by Vince Beiser
In those pre-oil days, pearls were the gulf’s top commodity. Divers jumping from boats hauled up the precious baubles by the sackful, making local merchants rich. But the market collapsed in the depression of the 1930s, and what was left of it was taken over by the invention of cheaper “cultured” pearls in Japan. In Dubai, businesses went bankrupt, merchants left town, and the local economy was hit so hard that food became scarce. “As World War II ground on,” writes Krane, “the famine grew desperate. When there was no rice, fish, or dates, people ate leaves or the ubiquitous dhub, a spiny lizard that may have given Dubai its name. Plagues of locusts became a blessing. People would net the bugs and fry them, crunching on them by the handful. . . . Inevitably, some Dubaians starved to death.”16
Things improved after the war, but Dubai was still a backwater barely noticed by the outside world. In the 1950s, many of its 15,000 inhabitants still lived in palm-thatched barasti shacks and adobe houses, and camels wandered the sandy pathways of the town. Electricity and manufactured ice—of perhaps equal importance to the locals in a place where temperatures routinely hit triple digits—arrived only in the early 1960s. But things were about to change, and change radically, because in 1958 oil was discovered in neighboring Abu Dhabi.
Abu Dhabi turns out to have gargantuan amounts of oil—at least 92 billion barrels, worth trillions of dollars. Dubai found respectable amounts of offshore oil starting in the late 1960s, but nothing close to Abu Dhabi’s winning geological lottery ticket. Today Abu Dhabi produces some 2.5 million barrels of oil per day; Dubai barely manages 60,000. In fact, the emirate is now a net importer of oil and gas.
What Dubai lacks in fossil fuels, though, it makes up for in a commodity far more rare in the Middle East: competent leadership. The Maktoums began building up their picayune port into a hub for business and trade over a century ago. In the early 1900s they abolished customs duty and lured Arab and Persian merchants with offers of free land and promises they could do business unhindered by government (which also encouraged the growth of a lively smuggling trade of everything from drugs to gold that still endures). Streams of fortune-seeking immigrants, especially from what is now Iran, moved in, swelling the population and its trading links abroad. Today there are nearly three times as many Iranians living in Dubai as native Emiratis.
In 1958, the emirate’s fortunes took a decisive turn thanks to an early bit of land reclamation. The inlet, known as Dubai Creek, had been silting up for years, forcing incoming ships to anchor offshore. (Sometimes sand just gets in the way.) Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed al-Maktoum, father of today’s ruling Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, dredged the creek deeply so that it could take in more and bigger ships. Well aware of the value of sand, the sheikh then used the dredged grains to build up land on the creeks’ banks, which he sold to merchants. It was a double win.
“From then on,” writes Krane, “Dubai would ride an incredible growth spurt that has yet to stop. The dredging of the creek was the spark that started the whole thing.”17 The sheikh sank oil profits into building ever more expansive roads, ports, airports, and state-owned businesses, including Jebel Ali, the world’s largest man-made harbor. It may have still been a tiny statelet, but Dubai made its grandiose ambitions plain. “In 1974, they built the World Trade Center, with a Hilton hotel in it. It was then the tallest building in the Middle East—in the middle of nowhere!” chuckles George Katodrytis, a professor of architecture at the American University of Sharjah, the emirate next door to Dubai.
Money and people poured in. In 1960, the city had 60,000 residents, most of them living in an area of two square miles. Twenty years later, it had ballooned to 276,000 people living in thirty-two square miles.
All this development has certainly worked out well for the ruling family. Sheikh Mohammed is one of the richest men on Earth, with a fortune estimated in the double-digit billions. Dubai was already booming when he pushed it into overdrive in 2002 with an unprecedented move: Dubai, he decreed, would allow foreigners to buy homes. This was something no other gulf country allowed. It turned out to be a masterstroke that triggered a real estate boom of global proportions—one that soon led to the need to create more real estate, in the form of islands.
Dubai is tremendously appealing to a certain type of global citizen. It has an excellent banking system with Swiss-like opacity. It imposes no taxes and few restrictions on imports and exports. It boasts good schools, hospitals, and infrastructure.
Above all, Dubai offers safety. It is a literal oasis of security and political stability in the world’s most chaotic region. It offers a haven for anyone in Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, or any other nearby country who fears that war, economic chaos, or the attention of government officials might threaten their business. It’s a safe place where such people can base their companies and park their money and even their families.
Dubai’s wealth helps keep it stable, along with its ironfisted intolerance for political dissent. According to Human Rights Watch, “The government arbitrarily detains, and in some cases forcibly disappears, individuals who criticized the authorities, and its security forces face allegations of torturing detainees.” It’s an effective combination. Dubai has never suffered a coup or civil war, and hasn’t had a significant terrorist attack in over fifty years.
It is also uniquely open and tolerant by gulf standards. Though the native Emiratis tend to be conservative Muslims, recognizable in their spotless traditional white robes and head coverings (Sheikh Mohammed is himself a husband to several wives and father to at least twenty-four children), everyone else is more or less free to do as they like. There are plenty of Hindus, Christians, even Jews living and working there.
At the same time, Dubai has improbably made itself into a popular tourist destination. Sure, it’s located in one of most chaotic and repressive regions of the world. But it’s also sunny almost all year round, with great beaches and a warm sea. And unlike neighboring Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, you can drink alcohol, dance at a nightclub, and sunbathe in a bikini all you want in Dubai. The emirate had only forty-two hotels in 1985. Today it has hundreds, hosting more than seven million visitors each year.
The whole enterprise got an unexpected boost thanks to the 9/11 terror attacks, of all things. In its scramble to shut down terrorist financing networks, the United States froze the bank accounts of some gulf Arabs they thought might have links to Al Qaeda. America was suffused with suspicion toward Middle Eastern money. Many wealthy Arabs and their money managers decided they’d be better off keeping their wealth closer to home. And so billions of dollars flowed out of America and headed east, looking for a safe harbor to invest in. Dubai stood there smiling, holding its doors wide open, and the money rushed in.
The result was that Dubai’s real estate market exploded. Office towers, shopping malls, and luxury hotels burst up from the ground.
The city that has ensued—and which is still growing at a baffling pace—is easily one of the weirdest places I’ve ever been. It’s a fantasy conjured up like a genie out of the desert. Dubai represents the triumph of the power of money and will over nature; how else to explain the presence of not one but many golf courses and ornamental lakes in the middle of the desert? Of gigantic islands built of sand where there was once only water?
Riding the $8 billion state-of-the-art driverless Metro along its elevated track from one end of the city is to enjoy an eye-widening tour through the heart of a futuropolis straight from some Pixar sci-fi fantasy. It’s a miles-long belt of urban density, packed with high-sheen glass-faced skyscrapers and asphalt roadways eight lanes wide, all of it sandwiched between swaths of sand—the desert on one side and the beach on the other. There are buildings fifty stories and more in all manner of fanciful shapes—one twisted like a corkscrew, one shaped like a half-moon, another a set of concentric half-circles. Towering far above them all is the surreal spire of the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, surrounded by a dense
thicket of towers so emphatically dwarfed that they seem to be gazing up in awe at their gleaming, glass-faced leader.
At the city’s margins, swooping elevated highways with cloverleaf interchanges lace the desert. And in seemingly every unoccupied space, cranes sprout up like giant steel dandelions, lording over construction sites crawling with bulldozers and backhoes and workmen in yellow safety vests.
Think about how much sand it took to create such a city out of practically nothing, most of it in the last twenty years. That’s why sand is now starting to become a serious issue. We have never consumed this resource at a pace remotely like the quantities we are consuming now.
Dubai’s overall vibe is sort of like a gigantic open-air airport lounge. It’s clean and modern, full of concrete and glass buildings housing familiar chain stores and fast-food restaurants and ads for famous brands. On the street, in the malls and hotel lobbies, you could be in any twenty-first-century city, any place that attracts people from around the world. It’s a kind of postmodern city, a place stripped of any identity besides modernity itself.
The whole city seems strikingly out of place in a region so steeped in history, religion, tradition, and culture, where adherence to ancient faiths and traditions is so prized. But it has proven a phenomenally successful model. Dubai is the Middle East’s leading financial hub, home to its biggest port and to the world’s busiest and biggest airport. The five-star hotels keep booking up and the luxury villas keep getting bought.
Dubai is selling, above all, location—a desirable physical place. But once it really started booming, it ran into a problem: it doesn’t actually have much space. At least, not the most desirable kind to tourists and well-heeled home buyers, which is of course beachfront property. Dubai aims to pull in 20 million tourists by 2020. The emirate has only forty miles of natural coastline, and it was getting built up fast. The solution was as obvious as it was implausible: build more.
When the island-building campaign got going in the mid-1990s, the original plan was to build a conventional-looking round island. But that would have added only a few miles of beachfront. Sheikh Mohammed, or so the official story goes, came up with the idea of a design that would both evoke the emirate’s culture and also provide far more beach: a palm tree, each frond of which would be a spit of beach-edged real estate. The Palm Jumeirah would be the first piece of artificial land ever built deliberately designed to be a shape you could identify from the air. It would more than double the emirate’s coastline, adding forty-eight miles of new shore, including thirty-eight miles of beach.
Sheikh Mohammed created a new state-owned company, dubbed Nakheel, meaning palms in Arabic, to build the island. He put a trusted lieutenant, Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, in charge. To build the land, Nakheel turned to Van Oord, a venerable Dutch company that is one of the biggest dredging and land reclamation outfits in the world. (After all, the Dutch have centuries of expertise in the trade.)
Dubai sits right at the edge of one of the world’s great sandpiles—the vast desert of the Arabian Peninsula’s Rub’ al Khali, or Empty Quarter. But desert sand doesn’t work for land reclamation any better than it does for concrete: the grains are too rounded to lock strongly together. Luckily, there is plenty of usable sand on the other side of Dubai. The only complication is that it’s at the bottom of the Persian Gulf.
That was no problem for Van Oord. The company sent out self-powered, self-guided surveying ships to take core samples from the nearby seabed, looking for sand that had the right chemical composition, amount of organic material, and compressive strength for the job. Once the scouting craft located a deposit of sand appropriate to the job, six miles offshore,18 a fleet of dredging ships, guided by GPS, went out to what are known as borrow areas. The ships lowered enormous pipes, fitted with screens to keep out anything bigger than a fist, into the water, and vacuumed up the sand into their holds.
Then each ship sailed back shoreward to where the GPS told them the Palm was to be, opened its hold doors, and simply dropped the sand. After a few rounds of this, the pile would get too big for the ships to clear. At that point, the ships would stop a few hundred yards away, tilt skyward a hose the size of a cannon, and shoot a torrent of slurry into the air. The process is called rainbowing, which definitely sounds prettier than “blasting five tons per second of sand and water through the air.” Again guided by GPS, the movable nozzles drew the shape of the Palm like gigantic sand-shooting spray paint cans.
In some ways, the gulf is a uniquely well-suited platform for such a project. It’s shallow, reaching only 300 feet at its deepest, which makes it relatively easy to pile up enough sand to rise above the waterline. It’s also sheltered and relatively calm, with few waves to erode the sand piles.
Still, as anyone who has ever built a sand castle knows, just piling up grains makes for a pretty loose structure. That’s not good when you’re planning to put thousands of tons of buildings on top of it. To firm up the new land, Van Oord applied vibrocompaction, which involves cranes driving fat metal spears deep into the sand and setting them vibrating. The vibrations make the grains jump and shake around, settling into the void spaces between them, locking them together, making the structure denser and more solid. It also makes the pile smaller, so more sand has to be added again after the vibrocompacting.19 The process involved drilling more than 200,000 holes over a period of eight months.
When the Palm Jumeira was finally completed in 2005, some 120 million cubic meters of sand had been piled up to form it. The whole island is surrounded with a breakwater built of rocks piled atop yet more sand. All told, there’s enough sand and rock in the Palm to circle the globe with a wall seven feet high.
Here’s an equally amazing fact about the Palm Jumeirah: Nakheel sold every lot on it before they’d even built the place. In May 2001, while there was still nothing but water where the Palm was to be built, Nakheel declared it open for business. Up for grabs were 2,500 beach apartments along the trunk, and 2,500 private villas on the fronds. The villas started at $1.2 million US for a four-bedroom “Garden” villa, going up to six-bedroom “Signature” villas; all came with two parking spaces and a maid’s room, of course, and a patch of sandy beach right outside the back door. At least that’s what the architect’s drawings showed; there was nothing actually built yet. “When a potential buyer turned up, bin Sulayem, an elegant man with a perfectly clipped mustache and an ingrained politeness, fired up his speedboat,” writes Krane. “He’d zoom investors a mile and a half out to sea . . . Then he’d cut the motor. ‘This is where your villa’s going to be,’ bin Sulayem would tell his client, as they bobbed in the Gulf. ‘Now give me a deposit.’”20 Every single one of them was snapped up within seventy-two hours.
It was only a few years later that construction of those villas actually got under way. Forty thousand laborers were put to work deploying millions more tons of sand, in the form of glass and concrete, into place.
The buyers—some private, some resellers—came from some thirty different countries. About a third were gulf nationals and a quarter Brits (including David Beckham), and there was at least one Austrian—Josef Kleindienst.
Kleindienst first came to Dubai in 2002, his money-seeking antennae having picked up the signal sent by the opening of Dubai’s real estate market to foreigners. He had been a Viennese police officer for eighteen years, and claims to have enjoyed it, rising to the post of inspector general. He also dabbled in politics, joining Austria’s far-right Freedom Party and heading a police union affiliated with it. He broke spectacularly with the party in 2000, publishing a book titled I Confess, in which he accused party leaders of paying police to illegally slip them classified information, a charge the party denied.
All the while, he had a sideline in real estate. He’d watched his father and grandfather buy and sell land since he was a child. Kleindienst saw the door of opportunity swing wide open in the early 1990s, when Communism collapsed in Europe a
nd all of Austria’s eastern neighbors were suddenly open for business. Working with friends in the Hungarian police, Kleindienst snapped up a bunch of plots in Budapest. “We made very good money,” he said. By 1999, he had quit the police force to go into real estate full-time, launching the company now known as the Kleindienst Group. The company now has investments in properties across central Europe as well as in Pakistan, Seychelles, and South Africa. But it was in Dubai that Kleindienst really found a canvas adequate for his ambitions. He started operations there in 2003, and since then his company has developed a range of apartment complexes, office parks, and hotels in the emirate.
“We bought fifty villas on the Palm Jumeirah,” he says. “It was only sand then. We would have bought more, but there was nothing else available! We came a couple of days too late.”
The Palm Jumeirah was such a hit that plans were quickly announced to follow it up with two more palm-shaped islands that would be even bigger—the Palm Jebel Ali and Palm Deira. By then, so much sand had been dredged from the gulf’s floor that the quality of the remaining grains was declining, requiring additional time and expense for extra vibrocompaction.21 No matter. In the frothy financial climate of the mid-aughts, there seemed to be no limit to how much new land could be built and sold.
So Nakheel started work on the most audacious project yet: the World. Never mind buying villas; now you’d be able to buy a whole country.
Construction began in 2003. The World would create over 2,500 acres of new land out of 320 million cubic meters of sand, adding 144 miles to Dubai’s coastline. Planners expected the islands to host as many as 300,000 people. Unlike the Palm, where Nakheel built up many of the buildings and infrastructure, the World islands were to be sold empty, tabulae rasae for developers’ dreams. Investment costs: an estimated $14 billion.