By Douglas Langmead
Edition 5 – May 2015 Pages 32-34
Tags: cities • transport infrastructure • commercial property
Paul Carder’s blog “To the Heart of the suburban dinosaur” explored the impact of agile working on the “dinosaurs” of large-scale, single purpose office buildings. In the western world, these behemoths emerged in industrial office estates, driven by the perceived benefits of having office workers agglomerated in order to achieve efficiency of communication and dissemination. The business practices and technologies that underpinned these buildings have evolved and improved and many are in the process of being re-purposed.
Things happen on a grander scale than that in the Middle East, where the mantra is “if the land-use doesn’t fit the land, make more land.” Here, the patterns of work and place have evolved differently from the west, and at a much faster pace.
Creeping tides of development have spread rapidly out from the centres of traditional trade and commerce to vast tracts of new development, driven by ambitious programmes and an awareness of the need to build a society that will endure and prosper long after the world’s dependence on fossil fuels has passed. For developers, this has meant wave after wave of semi-government and government estate developments, some founded on single-purpose development in the tradition of the Souq, leading to Dubai’s showcase projects of the early 2000’s – “Internet”, “Gold” “Media” and similar estates that were proclaimed “Cities” (only “Knowledge” is a “Village”). The logic and lifestyles of creating huge mixed use developments, both onshore and in colossal reclamation projects offshore, have seen various models of work and place evolve.
Offshore reclamation projects have increased Dubai’s 1975 coastline by about 180km, adding (as of 2014) about 70km² of prime coastal land of which less than a fifth has been fully developed. The ultimate vision prior to the global economic crisis was to create more than 520 km of new coastline. Those plans have been scaled back, but not abandoned.
The hourglass shapes of the two Palms (Jumeirah & Jebel Ali) effectively funnel all access through a few narrow causeways, with travel distances of up to 16km just to reach the main coastal highway leading to other destinations. The City Metro that was completed just four years ago is already unable to cope with passenger numbers, even with trains running at 2-minute intervals at peak hours.A monorail runs the length of Palm Jumeirah, but terminates 1km short of a metro station and is hence used only by tourists and not commuters.
These disconnects arose as a result of the incredible pace of development, constantly changing aims and structure of the development authorities, and inability to coordinate all the changes in a very short space of time. Faced with commuting distances of more than 50km to central Dubai an alternative is required for places to work closer to home, or work practices that reduce the dependency on a daily commute.
Jumbo caravanserai
The primary form of transport in Dubai is not the car – it is the aeroplane. Dubai has reinvented itself as a caravanserai at a major crossroads of global travel. Dubai International toppled Heathrow as the world’s busiest international airport in 2014. Passenger traffic at Dubai International and Al Maktoum International combined reached 71.3 million last year. Traffic for the two airports is expected to exceed 126 million by 2020 and 200 million by 2030.The vast majority are on their way to somewhere else, but many stopover or commute to nearby Gulf states: passenger growth is averaging close to 10% annually. An extension of the Dubai Metro to link the two airports in time for Expo 202 has recently been announced.
All those planes mean work and revenue. Dubai Duty Free recorded annual sales of US$1.9 billion in 2014,expected to rise to US$2.1B in 2015.Add to that revenue from sister international airports in Abu Dhabi, Sharjah and the brand-new,10-runway Dubai World Central Airport and you begin to appreciate what a driver travel and tourism is for the UAE economy.
75% of the population are expatriates, and all of them came by plane, leave by plane and return to their home countries or on holiday annually. Work is spread across the region. On a typical day there are 65 flights on regional airlines between Dubai and Doha, just 375km away in neighbouring Qatar. Hundreds of passengers on those flights are business people, plying their trade in both countries.  The face-to-face nature of business in the Middle East dictates that business transactions that could easily be managed over the internet are instead conducted over the length of a day, with six-hour travel and transfers on top.
Population grows but traffic flows struggle to cope
Since 1975, Dubai’s population has grown from just over 200,000,mostly local citizens, to nearly 2.2 million, a tenfold increase in population and a shift in demographics to the point where UAE citizens are now outnumbered 4 to 1 in the urban centres, and for the most part wouldn’t have it any other way.
Expatriates feel welcome here. “The National” daily newspaper reported in February 2013 that the most populous neighbourhood in the emirate was Muhaisnah 2, a labour camp area known as Sonapur, where there are more than 3,000 men for each woman. Muhaisnah 2 contains about 8% of Dubai’s population in 5.5 square kilometres. In residential suburban areas, populations are more evenly balanced, with 29 boroughs having a majority of females, but in far lower overall numbers.
For the UAE, immigrants are not a problem – they are a necessity, and are made to feel welcome. Subject to local rules, and expats can own property (but not land), drink, smoke, dress immodestly, eat pork bought in local supermarkets, educate their children in schools with their home country curricula, get access to government sponsored healthcare services, attend church and commemorate Anzac Day in public. Generally speaking, expats don’t pay income tax, but pay as they go with rates and lifestyle choices. The UAE’s multicultural blend of ethnicities, faiths, religions and lifestyles works pretty well.
A peculiarity of the economy is that the armies of blue-collar workers remit 90% of their salaries to support families back in their home countries, whereas the higher-paid white-collar workers typically see the vast majority of their earnings allocated to the high costs of living and the luxury lifestyle that attracted them to Dubai in the first place.
Need more buildings? Make more land!
In the period from 2002 to date,the pressure to build and expand in Dubai has led to vast offshore reclamation projects – these have expanded the landmass offshore by almost the same area as developments onshore. In the boom years from 2003-2008,the map of Dubai was akin to an advent calendar – every couple of months,another swathe of the map would be lifted with the announcement of the release of another off- plan development,fuelled by a gold-rush mentality that saw properties changing hands numerous times at ever-increasing values,often before a sod had been turned….