Urbanization of Dubai | Hacker News Reader

Urbanization of Dubai

earthobservatory.nasa.gov

104 pointskumarski38 comments

I'd love to see pictures like that for the whole of Dubai. These only show about maybe 1/3 of the actual city. But still impressive. I went there a few months ago and the only thing I can describe it with is "Playing Sim City with money cheat".

Hmm, that's not urbanization that's construction. A large number of these buildings are empty, and too expensive for immigrants to rent (let alone buy).

Also, building glass boxes in the scorching desert heat does not make good environmental sense. They should be building more of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IE-wHF5zf0k

Its impressive what you can build with a huge amount of slaves.

Pyramids also come to mind.

The pyramids were not built by slaves (at least there's no real proof of it). A lot of the workers who died during the construction where buried in decorated tombs which says something about their wealth, which probably says they couldn't be slaves.

ALIENS!

off-season farmers. During the yearly Nile floods the fields would be covered.

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Not crafted by guest workers.

You have to give credit to Sheik Mohammed for what he has accomplished. Dubai is not like other arab countries which get money from petrol. It built itself into a city which everyone in the world knows, that too in a very short span of time.

Also under a lot of debt. Dubai had to be bailed out by Abu Dhabi. Sheik Mohammed doesn't call the shots in his city anymore.

Remember the fallacy of the unseen. It's easy to marvel at what has been built (albeit at a net loss) and forget the alternate uses of those resources.

I would have praised him if he have made universities that are on par with Stanford, MIT (which would have cost 1/10th of cost of current development). They have seen shinny Vagus but failed to see why they shine.

Regrettably, there's more to great universities than throwing money at it. It's important to remember that the country has no educational history. 50 years ago the few inhabitants there were barely literate, and few of those who could read had ever read anything but the Quran.

That said, Abu Dhabi is actually trying to do just that. They're buying off entire departments of western universities, offering generous research grants if the department is relocated to Abu Dhabi. The idea is to bootstrap a tradition of higher education.

Didn't someone say we should build a city in the desert before we build one on mars?

I think we can check it off the list..

speaking of the desert, anyone know how dubai has managed water access through all this growth?

i know many countries in the region (namely kuwait and saudi) utilize desalinization on a large scale, though i’ve heard it's only economically viable where oil is extremely cheap and abundant, which (as far as i know) is not the case in dubai..

seems like the environment would lend itself well to nuclear (a lot of barren, uninhabited, seemingly geologically stable, space), which i'd imagine could fuel desalinization plants just fine.

They desalinate like there's no tomorrow. Like so many other things there, it's insanely expensive, but they do it anyway.

UAE is also enroute to building its first nuclear power plant, but it's not what's powering desalination at this point.

I've been told they ship a lot of water in.

Sadly, "settled on an enormous body of water and fitted with world-class desalination plants" is a poor model for a potential Martian city. :)

And they still have no sewage system...

I don't think this is true anymore. According to this article, Dubai now has a sewage system covering the entire city: http://p4papyrus.blogspot.ca/2011/02/sewage-system-now-cover...

As a former resident and that I still go through quite often, some limited high-end parts of the city have central sewage but the broad majority of sewage is still trucked from individual buildings to the treatment plants.

Is there a proper address system yet?

There is in the diplomatic area. There's been talk in the papers about proper addresses being rolled out sometime soon but I imagine the squabbling over naming rights for the roads will take a while to sort out.

does it make sense to develop an entire new city on shoreline when we face rises in sea-levels?

I don't know about you, but I want to live on the water now, while I am still alive. I am not worried about who lives in the house that is flooded in 100 years.

yes. people like me worry about people like you.

Unless the city is being built on already flood-prone marshland (which is a dumb idea even right now), the timeline for it becoming inundated is on the order of 200-300+ years.

The historical lifetime of residential buildings rarely exceeds even 100 years - with notable exceptions only.

How far ahead do you think we should be considering when building? 100 years? 300? 500? 1000? The Earth is not static, and practically all land that we stand on today will become dramatically different at some (probably distant) point in the future.

Cities rise and fall faster than the climate changes around them - even when accounting for man-made climate change. Cities are also organic, continually redeveloping - with portions of it becoming disused and broken, while previously disused parts become revitalized.

Considering the timescales we're looking at, the natural lifespan of most coastal buildings would be considerably less than the encroaching waters, and more than enough time for cities to organically grow away from them.

So wtvanhest's position seems sensible. There is really no reason to not live on the coastline today.

I would think twice before buying coastline property in Dubai. Large parts of Dubai's beaches are man-made and may last a lot shorter than that 100 years you consider safe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_(archipelago)#Project...)

Also, a house that is known to last only 100 years will be harder to sell in 50 years time, so forget about the pension investment benefit of buying such a house (yes, that should affect current house prices, but I think humans in general do not understand long time horizons that well)

Back to the subject proper: Dubai is gambling that they can become a Vegas and keep making money that way. That bet may pay out, but it is not a bet I would make. Problem is that there is no middle way here. Sure, if their income will be half what they expect it to be, they can kick foreigners out to keep the $/capita at decent levels, but what would they do with all those houses than? Demolish? Huge loss of money. Keep around? Even larger loss because of maintenance costs. Turn into a ghost town? That might become a tourist attraction.

Also, Vegas has survived so long by consuming the water from the Colorado river, but that is not sustainable. I expect huge problems in Vegas within 20 years. Dubai starts in the 'no water' position. But hey, I am not an economist, so don't take my word for it.

When the oil runs out (or alternatives become cheaper), this will be a ghost town. Heck, the whole country will collapse. No more oil, no more slave workers.

Can't wait.

Dubai has been 'out' of oil for a while. Most of the petrochem coming out of the UAE is currently in Abu Dhabi and RAK. The whole idea of building all of this up was to serve as a middle eastern city for the post-oil economy. The success of it is another story; the western expats have been leaving in droves of late and there's not much sign of it abating. The eastern expats (Indian and Chinese) keep coming in though.

A lot of us western expats have headed to greener shores; the oil boom in Azerbaijan is one draw, a lot of the build-up in Qatar at the gas fields is another, and Western Australia is also helping things along quite a bit.

Wage rates for expats have fallen through the floor in the middle east as well - where one once could make a king's ransom in a year or two in the sand trap, now it's not so much the case, even in Saudi Arabia.

Really? Of all the gulf nations, the UAE seems tome to be the most prepared to survive after oil, specifically because of Dubai.

Now, it's not my favourite city, but I don't understand all the hate towards it. They've got a lot of oil money that's not going to last and they need to pivot to something else. Dubai is their attempt.

Dubai is not self sustaining, it needs a lot of money to run. It's a bunch of half-empty skyscrapers in the desert. They need to be air conditioned, water needs to be delivered and/or desalinated, sewage needs to be taken for processing by trucks.

I would understand if they built something useful, something high-tech, like a CPU factory or some biotech stem cell research city. Instead they went for a caricature of Las Vegas, but with all kinds of laws against what normally is considered fun.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/04/dubai-kissing-coupl...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-512815/Briton-jailed...

http://articles.nydailynews.com/2012-12-06/news/35654144_1_d...

http://www.nairaland.com/175589/russian-woman-arrested-dubai...

Best prepared to survive != currently self sustaining.

Of all the ME petrostates, UAE is by a long shot and then some the most liberal and has the most diversified economy. It's also moving the fastest towards becoming more liberal and getting a more diversified economy.

The kicker here, of course, is the meaning of being the most liberal "of all the ME petrostates" - the bar is not very high. That said, if you're married, western, well-paid, can keep your hands off your partner in public, don't routinely get obscenely drunk and don't do drugs (many, many people fall into this bucket without giving up any quality of life), you could find much worse places to live.

> "can keep your hands off your partner in public, don't routinely get obscenely drunk and don't do drugs (many, many people fall into this bucket without giving up any quality of life)"

In my experience, the number of people who actually live this lifestyle without giving up any quality of life is a far, far, far smaller number than the number of people who apparently live this lifestyle without giving up any quality of life.

The greatest myth of modern Western society is that freaks are actually uncommon.

I didn't say that you can't be a freak. The list I made is actually quite exhaustive (OK, add "don't criticize the royal family and/or islam" and "don't proselyte").

> Of all the ME petrostates, UAE is by a long shot and then some the most liberal and has the most diversified economy

Being the best among the worst is not exactly a good indicator.

Dubai doesn't have a very diversified economy - 90% of exports is oil.

> Being the best among the worst is not exactly a good indicator.

And I claimed no such thing. But there is value in comparing countries to comparable countries. In the case of UAE, that's Saudi Arabia, not Sweden.

> 90% of exports is oil.

Yeah, no. Dubai is a major trading hub with a significant financial and services sector. Oil accounts for just under half of exports of all of the UAE[1] - and the oil isn't in Dubai, it's in Abu Dhabi, so the local number for Dubai is likely much lower. The economy of both the UAE broadly, and Dubai specifically, is still deeply dependant on oil, and there's no doubt that a collapse in oil prices would be totally devastating to the economy. But, as previously stated, they are rapidly diversifying (while they have the money to do so), but this is a process with a horizon of several decades.

1: http://www.indexmundi.com/trade/exports/?country=ae

I can't look at Dubai the same since playing Spec Ops: The Line.

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