Dubai’s urban masterplan to build ‘soul and identity’

Dubai Tourism

Aren’t cities great? We rhapsodise about rolling hills and soaring mountains, green forests and blue oceans, but concrete urban environments are where most of us choose to spend our time.

Well over half the world’s population lives in cities, and that is rising inexorably – it will be around 70 percent in 2050, according to the World Bank. All the hassles of living in close proximity to other people are far outweighed by the benefits of living in close proximity to other people, it seems.

What intrigues me about the great cities of the world is this: London, Paris, New York, Los Angeles, Shanghai and the rest – the list is too long – are all, obviously and by definition, man-made. But they each have a soul and a heart, as well as a physical body. They are simultaneously artificial and organic.

Reem Al Hashimy, the UAE’s minister of state for international co-operation and the woman who brought Expo 2020 to Dubai, understands this. At a forum on the Expo site earlier this week – “Cities in Action” – she celebrated the twin identities of cities.

“We have to get 200 nationalities collaborating and driving economic growth, but we also have to maintain the soul and the identity of Dubai,” she said.

It will be news to some curmudgeons in the West that Dubai has a “soul and identity” at all. A number of them complain regularly about the emirate’s lack of “culture” – as if they spent every waking hour in Covent Garden or the Tate Gallery, rather than a supermarket or pub.

The Expo event was the perfect riposte to these denigrators. It was staged to answer the question “what makes a city liveable”, and to give some idea of the scale of urban transformation Dubai will undergo over the next couple of decades.

The Dubai Urban Masterplan 2040 – announced to great fanfare last year – is hugely ambitious. The population will more than double to just short of 8 million people, as will the size of green and recreational areas.

There will be a four-fold increase in public beach frontage, and a 134 percent rise in space allotted to hospitality and tourism.

But all rest and no work is a bad formula, so simultaneously 1.7 billion square foot of land will be set aside for industrial and economic activities, with a huge increase in transport and logistics – roads, metro and rail – to link residential and commercial areas.

The Expo forum put some flesh on that masterplan. It underlined the need for sustainability in the urban landscape, as well as the potential for AI to play a commanding role in making residents’ lives easier and more productive in the future.

“There are no smart cities without smart data,” said one panellist – to which you might add “and smart people”.

The masterplan carves Dubai up into five “urban centres”, which recognise the historical development of the emirate in a widening arc around the Creek.

Deira and Bur Dubai form the northern end of the plan, with Downtown and Business Bay, Marina and JBR, the Expo 2020 area and Dubai Silicon Oasis spreading south.

For the latter two urban centres, much of the new development will spread south-eastwards into the desert, for one obvious reason: Dubai is hemmed in by the emirates of Sharjah to the north and Abu Dhabi to the south.

Getting transport links and utilities to these new regions will be a priority for the planners over the next few years, and a very costly undertaking.

This southward drift of Dubai’s urban sprawl is one of the most significant trends in the city’s history, and will only accelerate as the Expo region is developed and the new airport at Dubai World Central gradually opens up.

Some observers have talked about the possibility of “Abu Dubai”, in which the two principal cities of the UAE gradually expand to form one gigantic “megalopolis” running 100km along the shores of the Arabian Gulf. That is an awful lot of desert to urbanise, and plainly generations away, if at all.

But who knows? Did the founders of New Amsterdam imagine Wall Street, Fifth Avenue and Central Park when they settled on what eventually became New York City 400 years ago?

That’s the other thing about cities – you can never really tell how they will turn out. You can only nudge them along a certain line, like the 2040 masterplan, and trust that soul and identity do the rest.

Frank Kane is Editor-at-Large of AGBI and an award-winning business journalist. He acts as a consultant to the Ministry of Energy of Saudi Arabia