People are pouring out of Dubai

Excellent rant about what a crappy place Dubai is, and how people are getting the hell out.

Short of opening a Radio Shack in an Amish town, Dubai is the world’s worst business idea, and there isn’t even any oil. Imagine proposing to build Vegas in a place where sex and drugs and rock and roll are an anathema. This is effectively the proposition that created Dubai - it was a stupid idea before the crash, and now it is dangerous.
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It looks like Manhattan except that it isn’t the place that made Mingus or Van Allen or Kerouac or Wolfe or Warhol or Reed or Bernstein or any one of the 1001 other cultural icons from Bob Dylan to Dylan Thomas that form the core spirit of what is needed, in the absence of extreme toleration of vice, to infuse such edifices with purpose and create a self-sustaining culture that will prevent them crumbling into the empty desert that surrounds them.
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People are literally fleeing this place, to date leaving 3000 cars stranded at the airport with keys still in the ignition. And the reason for this is that if you default on your Dubai mortgage, you can end up in a debtors prison.

Goodbye Dubai (via Kottke)

Previously:

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

More at Boing Boing

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The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

philipb

#26 – I have been to Dubai & did not drink the Kool-Aid. Endless business and residential developments built with paper walls & paper money. With the exception of the former USSR, I have never seen such shoddy planning or construction. Like Saddam’s palaces, a thin layer of gilt applied to poured concrete.

If you can enjoy sitting on a gritty beach watching disposable workers being bused from site to dormitory & back then the UAE is no doubt highly attractive to you.
Ugly Canuck

hagbard: And LA isn’t?
Narmitaj

Things have changed… I haven’t been to Dubai for 15 years. Back then, Dubai was relatively low-rise and Abu Dhabi was the big-structures city. I remember thinking of parables about building stuff on sand – Abu Dhabi just looked like it was gearing up to become a deserted Ballardian landscape of empty skyscrapers and drained swimming pools.

My brother goes to Dubai every now and then, to hunt for students for Bradford University. I’d be interested in seeing the place again just for the surrealism. Certainly changed a lot since my father was a pilot with Kuwait Airways 1956-74 – even up until 1962 or so the airport runway and apron was compacted desert sand, not concrete.
Anonymous

There are global economic problems, not just in Dubai. So yes, people are losing jobs, leaving, rents are falling, and so on. But I’m astonished at the level of vitriol directed at one small city in the desert, and it’s shameful how respected international press distort figures to portray a much more dramatic picture than the reality. As for lack of sex, drugs and rock n roll … rock n roll can be found, some people enjoy a relatively drug-free environment (parents of teenagers for example), and people can still have sex without getting into trouble (unless they go to the beach and start performing in front of the police).
Anonymous

200 partly empty skyscrapers in the middle of the desert, plus one yet to be built called “the Michael Schumacher Tower”; ambitious German realtors; Djiboutian prostitutes (according to the comments on the link); and so on.

Could Dubai be any more ballardian?

The images and paradoxes are fantastic, although there seems to be lots of uncertainty on the horizon. The 3000 abandoned cars thing is controversial though, some people dispute that figure.

The juxtaposition of the irascible, grumpy text with the cool, numbers-based Deutsche Welle report was also great.

I hope Guy Delisle (from “Shenzhen” and “Pyongyang” fame) goes to Dubai soon and writes a comic book about it.

The detailed comment by “peter : Feb 17, 2009 at 1:54 pm” is great reading as well.
rasz

I remember reading somewhere people and cars were swimming in shit in Dubai because Sewer system couldnt keep up and was leaking it all over the place.
Funny how you can see cars driving in standing water in the middle of a DESERT on this video, could be liquid shit I’v been reading about earlier :)
skatanic

Well, i think this is the least unfortunate causality of the economic crisis.
guy_jin

@11: actually, it’s an electoral monarchy. but it’s almost the same thing.
milovoo

It seems like one of the easiest cities to picture abandoned and being reclaimed by nature like an old theme park.
glace neuf

Agree with #4 – learned a lot about Dubai from reading the polite discourse that followed after the post. Tom S. would probably scold boingboing for their blatent Dubai-bashing :)
hassan-i-sabbah

http://www.ballardian.com/dubai-ballard-world
Bade

Having lived in Dubai for four years I have recently left and consider myself lucky. I can now read BoingBoing again without having to bypass the countries ludicrous censor/firewall. Many friends were morose at being stuck there after 10 or more years. Their pay has been steadily decreasing and cost of living near doubling in two years and they couldn’t afford to relocate back to their home countries. These were doctors and dentists too, not people out for a quick buck. And this was a year ago! Hopefully the current economic crisis will lower rents and cost of living, and thus allow my friends to save enough to leave. As they say in Dubai “It is getting more expensive to live beyond your means”.
Takuan

http://www.economist.com/finance/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13186145&source=hptextfeature
Anonymous

everyone do the Schadenfreude!!!
Anonymous

@markfrei

i live in seattle…don’t worry, it is still super gay. :)
Purly

It’s like watching a report about the Tower of Babel or something.
Jerry Cornelius

‘But I’m astonished at the level of vitriol directed at one small city in the desert’

Really? Think about it.

The ‘villas’ were hilarious. A city full of people who lust after places like that. Think about it.
BlindJoeDeath

I wonder how it will effect this
http://newyork.craigslist.org/mnh/fbh/1035336992.html

yeah , luxury spa in dubai, great investment opportunity
Auto Parts for Brains

I have been to Dubai twice and honestly, after skiing and the safari, there is little reason to stay. The city is congested and traffic is bad. I cannot deny that there are a lot of reasons to visit it. Still, there is a big chasm between staying and visiting.

It is true that Dubai has no oil and in reality it is not even UAE’s capital. Abu Dhabi, the capital is way more awesome than Dubai in my opinion. Roads are bigger there and it is not as crowded. I think one reason people are leaving Dubai is because this year, the economic crisis caught up with the city already that a lot of infrastructure projects in there has literally stopped. That means less jobs for many.

Will I be visiting Dubai again? Probably, especially since they have the new Atlantis hotel there and a Six Flags coming soon. Will I be staying? No way!
Senna1

You people are all missing the point…

Without 200+ disgustingly rich people buying condos the Michael Schumacher Tower won’t happen!

This is serious!
markfrei

I think this is an important lesson for civic leaders. It is a fine line they walk. When Chicago was busy clamping down on liquor licenses they were also effectively clamping down on the live music venue that were the reason many of us move to a large city.

Recently I was considering a move Seattle. During the time of my visits, the police decided to start raiding gay bars and started charging them for things like showing adult videos on the tv screens in the bar. This kind of censorious attitude led me to cross Seattle off my list rather quickly – I have no interest in living in a town that is quickly regressing to pre-Stonewall days.
krylon

Ok so I cannot say this emphatically enough – while the blog post itself is a well written tirade, the level of civil discussion in comments section of the link above is amazing.

If you read the above in its entirety, do not miss the comments, specifically the discussion between Tom S. and the story’s author.
mdh

And the reason for this is that if you default on your Dubai mortgage, you can end up in a debtors prison.

An overpriced city in the middle of the desert, without drink or drugs, IS a debtors prison.
FreakCitySF

Go to the original Atlantis! geez
Remember the 90′s commericals? and recently this one
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1Q4NLRCvug

I say good for Dubai, I’m glad. Although I haven’
t visted and would like to ski indoors, it’s just a bizzare place, east meets west. Contract workers in rags and men in white disdasha who own them. Las Vegas built on oil fortunes funded by US. Maybe we should get shares of Dubai with every purchase of gas.

They have every fastfood/retail/product that you have at your local mall yet they are working with ancient traditions.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/dubai/3269149/Dubai-couple-face-longer-sentence-for-fornicating-on-beach.html
Anonymous

I thought Dubai was formed around a centuries old tradition of trade, thus all their large souqs and free zones. And compared to some of the surrounding countries, it is quite liberal – you can drink alcohol there and show leg, even face.

I wonder how the article writer would rant about any US college town in April: thousands are fleeing this city, leaving their bikes to rust and filling the streets with their still-working furniture, microwaves, and televisions, surely a sign of laws heavily favouring landlords.
Chris Furniss

Dubai always seemed like a city you’d visit in a Final Fantasy game or something. Like their primary mode of transportation is chocobo.
arborman

Gee it would be a real heartbreak if the good people at Halliburton were to lose their shirts, after having moved there just a couple of years ago. That would be a tragedy.

After all the hard work that went into stealing all those billions, it would be nothing short of Kafkaesque for their money to vanish into the desert.
hagbard

Dubai is a human algae bloom
presterjohn

The headline on the video says:

“Lindsey Williams was right”

for bonus points, I’d like to See Boing-Boing do a post about Lindsey Williams.
Anonymous

What a symplistic way to look at a social phenomena… as you titeled it, it IS just a RANT.

In every crisis there is more than meets thhe eye. And please… Dubai was NEVER EVER ment to be something like Manhattan. It’s more like a gigantic Club Med or something like that, and if there is something that is soulless from skratch, it is a resort.
noen

Schadenfreude is a sweet dish.
hagure

Funny, I was just dreaming the day before yesterday what Dubai would be going through b/c of the recession. Then some Dubai merchant tried to sell me some lightspeed briefs. Dammit BB stop reading my mind!

Also:

Read the comment exchange between the writer and “Tom”. It addresses some of the “Dubai hate” that goes around.

It’s one of the most civil exchanges on the web I’ve seen outside of jontaplin.com.
Ugly Canuck

Stinkin’ absolute hereditary monarchies…who needs them?
overunger

Ah ha ha ha ha — don’t let the door hit ya where the good lord split ya!
Ah the unconscious super rich….

Hey! someone could make a cool post exodus Dubai FPS game – it would be fun running through empty super hotels and indoor tropical islands hunting rich zombies or something!
Anonymous

Yes it was fast becoming an utopia, the rents are
astronomical I call this Renticulture something like farming the poor working souls to feed the avarice of the crooked rich , clad in bedsheets pirates ahoy for centuries…time turns around back to sand and date trading, hope better sense will return .. God is Great
padster123

Where’s J G Ballard when we need him?

He’d have LOVED this shit.
Ugly Canuck

To speculate?
Perchance…Dubai!
Dubai, to buy…
No more.
perceptualstates

how many of you have been to dubai? none i suspect. what’s up with all the dubai hate? i was just there and it is booming. sure, idiots who got caught up in speculation are eating it. just like in New York and Las Vegas. anyone who reads the headlines and doesn’t know about the full, rich world of dubai (that includes a full, rich underside) is missing the whole story. viva dubai!
biffpow

Couldn’t happen to a nicer place.

And @Chris Furniss, that’s the best comment I’ve read on any blog for days. So accurate.
spencerluck

That rant is just schadenfreude.
Those guys are merchants and any sub-prime guest-worker exodus now will eventually reverse.

Smashingtelly’s author will be eating his words in ~18 months.
rtb61

Dubai was simply a place where the rich and greedy could ruthlessly exploit third world workers and the legal system was set up to work that way. Not only do those foreign third world workers have no rights, they will be imprisoned and the exiled from the country at the whim of the rich and greedy. A city built upon the exploitation of humanity and, for some of the worst examples of humanity a place to ‘luxuriate’ in the poverty and desperation of other people.
FreakCitySF

#9 is a tie for best comment :)
barba

I wonder what will happen to the large numbers of south asian quasi-slaves that built the city.

What is amazing to me is that there are that many people with that bad of taste coupled with that level of wealth.
bcl_power

Imagine proposing to build Vegas in a place where sex and drugs and rock and roll are an anathema.

They call it Branson. You can see Yakov Smirnoff there five nights a week!
Anonymous

Just when I thought William Gibson had run out of predictions to get smug about, we get sprawling Middle Eastern ghost-metropoli.
Mr_Voodoo

@Chris Furness
Your comment = funny. My getting your comment = a little sad. Though it does give me an idea for reviving Dubai’s economy through genetic engineering of ridable creatures from popular videogames.
Yoshi-ride, anyone?
Halloween Jack

Branson, at least, has the Ripley Museum, which I found quite fascinating; also, a lake that’s kept well-stocked with fish (it was a resort town long before the dinner theaters sprang up). I’ve never read anything about Dubai (the annoyingly vague comments of astroturfers like perceptualstates notwithstanding) that explains why Dubai would be any better than any other playground for the rich. I suspected that it was probably a bad piece of work when I saw that the guest list for the opening party for the Atlantis hotel included Wesley Snipes; when you’re reduced to recruiting a tax cheat to fill out your celebrity quota, you’re in trouble.
avraamov

#24 posted by padster123

he may well have read it…he’s not dead yet.