Cityscape revisited

A wee game of scrabble before we start?

CITYSCAPE
AY, SCEPTIC
SPACEY TIC
ICECAP STY
CYSTIC APE

Unless you live on Mars or in Umm Al Qwain you will have noticed the annual Hajj of the intrepid and gullible to the Dubai Word Trade Exhibition Centre this past week.

There is no other way to describe what is Cityscape. There are those who believe, those who believe what they are told and those who want to believe because everybody else does.

Thousands of starry-eyed “property professionals”, Saudi geezers and Russian biznezmen with suitcases full of cash descend onto the “World’s largest property fair” for their yearly fix of hyperbolic announcements of new outlandish developments, and to ogle scantily clad Lebanese hostesses. Aspirational newcomers can be identified by the cabin trolleys full of glossy pamphlets they drag behind them and the awed expressions on their faces and the drool down their cheeks.

This is not so much a trade exhibition as it is a cattle market: the biggest udder gets the most attention; This is real estate porn, marginally more salubrious than a car show (and the hostesses certainly look the part).
Subcontinental hustlers in mustard yellow shirts and ill fitting coats enquire with Uzbek girls about squarefoot rates, and barefoot rates. Others stop at every stall shrieking with childlike excitement and gorge themselves at glitzy blinking scale models. They are instantly pounced upon by sales agents with standard issue gelled hair and pungent aftershave, sweepingly pointing out this signature tower and that amazing water feature, Karama Rolexes dangling from their wrists, liberally spewing senseless superlatives about “perfect community living” among “brilliant verdant oases” of ubiquitous Greg Norman designed golf courses.

My enquiry at the ‘Dubai Properties’ stall about solutions to the apparent power shortage in Business Bay which forces completed buildings in this ‘elite new CBD’ to run on diesel generators for the next three years, or the absence of a functioning sewage network, is met with a blank stare by Ahmed from Alexandria, who arrived six months ago in Dubai and now offers his expert knowledge of the real estate market to prospective buyers.
I ask about sales rates at ‘Mudon’, a new sand-coloured faux Arabesque Lala land somewhere in the sticks behind Arabian Ranches. My joke about the colours of the buildings looking like they had ‘mud on’ them is lost in translation. Ahmed informs me that without problem he can fix me up with a Dhs 5 million mortgage in no time and that the project would definitely be completed on schedule. According to my bank manager I can’t even afford to borrow two million, but for a brief moment I am tempted to suspend reason altogether and give into the dream of certainty and security: The fata morgana of a project in Dubai being within affordable reach and completed on target.

Even if everything that was launched at past Cityscapes and half of everything on this year’s show got built in the next ten years, I promise you that Dubai is going to become one uninhabitable behemoth of a town, or rather a conglomerate of utterly disjointed “communities” for rich people – each one with its own “water feature”, “amazing” signature building, idiotic joy ride monorail and amazing traffic jams at the access points.

One example: This year’s biggest and bestest announcement, “Jumeirah Gardens” by ‘Meraas Development’: In their own words a mega projects with a twelve year program - read 19 years with neither power nor sewage network in the end.
Three mega towers for good measure and dozens of 20- 50 storey towers. And of course, the “water feature” “defining” the “community”.
This is madness on a megalomaniac scale flying in the face of any single principle of responsible farsighted urban planning. At one side the development is hemmed in by the back road of SZR (access to the parking lots of the entire stretch of buildings from Fairmont hotel to the ShangriLa), on the other sides by Safa park, Al Wasl road and Diyafa street. Imagine the construction access alone for this mammoth building site. Not only will this create absolute traffic mayhem on these roads for the next decade, the construction of several bridges to be built on Wasl road and Beach road to link ‘Jumeirah Gardens’ with a large offshore island development (The ‘Universe’) will choke quality of life in Jumeirah for good.

Has anyone questioned the wisdom of redeveloping an already congested area with twenty-fold density, thus adding a population of circa 300-400,000 people between Satwa and Safa with no physical possibility of creating a multi-lane road network without serious bottlenecks? The slip road behind SZR works for now until it feeds into World Trade Centre roundabout at one end and Interchange 1 at the other.
Bottleneck today, give me the bottle tomorrow! Al Wasl road has already reached breaking point from Emirates Bank all the way to Port Rashid because of Salik dodgers who cause misery for people actually still living in the area.
With appropriate hyperbolic exaggeration I propose a wager: ‘Jumeirah Gardens’ will be the ruin of Dubai. If I’m wrong I’ll go shopping at Union Co-op on Friday evening.

Actually. Someone did question it. The original Masterplan by a well-known international firm indeed proposed low to medium rise housing, not mega structures landed in the middle of town like a UFO. Luckily the developers then came to their senses. What the hell did they think they were doing?! Giving away land to the great unwashed? Building a sustainable society? The heck; a 600m high mega tower was needed! That would look good, with the water feature!!

I searched Cityscape from end to end and I assure you: No sign of lower or middle income housing. Dispersed across town, joined up, public transport connected housing. Not anywhere. Zilch. Not only no private developments - which is understandably with land prices what they are - but no sign of any comprehensive public, Municipality initiated Development Plan to link and inter-weave those private Master developments to retain, allow and create space for “normal” residential areas – like the Satwa that will be no more.

It all started so well. Now it is going horribly wrong.

What we see at Cityscape is not natural and necessary growth.What we see is greed and forced, contrived, and purely speculative wishful thinking at work. You can’t run before you’ve learnt to walk. What Dubai needed now more than anything was a moratorium on construction, completion of the utterly lacking infrastructure and consolidation of growth. There IS such a thing as over-development.

If you built because they would come you’ll have to keep building because they are coming indeed . And then they'll stop coming.

Property in Dubai is an artificially created vicious circle - not dissimilar to the past madness of the financial markets. Like derivatives, securitized by farts of hot air from Abominable Insurance Goons et al., sold over and over again just because somebody somewhere always bought policies or obligations without understanding the risks or even thinking about the day when the chickens would be coming home to roost.