Dubai: How not to build a city | Hacker News Reader

Dubai: How not to build a city

thestar.com

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Dubai is a city built on the backs of maltreated migrant workers. There is little glamour for these mainly South East Asian workers who earn $1 a day. The difference in lifestyles between the labor camps these workers live in (people literally living out of massive shipping containers) and the fast cars, over-sized houses that expats own couldn’t be any greater. The companies that bring the migrant workers over have been accused of purposely forcing them to stay in the UAE by misplacing their passports and delaying salary payments. The UAE has also had its human rights record heavily criticized by the UN and human rights organizations. So despite lavish expat lifestyles and impressive urban growth, there are plenty of non-economic reasons why Dubai is an example of how not to build a city.

Couldn't the same thing be said for NYC? Look at living conditions in a turn-of-the-century NYC tenement, and you'll be appalled. Millions of immigrants arrived with literally nothing except the clothes on their backs and toiled for pennies a day so the fat cats could have their mansions on 5th avenue. Yet most people don't say that NYC is an example of how not to build a city...

Yes, but those immigrants had a better life and more opportunity in America than their homeland. They came and stayed voluntarily.

I don't really know the details of Dubai's labor situation, but aren't they also there voluntarily? I know laws are different in the Middle East, but I thought slavery was still illegal in the UAE.

If you're laid off or fired, and you owe money, you will be stopped at the border from leaving. It takes about a week for the notification from your employer to get into the financial system, which is why many westerners drive to the airport and leave their cars in the parking lot with the keys in them - never to return to Dubai.

That doesn't sound all that different from turn-of-the-century America, where debtors were often forced to work for their creditor until the money was paid off. I guess the difference is that now it seems like everyone's a debtor, but if you choose to live by the standards someone from a century ago, you have much more freedom and purchasing power, not less.

(Seriously, when did living debt-free go out of style? If my grandparents wanted something big like a summer home, they saved for it, they didn't go out and get a mortgage.)

The difference is that in America's history employers worked in good faith (aside from slavery). In Dubai (and to some extent, China) migrant workers are defrauded and deceived by their employers out of their rightfully due pay.

Dubai's guest workers won't become citizens, not matter how long they work there.

The story linked in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=550719 has some anecdotes about how some of the workers get lured to Dubai and then stuck there. Saudi Arabia (one of the countries I've lived in) did similar things to their working classes.

Wasn't it just a year ago that Dubai was held up as a shining example of modernity in the Arab world? The future of cities in this interlocking global economy? Its reliance on tourism and finance was lauded because everyone knew that oil in the Persian Gulf would eventually run out. And a lot of people I know wanted to go to Dubai (my sister actually wanted to be spend a year working overseas there) just to check it out.

Dubai's problem is that they've built an economy that's almost entirely pro-cyclical. Tourism does well when the economy booms, but dries up when it busts. Finance does well when the economy booms, but blows up when it busts. So it's no wonder that in the biggest downturn in 80 years, Dubai's economy is hurting.

But that doesn't mean that Dubai's an example of how not to build a city, any more than Silicon Valley or Detroit are examples of how not to build a city.

our icons of today are our counter-examples of tomorrow.

Moreover I think the list of counter-examples bout cities is full, thank you everybody: Brasilia, Valparaiso, Paris, New York, Tokyo, etc., now Dubai. Maybe now is time to resurrect Christopher Alexander's spirit (I just checked, he is medically alive) and look at what is good and why it's good.

not sure I understand the comparison between Paris/NY/Tokyo and Dubai...?

they all have been deemed "the way you should not build a city" at one point or another (for different reasons of course).

For me, the city looks like if they were trying to build already complete adult human, then turn it on and hope it will live, without having to be born and then grow up to that form. Which is something I'm quite afraid of, because it usually works badly.

You've... already built a complete adult human?

It was held as a shining example, by many of the same people lauding the innovative financial products we now label as toxic. They were wrong.

Should Dubai fall into ruin, it will serve as a powerful weapon in the hands of those that oppose a secular society in the Middle East. Dubai should be a lesson we learn from, but not at the expense of positive modernization.

Wonder if the architects considered the "ruin value" of what they were constructing. May become relevant sooner than anyone would wish.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruin_value

The article didn't point out any arguments or facts to back up the theory that "you don't build a city like this", except for the opinion that "you just don't". Too much emotions, too little reason. The city may in fact be in decline but for the whole other reasons: decline in tourism and financial markets. These are the factors that influence it badly, not the way it was built. And if the city keeps declining it's because tourism, technology and finance dived too deep and weren't able to keep the city afloat, not because "it was built badly". I could understand such wording in an emotional blog post, not in anything even resembling serious journalims.

One thing is striking: An AMERICAN (I ssume) says thatcity built for driving. I am afraid to even imagine when a guyfrom have-a-car-or-starve-because-of-no-foodstores-in-walkable -distance country make such statatements, what a place it is.

He's Canadian

What makes this a suitable post?

Interesting topic. Uninteresting article. Problematic trap.

What makes this an interesting comment?

Someone posts your same urgent insight on every tenth story that makes the front page... Come on folks, please read the guidelines:

"Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or egregiously offtopic, you can flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did."

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Yeah. I read them and occasionally re-read them when I start thinking that the explanation for WTF these stories make it to the front page might be that the criteria have changed.

You can improve your experience without polluting the comments.

Consider writing a greasemonkey script that filters domains that contain content that you don't want to see, then share the script with the community.

That is beyond my abilities since, as a previous poster said, this is a potentially interesting topic but this article about it is completely uninteresting.

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