Dubai

Last weekend, 3 colleagues and I went to Dubai. Much I had heard and read before about Dubai. Now, so close to Dubai, just 1.30h flying, I had the chance to see in-loco this meant-to-be monument to arab enterprise and western capitalism.

In 1971, the British left and Dubai decided to ally with the 6 surrounding states and make up the United Arab Emirates (UAE). This coincided with the discovery of large oil fields. Dubai only had a dribble of oil compared to neighbouring Abu Dhabi, so Sheikh Maktoum decided to use the oil revenues to build a city to be a centre of tourism and financial services, attracting cash and talent from across the world. A city seemed to fall out of the sky, they fast-forwarded from the 18th to the 21st century in one single generation.

However, the global financial crisis didn't spare Dubai, as the flow of investments dries up, halting the mad burst of construction, the secrets of Dubai are slowly leaking out. This is a city built from nothing in just a few wild decades of credit and ecocide, supression and slavery. All efforts are done to hide the foreign underclass who built the city and are hold in absolute slavery conditions. The ecoligical footprint of Dubai residents is the largest inthe world, there are countless buildings half-finished, westerners imprisoned because they failed their financial obligations (there is no such a concept as bankrupcy), etc. Everything is fake in Dubai, from the artificial islands, the worker's contracts, the water (desalinated), to the palm trees.

In short, the dark and disturbing side of the glitter.

The pictures below show a road in Dubai in 1990, before the madness, and the same road nowadays....