I recently wrote an article about why London will never be New York. The article was met with lots of positive and negative criticism; some love London, and others love New York. One gentleman was so furious he dubbed me an American who doesn’t know any better, because New York is nothing but a concrete jungle (as opposed to Liverpool Street or Holborn?). Of course, we are all entitled to our opinions.
As some of you may already know, I have spent a couple of years in Dubai. Although my experienced, possibly jaded opinion says that London will never become New York, I can comfortably tell you why, and how, Dubai may one day actually become London, and take away a good chunk of the tourists that come to London (that’s great for some Londoners, eh!).
Living in Dubai made me quite Anti-Arab, and on many occasions, anti Muslim. Ultimately, I was extremely frustrated with the general incompetence of systems, the bad quality of service, general lack of common sense and common courtesy, and people’s undying, inevitible ability to do everything wrong an average of three times before getting it right. Hoarding money, overcharging, ripping off residents and immigrants, lying, cheating, deceiving, and not thinking through what the hell it is that they’re doing are among some of the common mistakes they made in Dubai. I’m sure they still make them. When I lived in Dubai, I compared everything, civil infrastructure, Information Technology, shopping experience, quality of life, cost of living, etc. with the US, and Dubai lost on practically every ground. I was never sure where the Arabs & Muslims had come up with their system, their costing & pricing, their inefficient ideas, and their con-like way of life in Dubai. I used to blame them and their kind for it.
And now, I realize, that on some level, I owe them an apology for criticizing them for making Dubai the way it is. Well, maybe not. But what I have realized is that comparing Dubai, or any other part of the world for that matter, with the US way was a mistake. I knew nobody in the Muslim world (except maybe Iran) would make effort to reinvent or recreate the wheel, but I always assumed that Dubai was trying to mimic New York (with Sheikh Zayed Road being their pride and all), but they failed miserably. Well, that was my mistake. I hadn’t experienced London yet.
And now that I have, well, Dubai is really not that bad. When I compare the way of life in London to the way of life in the United States, I see the same fallacies that I saw in Dubai. The same traditional cultural hoardiness, sticking to culture and tradition (which nobody really knows much about, in London or Dubai – don’t get me wrong, there are people who do, but most are pretty lost), sitting on money, enjoying other people’s misery, lying, deceiving the public, being overcrowded, etc. etc. My, I thought, am I making the same mistake that I did in Dubai?
Probably. Comparing London and New York is not necessarily fair. The cities emerged differently, were built by different people with different visions and served different purposes in different cultures for different people with different mentalities and ideologies. But Dubai, gosh! Dubai is a hotter, modern, dusty, inexpensive, (maybe) glamorous (dare I say), cleaner (definitely!) version of London. How, you ask?
Well, London is built with one aim and one goal in mind: impress those who visit and take as much money as you can from them. But what you build is what you get, i.e., that is also the mentality of the people who live there. I’ll continue this attitude of the people later, but Dubai does impress a lot of tourists, and with the certain allure it has created, people spend a lot of their money in Dubai, which what their ultimate goal is.
Dubai is ultimately built by the British. You see British civil engineering at work in the Dubai road infrastructure, you see the British bureaucracy/systems in place when dealing with most day-to-day things (getting a landline telephone – the equivalent of BT in Dubai is Etisalat, getting a mobile phone, paying your bills, banking, etc.). Basically, Dubai is a carbon copy of British systems, and that’s because it’s built by the British. In that British re-creation of Dubai, you see some efforts to rectify the mistakes in London, and as a result of that, the wow factor that Dubai offers for some people may be more than what London can offer. Of course, Dubai doesn’t really have a history, and it will always fall short of London in that department.
But where Dubai really succeeds is in having used the American system to successfully market. It seems like they may have solicited the British and other European nations for help when it came to developing their city, but the Arabs know and believe that no one is better at positive marketing than the United States, and this could be the one biggest factor why Dubai can cause quite a dent in London’s tourist revenues.
So, how does Dubai compare with London?
Just Visiting?
When you’re visiting or passing through, be it for leisure or business, you want it to be cheap, efficient and fun. You want to be pampered and you want to feel important, and you definitely want to make the most of it, right?
Hotels
Okay, London has a fine line of great hotels, but then so does Dubai. In fact, with the Burj ul Arab, Jumeirah Beach Hotel, Madinat Jumeirah, Royal Mirage and a plethora of others, Dubai has a collection of modern five star hotels with a traditional touch that will dazzle just about any visitor. What else? Dubai offers add ons with your hotel service like buttlers, which will make even the most seasoned traveler feel like a king. Dubai can do this because they’ll charge you over GBP 500 per night for your hotel room, while the guy who will carry your luggage, clean up, and do all the dirty work will get paid less than GBP 300 a month! That may be a violation of human rights on some level, but it certainly works well for visitors and tourists. I remember an uncle of mine telling me about his visit to Grosvenor House in London in the 80s, and how he had to carry his bags up to the room himself. In Dubai, you’d never do that.
Shopping & Fashion
There were days when the world came to London for shopping for the latest fashions and gadgets. People still come to London for that, but I’m not sure they come with the same expectation or enthusiasm anymore. Dubai has successfully marketed and built itself several world class shopping centres, and interestingly enough, some products may even cost you more in Dubai than they would in London. But that’s not true of all the products, especially once you learn the right areas and the right places to shop in Dubai. Even though I’ve seen that the same shops in Dubai don’t get the latest products that they would stock in London or New York, Dubai has definitely entered this market, and quite possibly has a much better pricing position than London for a multitude of reasons (no tax, no excise and customs etc.).
We know that the fashion headquarters of the world are London, Paris, Milan, New York and maybe Los Angeles. Dubai has made a serious effort to enter this market, and they’ve certainly gotten somewhere. Dubai regularly hosts fashion shows, and the biggest designers do not mind hosting and displaying their products in Dubai. That’s a big attraction for tourists and visitors, as trivial as that may be for some of us practical people.
Living or Working in Dubai?
If you move to Dubai from London, you won’t find much of a difference in the culture. Neither of these places are by any means American in Corporate Culture, and that may very well be a cultural and traditional gap for the best. Londoners will not find it very different in Dubai, except that if you go to Dubai from London, chances are you will get VIP treatment and your quality of life may improve, although for someone who is well settled in London, the kind of life Dubai offers may very well be trivial.
The area Dubai lacks in professionally is, well, professionalism. There is a serious lack of professionally competent people in Dubai, and although London has its fair share of incompetence, it generally has a much better employee set than Dubai. So, naturally, for the striving, aspiring person, London has more to offer: access to a bigger market, access to more resources, better facilties, etc. etc.
Education, you say?
Education is certainly a developing area in Dubai, but it’s no where close to being acceptable at this point. I won’t say any more in this section, except that London and it’s surrounding areas house some of the world’s best educational institutions. Dubai doesn’t have any decent higher education yet, but I believe it is in the works.
Cleanliness
Well, Dubai takes the lead here easily. It’s very clean, especially the areas all the tourists and western people visit. All such areas are practically spotless, although they come at the expense of slave labour. Of course, most people are oblivious to things such as slave labour, so this is a big plus point for Dubai. Parts of London have become extremely filthy, and I needn’t comment more on this. I said plenty about it in the article that compared London with New York, and there’s no point in repeating myself.
Traffic
What can I say? Both London and Dubai suck. Road tax is killer. Tolls are killer. London has better public transportation, but Dubai intend to roll out their fancy planned metro in 2009. That will certainly create cultural and class issues in Dubai, the effect of which remains to be seen. This blending of the racial discrimination of the east and west sides of the Dubai Creek could make or break the comfortable working class of Dubai.
Why won’t Dubai Compete with New York?
Quite simply, because Dubai isn’t marketing itself as an American city. It offers facilties like London, it offers services like London. The flat, housing and apartments feel more like London than they do like any part of New York or other American cities. But Dubai is using the grace of New York. It is painting itself the metropolitan image that London lacks, and it’s doing a fantastic job.
Fancy skyscrapers, a tube / subway system, big roads and highways, the world’s biggest businesses (even if they don’t any business and get rent free buildings to fool everyone else), and the image of success. It’s a very well told lie, and a perfectly created fassad, created by the British and Europeans for and by the Europeans, and you can see it has been a successful venture so far. How long it lasts will be interesting, but Dubai may never make it because it’s very difficult to gain a sense of ownership or ‘homeliness’ in Dubai. A place that will never call you its citizen, a kingship that will never treat you as one of its own, will never get the dedication of the people who reside there to make money; it’s that simple.
Where Dubai Fails?
Well, there are several pitfalls Dubai needs to overcome before it can consider competing with London. Among them, a legal system, decent education, more condusive laws for business people, and less lying.
Major businesss in Dubai were given free buildings to move in in areas like Dubai Internet City, so that other striving and aspiring businessmen follow and pay the outrageous fees. The fassad worked, but I don’t know when people will start to see it isn’t what it claims to be. Most of the businesses, even if they are functioning in other countries, fail to take off in Dubai because they’ve bought into this lie. This needs to stop; Dubai needs to help develop business inside rather than make it fail.
Laws are important. Company law that is 4 sheets of A4 paper typed in 12 point font with more grammatical mistakes than my 2nd grade english paper will not suffice for complex international business. After all, how long will businesses settle disputes in and according to the law of the United Kingdom in Dubai? Lawyers are full of crap, trying to offer you legal help on law that’s 4 pages wrong. Please don’t fall for this trap in Dubai. Lawyers are pathetic everywhere, but in countries where implementation of law is non-existent, and even worse, in countries like the UAE where law is non-existent, lawyers need to be booted.
Dubai needs to be less racist. The racism and discrimination is unacceptable at all levels of human decency; just because you’re brown or Indian doesn’t mean you don’t deserve to be respected; Arabs certainly don’t have the right to disrespect anyone; let’s avoid this discussion, shall we? But Dubai needs to be weary of this; once the metro in Dubai is complete, it could lead to a blending of the eastern and western population of Dubai, that could make the latter very uncomfortable, and I’m not sure Dubai has a ‘plan b’ for that.
There’s a lot more to be said on this, but it can’t be said without me not being nice. I’ll take up more issues in the future, but I think if Dubai keeps on the right track and focuses on the right things, it may very well compete with London. It is likely that Dubai will overcome its fallacies, although there certainly are no guarantees about when and how. Then again, given the level of competence in Dubai, London may not have too much to worry about.
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