Naked in Dangerous Places - Cash Peters [70]
“So what's this, then?”
I'm standing on a hillock of freshly excavated soil before a jagged skyline of unfinished metal and glass towers stretching as far as the cynical eye can see.
“What you're looking at, mate, is what Dubai's all about,” Nick explains proudly.
“Half-assed construction projects?”
“No. Sheik Mohammed wants this city to 'ave the biggest and the best of everything. He wants to be a player and put it on the map, bringing in more and more people. See those condos over there? Every one of 'em's sold already.”
Shrouded in cranes, a dozen huge towers gnaw at the clouds like punched-in teeth. Most have their upper floors missing, though not for much longer. Buildings like these are shooting up all over town at record speeds—which hardly gives me confidence that they'll stay up, quite honestly—thanks to a reservoir of imported labor flooding in from the Indian subcontinent and willing to work for minimum wage. A rate of four dollars a day is not uncommon.
The guy behind the construction splurge was Dubai's forward-thinking ruler, Sheikh Maktoum bin Rashid al-Maktoum. In the 1970s he came up with a daring vision: to take this primitive Muslim country of fifteen hundred or so square miles and transform it into one of the premier free enterprise economies and tourist destinations in the world. Unhampered by cumbersome bureaucracy (being a dictator, Sheikh Mak was the bureaucracy), and tapping into substantial revenues he'd pulled in from oil, he began devising the infrastructure for a wondrous city of the future, then gathered a bunch of architects and engineers together, clapped his hands, and said, “Make it so!” exactly the way Aladdin did when he lived here.
But here's where the plan got to be really audacious: the city wouldn't be built piecemeal, he resolved, the way the rest of us would do it, a little bit at a time to see how things go, because that could take forever. No, everything would be put up more or less simultaneously, at a total cost of around $400 billion.
Clap, clap. “Make it so!”
Well, you've never seen as much frenzied activity in all your life. Before long, there were more people building the city than actually living in it, 80 percent of them from overseas. And I don't know how many cranes there are in the world right now, but I do know, because Nick told me, that at any one time 25 percent of them are to be found in Dubai.
Anyway, by the time Sheikh Mak died in 2006, he'd performed a miracle, bringing this large patch of sand firmly into the twentieth century, exactly as he'd promised.
Unfortunately, by then it was the twenty-first century. So it fell to his younger brother, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, who thankfully was also a visionary with deep, oil-lined pockets, to grab the baton and take the plan even further, expanding Dubai into a prime residential location, a thriving business center, and, someday, the number one tourist destination on the planet.
Agog at the ambition of it all, we retreat from the crushing heat to the safety of the van, and, with the AC cranked up to “January in Reykjavik,” set off into town along a wide, dusty, unfinished highway.
“This,” Nick says, leading us to a broad stretch of sand on the Gulf called Jumeirah Beach, “is an iconic building, the one that really put Dubai on the map.”
On the other side of a concrete wall we find the Burj Al Arab, the Tower of the Arabs, hogging the horizon to our left. The world's tallest hotel at the time, at 1,053 feet high, it was built to look like an old merchant sailing ship, called