities are rare in the Arab world, where secret policemen routinely beat suspects and rely heavily on informers. “Dubai employs modern technology to uncover crimes,” said an Egyptian columnist.

Are “vulgarity, greed and financial meltdown” really unique to Dubai? Or are such associations largely due to journalists such as Mr. Black who unthinkingly propagate them?

Abject stupidity

A few weeks ago I highlighted a generally positive Guardian travel article about the development of boutique hotels in Dubai and how this was a very welcome addition to the tourist landscape. Imagine my annoyance therefore at the news that the Dubai Municipality has decided to crush one of these little gems under the jackboot of regulatory incompetence.

The full story can be found here. Try to read it without getting angry – I can’t.

This sort of episode demonstrates the foolishness of those whose knee-jerk reaction to any social or economic problem is ‘more regulation’. The problem is that those who create and enforce regulations are not some omniscient and other-worldly sages who easily discern the intricate workings of human society, even if they frequently delude themselves into thinking that they are. They are in fact much more likely, as in this case, to be narrow-minded, asinine, box-ticking jobsworths.

All hail The Onion

Out of the many acres of newsprint generated by the ‘Dubai Debt Crisis’, this is by far the best article of them all. The wonderful thing about it is that it simultaneously satirises both the Dubai real estate lunacy and the overwrought hyperbole of the overseas press reports.

Absolute genius.

A few quick things…

Holidays and various festivities have greatly reduced the output of this blog recently. Time for a few brief observations though:

A very good article on the Dubai media circus in The National from a week or so ago – well worth a read.

Unfortunately, Dubai seems to have carefully taken aim and shot itself in the foot again. This story was also in The Times today and will certainly give more ammunition to the anti-Dubai brigade amongst the UK press. Dubai really needs to get a grip on their PR right now. There needs to be a Head of Media Relations for the entire Emirate with direct subordinates within all the government departments and the quasi-government organisations. This matter should immediately have been red-flagged as a potential PR disaster and dealt with in a discreet and professional manner. These things are normally dealt with and ’swept under the carpet’, but only once the PR damage is done.

Visiting Dubai?

There’s an article in the Guardian’s travel section today about Dubai that focuses on the ’boutique’ hotel market that seems to be developing here, albeit on a small scale. I was very pleased to see that two of the guesthouses mentioned are located in Bastakiya: when I was last wandering through that part of town I passed one of these hotels and remember thinking that this small guesthouse possessed infinitely more charm and character than Nakheel’s entire oeuvre. 

I’ve long felt that Dubai has not made enough use of its architectural heritage. Unfortunately, very little of ’Old Dubai’ still exists and that which does has had to be radically ’restored’ due to the nature of the traditional building materials (coral and mud) and the climate. In the (understandable) rush to modernise, the restoration of the crumbling traditional architecture was not a high priority. This meant that only a fraction of the original buildings survived.

A few developments have tried to draw inspiration from Bastakiya: Madinat Jumeirah and Old Town are probably the most notable. As nice as these are, they are ultimately conventional structures and developments dressed up with some indigenous stylistic flourishes. Don’t get me wrong, they are infinitely better than the generic Nakheel/Damac dross, but they lack the slightly higgledy-piggledy charm of Bastakiya with its narrow streets, maze-like layout and shaded courtyards. It’s just a shame that there is so little left of it.

A large section of Deira was apparently due for redevelopment as part of the Palm Deira lunacy development. Given the supreme unlikelihood of this project ever happening, perhaps the planners might like to take a pleasant wander through Bastakiya before they come up with their next scheme, if only to remind them that authenticity is far more cost-effective than artificial islands.

(If you are looking for photos of ‘Old Dubai’, this site is well worth a visit.)

Pedway to Heaven

A new idea from the RTA:

Dubai is planning to build air-conditioned walkways to link major buildings and encourage more people to walk around the city.

The walkways, called pedways, will link major buildings, shopping centres, metro stations and bus stops(.)

Unfortunately, no matter how ’pedestrian-friendly’ you make the streets of Dubai, the extreme summer temperatures mean that we are not all going to abandon our cars. In some areas though, air-conditioned walkways could be a viable option. I only wish they’d implemented it a decade ago. If a system like Calgary’s plus-15s had been integrated into the planning process early enough, then high-density areas such as Sheikh Zayed Road could have been built with this in mind and connected relatively easily. Alternatively, master developers could have been told that the large-scale high-density residential or commercial projects had to be designed with underground or air-conditioned pedestrian routes linked to designated public transport hubs. I know it is easy to be wise after the fact, but I’m sure that such regulations exist in other countries and could have been ‘borrowed’ by Dubai when the boom started. In addition, the summer heat is not something new and really ought to have been a major consideration in urban planning from the beginning. 

There’s no news like bad news…

It’s interesting to note the contrasting reactions of the British press to the Dubai World debt freeze and yesterday’s $10 billion bail-out. The debt-freeze was front page news and opinion fodder for several days; the bail-out and timely repayment of the sukuk are rapidly relegated to the business pages. Indeed, the word ‘Dubai’ doesn’t appear at all on the Daily Telegraph landing page right now. I find this lack of attention interesting given that we were apparently on the verge of catastrophe a few weeks ago.

Could that be because a number of opinion writers have been made to look a tad silly? Or perhaps because the story doesn’t fit neatly into the simplistic ‘rise-and-fall’ narrative they’ve been so busy constructing?

Absolute Morons

Just when I thought that sober heads were beginning to prevail, The Times once again plumbs the depths of journalism with a truly daft article about Dubai. The headline in the print edition?

Bursting of the bubble leaves life in broken city state feeling like the last days of Rome

(…) Welcome to the modern equivalent of the last days of Rome. The failure of Dubai World, one of the Emirate’s flagship companies, to honour a debt due last month has rocked this city state to its foundations. By any conventional logic Dubai is now a busted flush.

This came as news to me I must say. I was blissfully unaware that Dubai was under threat from Germanic hordes to the North, or that we have developed a dangerous reliance on Barbarian mercenaries. I was also ignorant of the fact that the Roman Empire was so fatally undermined by the debts of its quasi-governmental investment company, Rome Universitas.

The article begins with yet another of those smug and self-congratulatory ‘word-pictures’ that seem to be mandatory when writing about Dubai. They don’t reach the pretentious depths of Johann (who could?), but it’s still fluff designed to mask the fact that there is no effective and coherent argument being made.

Superficially there has been no change to life here in the days since the failure to pay up triggered financial carnage but nowhere does superficial as convincingly as Dubai.

Let’s deconstruct this argument: we looked around and couldn’t really find any telling evidence that what happened the other week actually really changed anything. But Dubai is superficial and therefore what appears to be the case is not the case! Therefore, Dubai is about to collapse. QED

Gold star chaps, really impressive stuff.

The article then tries to support their claims with an expat case study and a few real estate related facts. I don’t deny that a lot of people got hit by the real estate or that this sector is going to take a long time to recover, but the market plunge began well over a year ago and has actually started to stabilise, so it hardly falls into the realm of news and predates the Dubai World situation. It does not support their notion that the Dubai World default has ‘rocked the city to its very foundations’, but is more indicative of the fact that the Dubai World default is actually a lagging indicator of the real estate crash and global credit crunch that are working themselves through. Their argument falls into the same trap as so many other journalists: the assumption that the Dubai economy consisted purely of real estate. What they fail to recognise is that the real estate boom was a very recent (albeit dramatic) phenomenon and that the city also serves as a trading, transport and commercial hub for the entire region. While the real estate boom attracted all the headlines, it was actually a negative and distorting influence on the traditional basis of the economy that undermined Dubai’s competitiveness. In the long run, the falling cost structures may actually make the city more attractive as a regional hub when compared to potential rivals.

What else do they offer in support of the claim that Dubai is about to be looted by Visigoths?

The borrowed money has not just gone on property. A state-of-the-art metro train system, operated by Serco, opened amid much fanfare in September at a cost of $7.6 billion. At 9.30am on a Thursday the station at Dubai airport’s cavernous Terminal 3 is empty. The train into the city, capable of carrying more than 640 people, has 21 on board.

I wonder why they don’t mention anything about Terminal 3 itself? Might it be because it was busy and this wouldn’t fit the decline and fall theme? Usage of the metro station at the airport has been very low because of the bizarre restrictions placed on carrying luggage. Given that they went to the Mall of the Emirates, it’s odd that they don’t the mention the extremely busy metro station there, or take the time to google ‘dubai metro stats’ to get more meaningful information. Then again, that would be proper journalism I suppose.

Anyway, must go. There’s a chap called Alaric at the front door and he’s got some friends with him.

You leave Dubai for a few days…

It transpired that my brief Eid visit to Istanbul coincided perfectly with the eruption of the Dubai World debt furore. I was therefore able to while away the time at Dubai Airport last Friday by reading the anguished reporting of The Times on the issue. I continued to follow the story on the main news sites over the next few days; such was the frenzy of speculation and doom-mongering that I wondered if I was going to return home to find the dystopian vision of Simon Jenkins writ large, or that the entire populace had simply decided to give up and commit mass harakiri.

As our flight back took us over Dubai, I was therefore relieved to see that the buildings remained standing and that the city had neither been consumed by fire nor swallowed by the earth. My concerns were further alleviated when I discovered that the airport had not yet been occupied by a horde of desperate refugees with tear-stained faces and that the residents of our apartment building had yet to resort to cannibalism.

Sarcasm aside, it has certainly been an ‘interesting’ week or so for Dubai and there’s a PR advisor out there somewhere who needs a good kicking. The attempt to downplay the story by releasing the statement just before the Eid and Thanksgiving Holidays backfired spectacularly: the gaps in the story and general unavailability of clear facts meant that media was able to merrily pile in with rampant speculation to fill the vacuum, merrily stoking panic as they did so. The problem was exacerbated by the fact that so many decisions in this region take place behind closed doors and are veiled in secrecy, which meant that even the most august media organisations were largely reduced to playing guessing games and assuming the worst. It was always going to be difficult, but the timing and handling of the announcement turned it into a media maelstrom.

I have been heartened to see at least some damage control being exercised in the last few days, as well as some back-tracking in the international press with some much more professional and balanced articles appearing in the Guardian (here and here) and in the FT. (I would link to the FT article, but annoyingly they limit online access to articles. I think it was in Wednesday’s edition though if you are subscriber.) The first Guardian article is probably one of the most sensible I’ve read about Dubai in the international press (it’s not difficult), simply as a result of possessing some nuance, intelligence and perspective. The second article also has some merit in that the author seems to have at least tried to consider various points of view, but he can’t help lapsing into Guardianista silliness every now and again.

Some of the other more sensible commentary can be found here, here and here. If you are looking for foolish moralising and speculation, I invite you to read the latest offerings from Johann and Simon.  There is also this odd offering in The Times which is worth a read, even though I largely disagree with the author’s claims and conclusions. If time allows I will revisit these, but just in case I invite you to look at a superb response to and parody of Johann’s earlier previous piece on Dubai. If you want to remind yourself of how amusing it is for the British press to be damning other nations for living beyond their means and piling up unsustainable debt, this might serve the purpose and have British citizens googling “how to emigrate to Australia and Canada”.

This story still has a long way to run and dealing with the debt is going to be a long and difficult process. I hope that all the skeletons are out of the closet and if not, that they are in the very near future. I also think that there are going to be very serious questions asked of those financial institutions that lent the money in the first place as more details start to emerge. Arabian Business have a good comment piece on this issue.

I remember going to the UK in the 1980s and 1990s and the word ‘Dubai’ being met with a baffled look, sometimes followed by the question: “Isn’t that near Saudi?”. If nothing else, this has been a reminder that Dubai is now on the map, for good or ill. Its prominence means that it cannot avoid international media scrutiny, but has to try and make this exposure work for it rather than against it. Hopefully Dubai has now learnt just how fickle the press can be and will adapt accordingly. Perhaps it can now get back to generating some more positive headlines, starting with the opening of the Burj Dubai early next year.