With new skyscrapers jostling for space on reclaimed land and each grandiose new project aiming to outdo the last, Dubai has become the world capital of unsustainable development. Frank McDonald, Environment Editor, reports
'Build it, and they will come", said Dubai's ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. And they're coming from everywhere. At 4.20am, the arrivals board at Dubai International Airport shows flights from Addis Ababa, Amsterdam, Bangkok, Beijing, Colombo, Dublin, Heathrow, Hong Kong, Incheon, Jakarta, Johannesburg, Male, Melbourne, Nagoya, Osaka, Shanghai and Singapore - all within three hours.
Emirates, the Dubai-based airline of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and chaired by one of the sheikh's three brothers, is the biggest customer for the Airbus A380, which will carry 555 passengers on two decks; it has ordered 47 of these jumbo jets. And even before its new terminal at the existing airport is open for business, a new airport ("bigger than Heathrow") with six runways is under construction at the other end of the emirate.
The Muslim call to prayer was being relayed in Terminal 2 as we made our way through what is, in effect, a huge shopping mall run by Dubai Duty Free. A big sign says "Welcome to Tomorrow". The "tomorrow" it has in mind is the new El Dorado, with lots of luxury hotels, apartment blocks and villas already built and much more under construction at a frenzied pace. Dubai is Dublin on supersonic speed.
You keep thinking you've seen it all, until yet another high-rise cluster appears out of the heat haze, like a mirage in the desert. Dubai Marina is the most congested by far - dozens of apartment and hotel towers, none less than 30 storeys high and several with at least 50 storeys. And they are all being built in one fell swoop, laid out around newly created waterways and distributor roads.
Burj Dubai, intended to be the tallest skyscraper in the world perhaps even for decades to come, stood at 442.1m (1,459ft) last week. The final height of this multi-faceted, spindle-like structure is a closely-guarded secret, but will certainly exceed 800m - nearly seven times the height of Dublin's Spire. (The world's current tallest building, at 508m, is the Taipei 101 tower in Taiwan).
Planned as the centrepiece of the entirely new Downtown Dubai by leading developer Emaar, the Burj tower - "Monument. Jewel. Icon", its website purrs - will be anchored by an Armani Hotel with 124 luxury "Armani Residences", at least 750 other luxury apartments and a range of shopping and leisure facilities. Air-conditioning will consume the equivalent of 10,000 tonnes of melting ice per day.
Every building in Dubai needs cooling, so you move from air-conditioned hotel to an air-conditioned restaurant or shopping mall in an air-conditioned car or SUV. People here even play golf at night, under floodlights. No wonder then that this emirate (population 1.2 million) has the second highest carbon footprint in the world per capita and, although it is in the desert, a huge consumption of water (450 litres per day).
Simon McNally, who came to Dubai three years ago to design the city's first Irish pub, still finds it amazing that they make so little use of solar power, except for parking ticket dispensers. At McNally Design International, "everything we're pushing is eco-friendly, and they're starting to listen," he says. "There's no way around having air-conditioning here, but it can be run on solar panels."
They'll never run short of superlatives though. The Mall of the Emirates is apparently the biggest shopping centre in the world outside North America, with hundreds of shops anchored by Carrefour, Debenhams, Harvey Nichols and Virgin Megastore. But its chief claim to notoriety is that it has the only indoor ski slope in the Middle East; it sprouts from one side of the complex like an architectural tumour.
Descending from a height equivalent to 25 storeys, Ski Dubai has five ski runs complete with chairlifts, a toboggan course and Alpine-style off-piste cafes. Its angular metal tube contains 6,000 tonnes of snow, with a minimum depth of 70cm, which is replenished nightly by machines. The energy required to maintain a constant indoor temperature of minus 1.4 degrees must be astronomical.
Outside, it's as hot as the hob of hell; in high summer, Dubai often registers 50 degrees, or half the boiling point of water. But this is never officially admitted, because it would mean giving the day off - on full pay - to the vast orange-clad army of construction workers from India, Pakistan and other Asian countries who toil day after day in the terrible heat for as little as €150 to €200 a month.
Diyal Chand (24), an electrician from Punjab, gets up at 4.30am to go to work and doesn't get home until after 7pm. There is no canteen, so he has to bring his own food. And when he goes home, it's to a bunk- bedded room shared with 13 other Indians sleeping in shifts. "In Dubai, everything that is good is beyond our reach", he told Time Out. "We can afford nothing here - this place is built to cater to the rich."
This is Bling City. Everywhere, there are elaborate billboards with enticing slogans and computer- generated images to lure potential purchasers. "Dubai Lagoon - the high watermark of living", one proclaims. "Culture Village - a new home in the heart of culture", says another. "Jumeirah Park - where family matters most" and, most disarmingly, "Live the eighth wonder of the world - The Palm Jumeirah".
Since it opened its doorway to opulence seven years ago, the soaring sail-like Burj al Arab, which bills itself as the world's only seven-star hotel, has been the icon of Dubai's drive to become a leading global tourism destination. Built on an artificial island just off Jumeirah beach, the Burj also provided a template for solving Sheikh Mohammed's biggest problem - Dubai's relative shortage of seafront.
The solution was a bold one: to manufacture real estate by dredging sand from the Gulf and piling it up to create a series of islands just off the coast, arranged like a palm tree laid flat. The Palm Jumeirah was the first product of this daring vision and, in legendary fashion, it sold out within 72 hours of being launched in 2001 - just after the UAE lifted a ban on foreigners buying property.
Development then entered its present phosphorescent phase. Two more "palms" were planned almost immediately, each bigger than the one that went before, and these are now under construction. Then Nakheel, Dubai's leading property company, came up with the brilliant wheeze of building "The World" - a group of 300 islands loosely arranged to mimic the continents on the global map.
IRELAND IS THERE, of course. This 20-hectare sand spit has been purchased by three Galway-based developers, Raymond Norton, Noel Conlon and John O'Dolan, reportedly for €20 million. They planted the Tricolour on it last St Patrick's Day, and are now planning to build "Ireland in the Sun", a boutique hotel and spa (naturally) as well as villas for sale at prices ranging from €750,000 to €2.8 million.
Ageing rocker Rod Stewart was said to have bought Britain, a larger island to the east, but Nakheel insists that it has actually been sold to Richard Branson, and that he's planning a holiday resort for Virgin Upper Class passengers. So far, only 45 per cent of the overall land (or rather sand) area has been bought up - a take-up level which the developers explain by saying islands are for sale "by invitation only".
Nothing has yet been built anywhere in The World apart from a luxury private villa for the Maktoums that Nakheel (which the Sheikh partly owns) was permitted to use as a marketing tool for the first two years. Surrounded by palm trees, manicured lawns and lush vegetation, it has its own water desalination plant and marble-paved helipad: The World is accessible only by helicopter or motor launch.
Located at least 4km offshore, with the increasingly Manhattan-like skyline of Dubai visible in the distance, it is meant to be exclusive. Environmentalists complained that the creation of these artificial islands damaged marine ecosystems in the Gulf, but Nakheel's PR man, Adnan Dawood, proudly points to fish and birds making new habitats for themselves among the fresh sandy reefs.
We went around The World in about 80 minutes. "It's intended as a global symbol of Dubai, like the Pyramids of Giza are to Egypt," Dawood says, adding that it took 326 million cubic metres of sand to create - "enough to fill 33 pyramids". Vast quantities of rock were also quarried from the mountains of Fujairah, the poorest of the UAE's seven emirates, to provide firm foundations for the islands.
Previously, Dubai's coastline was only 67km long. But as a result of all the new real estate being spewed out offshore, it will extend to 1,700km of "prime beachfront property", in estate agent-speak. With his fiefdom likely to run out of oil in 20 years, Sheikh Mohammed decided that tourism would be the next big thing - and the target is to double the number of visitors to Dubai between now and 2010.
"It takes a man of vision to write on water," as an old Arabic poem says. And it's not only the water that's being written on in Dubai, it's the desert too. Twenty kilometres inland, "the most ambitious tourism, leisure and entertainment ever created" (the hype is endless) is planned, with six "phenomenal" themed worlds and 31 themed hotels with 29,200 rooms. Borrowing from Disney, it's called Dubailand.
The Falcon City of Wonders will feature replicas of the Pyramids of Giza, the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower, the Great Wall of China and and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. But it will be a masquerade, because the various "wonders" will contain apartments, villas, shopping malls, hotels, restaurants, health clubs, spas and parks; the only element missing to make it just like Las Vegas will be casinos.
Then there's Hydropolis, the world's first luxury underwater hotel, which its German developer and designer, Joachim Hauser, says was inspired by Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues under the Sea. Installed on a site leased by Sheikh Mohammed, it will have 220 suites and all the usual facilities up to 20 metres beneath the Gulf. Guests will be transported to this fantasy world by train through a tunnel.
A metro is under construction, starting with two lines that extend to 70km as the first phase of an ambitious network of 318km, mainly on elevated viaducts; the first line is due to open in 2009. Tram, bus and marine lines are also being planned as part of a public transport strategy for 2020, but just in case Emiratis remain devoted to their cars, 500km of new roads are also included in the overall plan.
Not to be outdone by its brasher brother, Abu Dhabi - the largest of the seven emirates - is planning to build a vast cultural centre on one of its (real) islands, including a flying saucer-like Louvre museum designed by French "starchitect" Jean Nouvel, as well as another Guggenheim museum by Frank Gehry of Bilbao fame and a Performing Arts Centre by Baghdad-born Zaha Hadid, the "Diva of Deconstruction".
Back in Dubai, Tiger Woods is expected to make about €20 million in fees and benefits from designing his first golf course. Others coming to town include Donald Trump, who was "really blown away by the size of the projects" in the emirate; he is lending his name (but not his money) to Nakheel for The Palm Trump International Hotel and Tower, a €300 million development on The Palm Jumeirah.
One of Dubai's great lures is that it levies no corporation tax, and almost no income tax either. That's why the International Cricket Council upped its sticks at Lord's in London to move there two years ago, and Dick Cheney's chums in Halliburton, the biggest US military contractor in Iraq, announced in March that they plan to relocate its corporate headquarters to Dubai from Houston, Texas.
But the emirate's economic prosperity, once based on fishing and later on oil and international trade as the Middle East's major port, is now critically dependent on tourism. "There are two billion people in Asia and Africa within a four-hour flight radius of Dubai. If just 10 per cent of them came here - that would be 20 million - we'd be happy," says Hamza Mustafa, Nakheel's project manager for the World.
It's doubtful if many Africans living on two dollars a day will be making their way to Dubai any time soon, except to swell the ranks of "guest workers" who now account for 80 per cent of the emirate's resident population. The real game is to persuade moneyed Asians, Europeans and even North Americans to stay in its hotels - 200 more are under construction now - and buy holiday villas or apartments there.
WHAT ABOUT GLOBAL warming? "People have been asking a lot of questions about that since Al Gore's movie came out," Adnan Dawood admits. "But studies have shown that sea levels in the Gulf haven't been rising over the past 50 years." Nonetheless, with island nations such as the Maldives in danger of going under, questions must be raised about the long-term security of Dubai's artificial islands.
Andy Dukes, from St Alban's, in Hertfordshire, isn't too worried. He bought a villa on the first frond of the Palm Jumeirah for about €1.5 million; it has five bedrooms, six bathrooms, a swimming pool, garage and access to the beach via a flight of steps from the patio. "I don't think there's another country in the world with the guts to do something like this", he says. "But when the sea hits the second step, I'll think about selling".
Investors from Ireland, drawn to Dubai by its bling factor, are equally unconcerned. But one leading Irish property developer who made a reconnaissance trip to the emirate is more doubtful. "It's one of the biggest total gambles on real estate I've ever seen. It seems to be attracting the punters, but I wouldn't invest there. Let's see what happens when the available real estate is multiplied by 100."
Taoiseach Bertie Ahern went there last January, on his Irish trade promotion tour of the Arabian peninsula. Gazing out in some awe from his suite on the 40th floor of the Jumeirah Emirates Towers Hotel at all the skyscrapers and construction cranes, Una Claffey, one of his special advisers, remarked: "Well of course, they don't have Bord Pleanála here, you know". It didn't dawn on them that Dubai must be the world capital of unsustainable development.
According to Paris-based architect Patrick Bouchain, who turned the French pavilion at last year's Venice Biennale into a commune, what's happening in Dubai now is "pure, unabashed, outrageous consumption", with no regard for the need to conserve resources. The emirate's grandiose property projects, he said, "are probably the very last great folly humanity will be able to afford".
Temple of dune: where sand becomes land
47The number of Airbus A380s Emirates Airline has ordered
150-200The average monthly euro earnings of a "guest" construction worker
450The number of litres of water used per person, per day
800The estimated final height, in metres, of Burj Dubai, intended to be the world's tallest skyscraper
1,700The length, in kilometres, of the Dubai coastline when all the offshore real estate is built. The length of the original coastline is 67km.
6,000The number of tonnes of snow at Ski Dubai, an indoor ski resort at the Mall of the Emirates
10,000The equivalent number of tonnes of melting ice that Burj Dubai's air-conditioning will consume
326 millionThe number of cubic metres of sand used to reclaim the land for the Nakheel development, "The World"