Quote:
Originally Posted by McBane
don't get all razzled up over dubai! the city is a charade, a fad. you plop however many super tallbuildings you want there, but the fact is, it lacks the diversity, culture, cosmopolitan flair, and history that mark true cities such as philly, nyc, chicago, boston, etc. even LA has a more urban fabric than dubai. not to mention it's in a country/region where, all glitter and hoopla aside, is still a repressive area with a poor human rights record and a very very conservative attitude towards tolerance, women, etc. why do you think that when the economy soured, everyone started to leave? money cannot buy everything - and that includes all those things that make a real city feel like a great place to live, work, and play.
dubai is like crystal bridges (art museum funded by wal-mart heiress) trying to fit in with the Louvre, PMA or Met...it's a joke.
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I'll give you that Dubai is a city of little history. It's interesting to have such an enormous urban area with so little historical story; not like the 4-thousand year history of Athens, the 3,000 year history of Rome, 2,000 years of London, 300 years of New York and 150 years of Chicago. Los Angeles has only been something of a "major city" for 70 years. Dubai was a small town until recently - it has practically no big city history at all.
It's like a lot of American cities were 100 years ago. Dubai was built under the same boom-and-bust model that Chicago, Denver, St. Louis and Los Angeles were built on. All these places became region-leading metropolitan areas in a few decades. Miami is experiencing the down curve of a major development boom as we speak.
On the other hand, saying it has no Diversity? That's a farce; well over half its population is from India, Pakistan and the Phillipines who came in as construction workers - and many of whom will stay. Europeans live there. Americans live there. Arabs live there. So do hundreds of thousands of South Asian and East Asian immigrants. Dubai is one of the most diverse cities in the world.
It's still under construction, but after this hyperbolized skyscraper boom is over, normal urban growth to house middle and lower-middle classes will wash in and could make it a great city. What Dubai lacks is a middle; it's all upper class and underclass. It's all supertall skyscrapers over 800 feet tall, and then 2-story mansions and a sprawling blue-collar suburban area.
Eventually Dubai will evolve a middle class. It will also develop a bunch of mid-level skyscrapers that fill in around the supertalls; stuff that will seek to house people comfortably, without trying to make global newspaper headlines by being absurdly tall. And 100 years from now even Dubai will have a history.