How Dubai Became Dubai
The world became acquainted with Dubai only a few years ago. The city that launched a thousand magazine features was presented to Westerners as many things: Rich, strange, tacky, threatening. But most of all, it was presented as new. The instant global metropolis with a “skyline on crack” captivated the world with record-setting skyscrapers, indoor ski slopes and a stunningly diverse population. With 96 percent of its population foreign born, Dubai makes even New York City’s diversity — 37 percent of New Yorkers are immigrants — seem mundane. As a pair of American observers put it, Dubai is a city where “everyone and everything in it — its luxuries, laborers, architects, accents, even its aspirations — was flown in from someplace else.” But for all the breathless coverage of Dubai’s supposedly unprecedented emergence, the only truly new thing about Dubai is the “flown in” part. Dubai was touted as a new phenomenon, but it is actually just the most recent iteration of a far older one. For 300 years, instant cities modeled on the West have been built in the developing world in audacious attempts to wrench a lagging region into the modern world. While the rise of these global crossroads cities was once checked by the speed of ocean liners and locomotives, today their growth is powered by intercontinental jets that can move a passenger from any major city in the world to any other in a single day. So while the city of Dubai is new, the idea of Dubai is not. It’s just that in the age of jet-powered globalization, the idea can achieve liftoff as never before.
As the locomotive built Daniel Burnham’s Chicago, the jetliner built [United Arab Emirates Prime Minister] Sheikh Mohammed’s Dubai. In 1974, Sheikh Rashid tasked the young Mohammed with overseeing the growth of Dubai International Airport. In the 1980s, Mohammed tapped British Airways veteran Maurice Flanagan to launch Emirates airline, which would become an archetype of the Dubai model: A state-owned company managed by Western experts that would thrive in open international competition.
