A Paradise Built on Oil

Industry experts cautiously estimate that 15 to 25 per cent of the world’s cranes are in Dubai. After Shanghai (current population: 15 million), Dubai (current population: 1.5 million) is the world’s biggest building site. Adam Nicolson reports for the UK Guardian on the breathtaking scale:

Dubai is growing faster than any city on earth. “Mushroom City”, Ravi Piyush, a plumply content dealer in the Gold Souk, said to me. “Nothing today, everything tomorrow.” The World Bank reckons that the reconstruction of Iraq is going to cost $53bn. Here, along the strip of footballer-friendly sand that stretches 25 miles or so along the shores of the Persian Gulf, there is, at a rough estimate, about $100bn worth of projects either underway or planned for the near future. That is a numbing figure, ungraspable. It is the equivalent of every single dollar invested in the United States from abroad last year; almost twice the foreign investment in China.

This rapidly growing capital of international finance is becoming a paradise for the very rich, its construction fueled by oil revenues. Of course, those buildings are making themselves, rather by a flood of cheap labor from Southeast Asia. Those providing the muscle to build this city enjoy little of the rights of those who own the buildings. Nicolson continues:

There is no hint of democracy in Dubai. There is a consultative council whose members are nominated by the ruling family. A group of five old Arab families control the entire emirate. The working and living conditions of the construction labourers and the domestic servants from south Asia are notoriously bad. Thirty-nine building workers died on sites last year, 22 of them simply by falling, as provision of slings and ropes is inadequate. The Dubai press is full of stories criticising companies for late payment, no payment, the confiscation of passports, imposition of penalties for minor infringements, the manoeuvrings of loan sharks and all the other expectable abuses of a poorly regulated employment system. The property laws are explicitly racist: no non-UAE national can own land outside the designated free zones. No foreign company can operate in the country without paying a UAE “sponsor” to be their local representative. No one except UAE nationals can get one of the plum jobs in a government department. Education and healthcare are free for all UAE nationals but no one else. The local press will never be seen to criticise the government and when, for example, I tried to interview the director of strategic planning in the offices of Dubai municipality, I was told I could only do so “if we have checked you out first and seen that what you will write will be favourable”. Not much hybridisation there.

The prolific Mike Davis provides perspective on this ‘mushroom city’:

Under (Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum’s) leadership, the coastal desert has become a huge circuit board into which the elite of transnational engineering firms and retail developers are invited to plug in high-tech clusters, entertainment zones, artificial islands, “cities within cities” — whatever is the latest fad in urban capitalism. The same phantasmagoric but generic Lego blocks, of course, can be found in dozens of aspiring cities these days, but Sheik Mo has a distinctive and inviolable criterion: Everything must be “world class,” by which he means number one in The Guinness Book of Records. Thus Dubai is building the world’s largest theme park, the biggest mall, the highest building, and the first sunken hotel among other firsts.

Davis continues, illustrating how Dubai is hardly the paradise it’s made out to be:

Dubai, like its neighbors, flouts ILO labor regulations and refuses to adopt the international Migrant Workers Convention. Human Rights Watch in 2003 accused the Emirates of building prosperity on “forced labor.” Indeed, as the British Independent recently emphasized in an expos?© on Dubai, “The labour market closely resembles the old indentured labour system brought to Dubai by its former colonial master, the British.”

“Like their impoverished forefathers,” the paper continued, “today’s Asian workers are forced to sign themselves into virtual slavery for years when they arrive in the United Arab Emirates. Their rights disappear at the airport where recruitment agents confiscate their passports and visas to control them”

In addition to being super-exploited, Dubai’s helots are also expected to be generally invisible. The bleak work camps on the city’s outskirts, where laborers are crowded six, eight, even twelve to a room, are not part of the official tourist image of a city of luxury without slums or poverty. In a recent visit, even the United Arab Emirate’s Minister of Labor was reported to be profoundly shocked by the squalid, almost unbearable conditions in a remote work camp maintained by a large construction contractor. Yet when the laborers attempted to form a union to win back pay and improve living conditions, they were promptly arrested.

Upon reviewing the itinerary for my upcoming trip, I noticed that I had a layover in Dubai on my return flight from India. I’m hoping to find the time to spend a day or two exploring the city. And maybe check out some prime man-made island real-estate.

Link to the Mike Davis article
Link to Dorian Young’s Flickr set on Dubai

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