Can Dubai Move the Center of the Earth?

PHOTO: Dubai's skyline has become a showcase for some of the most spectacular high-rise architecture in the world.

Dubai does things large. Fueled by immense oil wealth, the emirate has a sense of unlimited possibility and a belief in the power to do anything imaginable. Already in possession of many of the largest and most spectacular construction projects of the last 50 years, Dubai now plans to build an enclosed, climate controlled city featuring the world’s largest mall.

Dubai, an entity beyond category, has now devised the newest and grandest ever of its grand schemes – The Mall of the World.

A place that has a virtual infinity of the things the rest of the world craves most: money, space and petroleum, is about to create what has been described as an enclosed, climate-controlled city.

Dubai has already built itself up as a super shopping stopover with some of the biggest malls in the world, including Dubai Mall, which is one of the largest and most extravagant of such constructions, with 1,200 shops. But in July and August the average high temperature is 105.8 degrees Fahrenheit and can climb as high as 118 degrees with relative humidity as high as 80 or 90 percent.

Such high temperatures are not good for business, so Dubai has perfected its indoor climate-controlled living. It has miles of enclosed space. It even has an indoor snow ski resort of 242,000 square feet. And now it’s going to expand the concept with an enclosed city.

The word “city” is not just PR hyperbole in this case, we are talking 4.45 million square meters. That may only be 1.7 square miles, but as a resident of a Mile Square City called Hoboken, I’m impressed.

It would be impressive to see a city nearly double the size of my home town enclosed and climate controlled. But the comparison with Hoboken in terms of land area is misleading. The Mall of the World will have 100 hotels. Hoboken has one hotel that I know of.  

If completed it will be no small achievement. And it would be an error to underestimate what these emirates can do.

Living Large in Dubai

If you have never taken in the skyline of Dubai, that alone is worth the trip. It is a showcase of modern high-rise architecture unmatched anywhere in the world.

Dubai’s skyscraper Burj Khalifa is more than twice the height of the Empire State Building. The city is an architect’s Disneyland, a playground for the architectural imagination.

At 160 stories and 2,717 feet in height, the Burj Khalifa, is the world’s tallest manmade structure by a margin of nearly 700 feet over the runner up, the 121-story Shanghai Tower. Historically the world’s tallest buildings exceed the previous record holder by a few feet. The builders of the Burj Khalifa wanted to be sure they would hold the first place spot for a long time, as the Empire State Building once did.

Today the skyline of Dubai looks as if practically everything from a half-eaten Oreo to tyrannosaurus rex has reincarnated as a skyscraper on the crowded canvas of the Dubai skyline.

Whether you like it, or like anything about it, you would have to acknowledge that the Dubai cityscape is one of the world’s most spectacular in many ways.

Bear in mind that the United Arab Emirates was only formed as a country in late 1971. In 1978 when the 39-story World Trade Centre office tower was built on Sheikh Zayed Road, it was a solitary tower standing over a a flat desert plain as far as the eye could see. There was almost no developed land in the area.

Now Dubai has more than 900 high-rise buildings designed with swashbuckling flair and a kind of extravagance that isn't possible on this scale anywhere else in the world.

Building the world’s most spectacular high-rise cityscape from nothing in 40 years may seem enough of an achievement. But the leaders of the UAE, including Abu Dhabi and Dubai, are actually shooting much higher. They are trying to move the center of gravity of the 21^st Century eastward. And they are making a dizzyingly effective attempt at it.

The Mall of the World is the latest of the UAE’s many drawing points to shift the world’s centers of economics and culture to the east.

The Twain Meets Eastward

About a year ago, Dubai’s airport surpassed Hong Kong’s in traffic, and became the world’s third busiest after London and Paris.

Dubai’s airline, Emirates, can make a solid claim to being based at the center of the world. Dubai is seven hours’ flight from Johannesburg and seven hours from London, 14 hours from Sydney and 14 from New York.

Emirates flies through Dubai to points throughout Asia, Africa and the South Pacific as well as from ten cities in America: New York, Boston, Washington D.C., Houston, Dallas (starting in October), Houston, Chicago (starting in August), Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle 

About an hour and a half’s drive from Dubai is its sister emirate Abu Dhabi, which has its own highly successful airline, Etihad, the national airline of the UAE. With its Louvre and Guggenheim museums about to open, its Grand Prix, its growing cruise port business and a flashflood of other developments, Abu Dhabi is also creating a strong magnetic pole of world culture in the region.

With the prodigious growth of China and India, the world’s center of gravity has moved inexorably eastward. Now the UAE has made a viable play for establishing itself as the new center of the world — midpoint between east and west.

We may be beyond the stage when it is legitimate to ask, “Can they do it?” They may have already done it.