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  • Goodbye, Dubai

    Review of Dubai, Glided Cage, by Syed Ali in the current (August 19th) issue of the New York Review of Books worth a read. If someone has online access, appreciate you posting.

  • #2
    Re: Goodbye, Dubai

    Originally posted by don View Post
    Review of Dubai, Glided Cage, by Syed Ali in the current (August 19th) issue of the New York Review of Books worth a read. If someone has online access, appreciate you posting.
    Not the NY Review, but a review from the Independent - Dubai: Gilded Cage, By Syed Ali - Reviewed by Christopher M Davidson from the 16th of April

    "I didn't come to Dubai for anything 'real'. I've already lived in real places." So says a perceptive young Lebanese expatriate in Syed Ali's Dubai: Gilded Cage. Such a desire for suspended reality was for years the cornerstone of the tiny emirate's socio-economic environment and, if you read this book, you will learn that most of the population – 95 percent made up of foreigners – was firmly in on the act.

    Since Ali began the book, economic reality has finally hit Dubai, with its massively leveraged developments in real estate and tourism infrastructure now floundering in the wake of the credit crunch. The emirate's ruler - the grandiosely titled General Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Maktoum - had been styling himself as the chief executive officer of "Dubai Inc". But with a string of broken promises to investors under his belt and with the tiny indigenous population of his emirate now the most indebted per capita in the world, his economic stewardship is under serious question.
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    Also from the Times UK - Dubai: Gilded Cage by Syed Ali - Work, spend, leave — the story of the Middle East’s glittering paradox

    Dubai’s meteoric rise from obscure pearl-trading port to global tourism and business hub studded with glittering towers and man-made palm islands continues to fascinate and appal in equal measure. The emergence on the world stage of this small emirate in the Gulf has spawned a host of books, all looking behind the meticulous branding that Dubai has used to attract business people and tourists from across the globe.

    Dubai: Gilded Cage is another that scratches the glossy surface of fantastical construction projects and conspicuous consumption to examine the paradoxes and contradictions of Dubai society.

    Syed Ali is a sociologist and assistant lecturer at Long Island University, in New York, whose interest lies in the people of Dubai, “a unique brand of global city: a city of transients”. Expatriates, most of them living on three-year renewable visas, make up 90 per cent of the population.

    Ali picks briskly through the layers of Dubai society, meeting migrant workers of all stripes to study the Faustian pact that they strike by moving to Dubai, trading away their political rights for a taste of the good life. Young professionals from the West are offered a quality of life and professional advancement that they might struggle to find at home. In return, the visa system is a simple and effective mechanism of government control.

    Working around them is the enormous labouring class that is still building the city’s skyscrapers, staffing its restaurants and cleaning its streets. Most are brought from the Indian sub-continent and enter into modern-day slavery, tithed to their employers and subject to serious exploitation. Living conditions for many remain appalling. Regardless of this, as Ali points out, Dubai still offers even the most poorly paid construction workers a salary far in excess of what they might earn in their own countries. And so they keep coming, many aware of the conditions that await, so as to remit their income back home.
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    Last edited by Rajiv; August 15, 2010, 02:33 PM.

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    • #3
      Re: Goodbye, Dubai

      Thanks, Rajiv. Here's a few NYRB excerpts:

      Through the tax breaks, gigantesque architecture, a well-trained security force, and spectacularly wasteful a/c, al-Makhtoum and his "Brand Dubai" team managed to create a buzz and turn Dubai into a seemingly safe, secure, friendly place to live. The Dubai fantasy peaked with the creation of Dubai's housing bubble in 2002, when al-Makhtoum encourage foreigners to buy property in the emirate. This unleashed a gigantic Ponzi scheme, fueled by money launderers and speculators who typically "flipped" properties after making a 10% down payment, driving up prices to absurd heights, and leaving the final investor catastrophically exposed when the bubble inevitably burst.
      Syed Ali's Dubai: The Gilded Cage,... reveals the often ugly reality behinds its facade. Ali minces no words in criticizing Dubai's "plastic" culture; its "grotesque grandiosity"; its environmentally wasteful architecture; its abusive treatment of the "socially degraded" workers who make possible its growth; its repressive, antidemocratic regime that has banned critical bloggers and jailed opponents; and its transient population that makes a "Faustian bargain" giving up "democratic freedoms for a standard of living one might not get in Arab or South Asia countries, or even in the UK or US".
      "Bankers, journalist, real estate brokers, and others I spoke with believe it will take 5 years for building to begin anew in Dubai, and they question whether the city can retain its allure, meanwhile. Many doubt that Dubai's financial problems have been fully revealed. "What is the extent of the debt, and what is the ability to service it while the economy recovers? People are terrified that it's been papered over." And if Dubai's "formula of tax-free economic zones and mass tourism doesn't work ... people who have been emulating it throughout the Middle East will say, 'What the hell do we do now?' There are a lot of angry young people out there, and the whole region will go up in smoke in 10 years if they can't find employment for them."

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      • #4
        Re: Goodbye, Dubai

        Originally posted by don View Post
        Thanks, Rajiv. Here's a few NYRB excerpts:

        There's actually a solution, but they will need to find round the Sharia laws, open brothels and casinos as Singapore has done, it will attract even more tourists and investments.

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        • #5
          Re: Goodbye, Dubai

          Originally posted by touchring View Post
          There's actually a solution, but they will need to find round the Sharia laws, open brothels and casinos as Singapore has done, it will attract even more tourists and investments.
          i think that they have prostitution covered, not just figuratively.

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